Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World is a timely and highly accessible treatment of Arendt’s work—and the larger context to which it responded and that it still illuminates. Stonebridge is an eloquent and capable guide. She clearly greatly admires Arendt but is not blind to her shortcomings, including her failed forays into opining on race relations in the U.S. South. The book is strongest in its presentation and synthesis of Arendt’s thought, weakest in seeking to apply it directly to contemporary issues (Donald Trump, the January 6 insurrection, environmental disaster, Q-anon, Elon Musk, etc.)—weakest not because Arendt is not relevant, but because the application is self-evident and thus the explicit intrusions feel heavy handed in an otherwise elegant narrative. Arendt’s keen understanding and ability to look into the future is frequently chilling; there is in her work, Stonebridge rightly notes, many “a sentence that rears up from the twentieth century to the twenty-first.” And just as applicable today: “The realities [Arendt] faced up to were not always ones other people were ready to think about.” Enough said.

Really enjoyed reading this. Great introduction to Arendt's philosophy and biography, gives a really good overview with links to how her thinking is relevant today. I was under the impression from other writings about Arendt that she was not a pleasant person but this book presented another side to her that I wasn't aware of. Also really enjoyed the parts where the author went to visit places that Arendt stayed too. I recommend it.

At beginning of the acknowledgments section of this book (Kindle location 3952), the author writes: "This book began with a conversation I had about Hannah Arendt with Krista Tippett for her radio show, On Being, in 2017." This conversation is available on Soundcloud here:

https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/lyndsey-stonebridge-thinking-and-friendship-in-dark-times-hannah-arendt-for-now?in=onbeing/sets/lyndsey-stonebridge-thinking-and-friendship-in-dark-times-hannah-arendt-for-now

On this page, there is also a link to the unedited version of the same conversation.

I was happy that I was offered a free electronic review of this book in advance of publication because Hannah Arendt's thought seems, like an iceberg, only partially visible to the casual observer. I wanted to know more. However, I didn't feel like I understood more about the parts of her life that I didn't understand before. I guess this is not the author's fault. She didn't promise an explainer for the uninitiated.

Perhaps the book is for people who already know about Arendt's life, but I can't imagine that this is a big segment of the reading pubic.

The author knows a lot about Arendt and is very enthusiastic about her, and wants you to be enthusiastic, too. This is admirable and worthwhile. But, in her enthusiasm, sometimes she went zooming by my understanding. I wanted to stop the book and say "What does that word actually mean?", for example, the word "givenness" when the author quotes Arendt saying "The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer passive givenness of the being, …" (Kindle locations 2575). And while we're explaining, how about explaining how a person actualizes their givenness. Maybe give examples? Like: "A person actualizing their givenness would do X, but they wouldn't do Y."

The book is episodic (as was Arendt's life), and some episodes seemed clearer than others. I liked Chapter Five, where the author narrated a lapse in judgment in Arendt's life. Specifically, Arendt scolded, in print, the mother of an African-American child who had been threatened and menaced by racists on the way to integrating a school in 1959 Little Rock, Arkansas. The mother, Arendt maintained, was neglectful of the child's safety. As it turned out, the situation was more complex than it initially appeared. Arendt appeared too eager to scold, which was especially unseemly given that Arendt was neither black nor a mother. She could have benefitted from someone saying to her "Now, Hannah, maybe you want to put this article aside for a week and re-read it when you are in a different mood." But I can't imagine that Arendt attracted a lot of people who had the time to endure the inevitable cigarette-smoke-filled argument that such a suggestion might generate. In any case, the episode was interesting and revealing, and illustrated, I thought, certain strengths and weaknesses in Arendt's philosophy.

On the other hand, I felt that Chapter Eight, which attempted to knit together Arendt's reaction to the Hungarian revolution of 1956 with the lives of both a 21st-century political activist in Lebanon and the early-20th-century German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, with parenthetical digressions on Bernie Sanders, Eric Hobsbawm, and the 2017 satirical film The Death of Stalin, did not hang together as a coherent whole. I didn't understand how the chapter's conclusion flowed from what came before.

Not only did I receive a free advance electronic review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley, but they also sent me a friendly email inviting me to read it.

A few years ago, I read and reviewed an interesting and enjoyable graphic novel about Arendt's life. There is also a good 2012 biographical movie about Arendt.