Man's search for meaning -- Viktor Frankl -- Recommend

This is a well known and heavily cited volume. One of my favorite books, Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People draws heavily on the philosophy Frakle outlines here. When people talk about there experience with this book, I've noticed they tend to focus on the human stories. For example, the SS commander casually pointing to the left or the right, dividing a line of prisoners who would live from the line that would be burned that night. Frankle happened to be trying to stand up straight so as to hide a bag he was carrying, this likely saved his life. But these stories (and there are several of them) are not the point of the book. Frankl doesn't dwell on the serendipitous, or the gruesome, or the inspiring. They are only included to illustrate a grand intellectual wrestle that he seeks to convey to the reader. He views his own suffering and that of his friends with clinical detachment.

This quotation carry's a good representation of the flavor of writing found in the book.

 “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”

This one describes why the book was written, as you can see, it's more relevant today than ever.

“Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

This book is only about 4 hours long and is well worth the read. It's the kind that you could read once when you're 15 and then come back to it when you're 25 and get something completely different out of it.

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