The Daily Stoic

Oh, so she, uh, was.

A was in the British army and then was the news correspondent who climbed Everest with Hillary and then wrote these three books, uh, this three, like a, a history of the British empire.

That's like incredible. Uh, and then, um, in 1965, so somewhere in there, um, basically comes to, like she, she'd known it since she was a kid, but that she's trans.

And then, so she, she gets gender reassignment surgery, but in like the sixties, like when it was like, and then before it's cool, but it's like an incredible memoir from like one of an, like this all time badass.

But I love, I love reading books about people who went through something that people are talking about now, but because when they experienced it, when they wrote about it, there's no political baggage, there's no controversy, there's no, no, no phobia about just, it just is.

And so I like, like, um, during COVID you'd read about like the Spanish flu. Right.

So you understand what's happening now through something that doesn't have any of the, that that's like one of my all time favorite books. I just read it like maybe a year ago and it blew my mind.

It's really, really good. Um, I think you'd like that one.

Sherman's memoirs are also incredible.

Well, Saban's book has a good title.

It's called How Good Do You Want to Be?

The most beautiful writing that Seneca did, you can find it in the book, The Most Beautiful Writing that Seneca did, he wrote these four essays that are called His Consolations.

And they're him consoling people who have lost someone. In one case, it's his mother who lost him. He's being exiled.

I loved this biography.

I loved his book, George Marshall, Defender of the Republic, both those epic, enormous biographies that I love that I don't think enough people read but become the basis of the books that I write.

And I'm looking forward to you all reading this book, Ascent to Power, How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World.

And I think as I talk about in my chapter on him in the Justice Book, he reads Marcus Aurelius as a young man and it orients his whole life around these cardinal virtues.

And this is one of the earliest pages of your book about this small town Missouri farmer suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself the most powerful man in the world at perhaps the most precarious moment in the history of the world.

And then you'll see this in the new book. I guess he's in the discipline book too, but you'll see this in Right Thing Right Now which you can pre-order at DailyStoic.com. So Justice, the new book. Anyways, a big one is Harry Truman.

I loved his book, George Marshall, Defender of the Republic, both those epic, enormous biographies that I love that I don't think enough people read but become the basis of the books that I write.

And he not only did this awesome book on George Marshall, which I interviewed him about remotely a couple years back. And then he sent me an email and said he was working a book on a book about Truman.

You can follow David on X at Mr. Roll and do check out Defender of the Republic and Ascent to Power, two epic awesome biographies.

I read his King George book, which I really. Yes. I have it. I didn't read it. I thought it was really interesting to read American history. Written by a Brit.

And I asked, I said, what was Truman like? You know, did he, did you sense? And he said it was totally fine and it was normal.

But so he puts it in this copy of Truman's memoirs.

You know, I have a copy, a signed copy of the two volume. Truman memoirs?

And I got it because of my law firm in Washington. Louis Johnson was the guy that raised the money for Truman in the 48 election.

I took it out of the library at Stet when I was, you know, like a new partner there, you know.

Actually, you know, Margaret Truman wrote a nice biography of her father. And in it she wrote that Truman is really not good friends with Eddie Jacobson.

Summersby wrote a book about it. She wrote a book about her affair with Eisenhower.

Hi, I'm here in the tour marketing department. I'm also an author of Bring Out The Boss In You as a guide for entrepreneurs. And thank you.

If you haven't read Frederick Douglass' memoirs, just an absolutely incredible life changing, amazing book that I can't recommend enough.

he was thinking about a book he read called The Guns Of August about the outbreak of of world war one

All those people who came into the world with you and have already left it, Mark Sreelius noted in Meditations Towards the End of His Life.

We'll do Walter Ward's Don't Hurt which is incredible and then he has David for me which is about Pearl Harbor and then did you read Splendid in the Vile?

Dave Infamy, Dunkirk these are the two Walter Lord books.

Then we did with The Old Bridge about the war in the Pacific oh and then Splendid in the vial.

Have you um have you read Shadow Divers? This is also World War II books. Actually this one's incredible. They are diving to get this German submarine that sunk off the coast of New Jersey. It's all about like deep sea diving but it seems a crazy good story.

Today's quote actually comes from one of Seneca's plays. People don't necessarily see Seneca as a playwright. In fact, James Rom points this out in this fascinating biography of Seneca that for a big chunk of the last 2000 years, it was inconceivable to scholars that Seneca, the playwright and Seneca, the philosopher were the same person. Many different people had the same names and so they just assumed that the themes and the styles seemed so different that they couldn't possibly be the same. I would argue they thought that the plays were so good that someone couldn't be that great at both things and what James Rom points out, which I stuck with me because I did a version of this in Lives of the Stokes. He said it would be like if Goethe had written Faust and was the right-hand advisor to Napoleon or Frederick the Great or something like that. Anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself. Basically, Seneca wrote some really good plays and this quote is from Seneca's play Thiestes, which is a very, very dark play.

what about flowers for Aldrinon which if you read that book as a kid it's quite funny.