Joseph Epstein's Four Volumes of Mini-Biographies

Seven and a half centuries before Bodhidharma started Zen by melding Buddhism to Taoism, Chuang-Tzu danced through the world. This sly jester is second only to the old sage Lao-Tzu in Tao greatness. Chuang-Tzu championed wu-wei—the art of non-doing, of letting the world spin without your sweaty grip on

Montaigne spat on every dogma and system that strutted through the intellectual barnyard of his day. His motto: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) His answer, delivered with a smirk: Not a daggone thing. “There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.” Montaigne Logic? Pfft. He’

Every so often, I plunge headlong into a Mencken spree, a vice I’ve nursed since the early 1990s when I first stumbled into Ann Arbor’s Dawn Treader Bookstore and smelled those old books (that odd but pleasing scent, I’m told, comes from vanilla releasing from the aging