Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history: Recent Episodes
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The folks at Shepherd, a book-discovery site, asked for my recommendations in a genre similar to that of Hannibal and Me. They let me choose only five, and I picked: Find out why I chose these five, and not the hundreds of others on my shelves over at Shepherd.
Page 220-221 in “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari: If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and […]
The wisdom of Mr. Crotchety, known to all former and long-time readers of the Hannibal Blog:
Two weeks ago I stood before this beautiful door in the Uffizi, in Florence. Uffizi means “offices” because what is today the world’s greatest museum started as the offices built by the family that ran Florence, and sometimes Europe: the Medici. The upper panel on the door above shows the Medici’s crest, six “balls” (including […]
One day almost twenty years ago, I bounded out of The Economist’s modernistic “Plaza” in London’s St. James’s, skipped past a few of the street’s posh gentlemen’s clubs and ran into Green Park, where I let out a primal scream. Aged 27, I had just got a job offer from The Economist. A dream was coming true. Since […]
A year ago I kicked off a series of posts that I called “my Germany mix”. The idea was and is to highlight just a few of my many, many articles on Germany that might be a bit more timeless than usual in journalism. Last year’s post was about the Nazi past and the unique remembrance […]
Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan and Viktor Orban already are. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and a long list of others really would like to be. What? Little Caesars. Because Caesarism sooner or later grows naturally out of populism. And that is a threat to our Western understanding of republican liberty. That, at least, was my hypothesis when I was invited […]
So I finally got around to Hitler. I took the expiry of the copyright of Mein Kampf as my excuse to reflect on how the Germans have over the past 70 years dealt with the shadow and legacy of the Führer. But that piece in our 2015 Christmas Issue is only the latest of several articles that […]
Wednesdays are our deadline days at The Economist. This means that correspondents have filed their copy to editors, who are subbing the pieces and going back and forth with correspondents and fact-checkers. Every now and then it gets hairy, but most of the time it just means lots of overeducated people sitting around doing the same […]
Tom Friedman was in Berlin this week, hosted by the American Academy, to make himself smart on Germany and to begin plugging the book he’s working on, “Thank you for being late”. Sipping drinks on a Charlottenburg rooftop before a dinner given for him, Tom and I were talking about one of the many ideas he […]
I spent the last four days at the Munich Security Conference, which is the global gathering for all those interested in international relations and matters of war and peace. It takes place in a historic Bavarian hotel whose hallways and coffee lounges are much too narrow for the throngs of diplomats, parlamentarians and statesmen, along with their […]
I’m an introvert and I also enjoy public speaking from time to time. That is not a contradiction. If you think it is, then you probably haven’t understood the definition of introversion. (In which case, read this excellent and short explanation by Jonathan Rauch, who used to be a colleague at The Economist.) The problem […]
Here in Berlin everybody is revving up for the third big anniversary of the year. The first two marked tragedies: the 100th of the outbreak of World War I and the 75th of World War II. This third one marks a happy event: the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 and the crumbling of the […]
In the winter of 2013, I attended the funeral of an aunt at an Alpine lake where she had spent much of her life and her final years. As the coffin was lowered into the frozen ground, I stood next to my godfather and whispered an idea to him. Born in 1924, my godfather had […]
Since moving to Berlin two years ago, I’ve spent uncountable hours on architectural walks–whenever possible with people who can tell me the stories behind a building, structure or gap. That’s because the architecture and its stories are so moving, so fascinating and absorbing. This accumulation of impressions had to find an outlet, and now it has. […]
What really slowed down those monks in the middle ages as they were hand-copying (= manu+script) the old books were the darned pictures. There weren’t many, of course, but the few were elaborate. Without the images, the monks, tipsy or not, would have blogged a lot more. I mean, copied. Gutenberg made everything easier but […]
When Helmut Schmidt invites you to give an “Impulsreferat” (an impulsive talk to spark discussion) you 1) accept, 2) feel honored, 3) get intimidated, and then 4) do your best to be insightful in a provocative way. After all, the former chancellor, about to celebrate his 95th birthday, not only made a good chunk of […]
I very frequently get emails from young people, usually studying now at one of my alma maters, asking me for advice on how to enter journalism. Obviously, their hope is that I have an internship or something even better to refer, but I just don’t. And really, I don’t. But I do try to respond […]
Jürgen Habermas, Germany’s best-known living philosopher, sees a “historical failure of the political elites in Germany” because in the current election campaign they talk about every possible banality except the big questions for Europe and Germany. Actually, those questions are only a new form of a centuries-old bundle of geo-strategic dilemmas called “the German Question”. […]
Above you see several so-called Stolpersteine — “stumbling stones” — in a sidewalk near my place in Berlin. The flowers and candles are from a neighbor, who regularly looks after the many, many stones in our street. Each one commemorates one victim of National Socialism who lived at the address where the stone is placed. The Stolpersteine were […]
I just became aware of a fantastic podcast about Hannibal and Me from South Africa. I don’t even know when it aired (possibly months ago). But now I’ve got this link. (It took a while to load in my browser, but persevere.) The bit about Hannibal and Me is between minutes 47 and 54. At […]
My employer, The Economist, is 170 years old. Another British publication, the Financial Times, turned 125 today. It turns out that we are loosely affiliated in some complicated corporate way and very dearly affiliated in a personal way, because I, for instance, share an office space with them in Berlin. By pure coincidence, their Berlin Bureau […]
What happens when a sort-of German dude, softened by years of Californian informality, returns to Germany and encounters the natives? Why, it’s friggin’ awkward, of course. Just one aspect: When meeting different kinds of people, should I use Sie or Du, the formal or the informal version of “you”? The resulting contortions, as I tell them […]
The World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) is going on right now in Berlin, with more than a thousand very talented students from all over the world testing their arguments and wit — and having a rather good time after hours as well. (You can watch the live stream of their debates here.) They asked me […]
In our double issue for the Christmas holidays, I’ve once again let my hair down and indulged myself with a cheeky but (hopefully) not silly historical comparison. This time: The Holy Roman Empire: European disunion done right Looking over my past Christmas Specials, it strikes me that I seem to default to one of two […]
A good bit of my job these days (as Berlin Bureau Chief of The Economist) is to follow people like Angela Merkel around. Sometimes I find myself right behind her (1), other times looking down on her in the Bundestag (2), yet other times with the hack pack in a press conference (3), or in […]
Well, you recall that, earlier this summer, my publisher was fiddling with designs for the paperback version of Hannibal and Me, and you guys had some input. I now see that the paperback is up on Amazon and on Penguin’s website (Penguin owns Riverhead), though it won’t be released until February 5, 2013 (13 months […]
Lance Armstrong is all over the news, as all of you know by now, and as several of you have pointed out to me already, since Armstrong makes an appearance in Hannibal and Me. The premise of Hannibal and Me, to recap, is that triumph and disaster are impostors, as Rudyard Kipling said so sublimely. […]
A huge Thank You to David Hurst, who reviewed Hannibal and Me in strategy + business, a management magazine published Booz & Company. It’s in the fall edition of the print magazine, but the web link is already up. An excerpt: … The effect of this meticulously crafted structure on the reader is sometimes revelatory. You are riding […]
Even as reviews are still dribbling out — such as this one from South Africa — my publisher is preparing to launch Hannibal and Me in paperback. I got an email with the two cover-jacket designs above that they’re choosing between. All that takes me back a year or so, when I first saw the […]
I) In the late 80s, when we still thought the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were as good as eternal, my friend Matt Lieber and I, fairly fresh out of high school, traveled around Germany and got a visa for a few unforgettable hours in Communist East Berlin. We entered through Checkpoint Charlie (pictured […]
The reviews are still trickling in. The latest is in The Globe and Mail, one of the big Canadian newspapers. Reviewer Harvey Schachter concludes: The book is a fascinating, illuminating look at careers through the prism of Hannibal’s life and the other people Mr. Kluth weaves in. His writing is seamless, the ideas provocative, and the […]
My piece in The Economist this week is about Native Americans, and in particular about the puzzling concept of their national “sovereignty” as individual tribes. I had a great time researching this one, mainly because I ended up visiting the White Mountain Apache tribe in remote Arizona. But why did I go to the Apache? […]
Let’s have a few minutes of fun tracing the genealogy of a story to illustrate the concept of archetypes — the Jungian idea that we tell each other the same timeless stories again and again, in infinitely many variations. (My book is based on that idea: namely, that we see ourselves in the stories of others, […]
One of my habits is, sporadically, to go through old stuff in order to throw most of it away and be reminded of the few nuggets worth preserving. As I was doing that, I came across a little Post-it note on which I seem to have scribbled, at some point over the past four years, […]
Michael Stürmer, a high-profile German columnist and historian, has written a great review of Hannibal and Me in Die Welt. It’s in German, but I’ll translate a few bits. (Those of you who can may fact-check me. ;)) … It’s a brilliant hybrid-study, in the genre of the moral biographies of older times… What was — […]
Admittedly, this one might be all Greek to you — or rather all German, because that’s what we were speaking. Uwe Alschner, who evangelizes the “Big Five for Life” concept in Germany (a guide to more purposeful living), had a great Skype chat with me about Hannibal and Me. (And the book’s not even been […]
“For smart, talented, and ambitious people, winning is sometimes so easy that it makes true success elusive. That’s because victories, easily obtained, can obscure the ultimate goal.” That’s a quote out of Hannibal and Me, Chapter 6, which is about life strategy. It’s also how I open my latest “teaser” post in the Harvard Business Review. […]
“The Catastrophe of Success” is the title of a short, famous essay by Tennessee Williams. I borrowed it as the title of a blog post I wrote for the Harvard Business Review the other day. That post is a teaser for Chapter 8 in Hannibal and Me, titled “The Prison of Success.” (I might follow up […]
Patrick Hunt at Stanford University is a leading archaeologist and historian, and arguably the leading living scholar of Hannibal. He has taken students to the Swiss Alps to figure out which pass Hannibal took. He has given a fantastic lecture series on iTunes U, which is in my bibliography. And he does much, much more, all of […]
“I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” So Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, allegedly excused himself once. Or perhaps it was Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw. It’s witty, it’s ironic, it’s true: that’s why any of them might have said it. Here […]
It sucks that I can’t watch the Beeb from here in the US. That’s because something fun is on the telly there. Three brothers — Danny, Ben and Sam Wood — are tracing the route that Hannibal took, from Spain through France and over the Alps into Italy, and thence to Tunisia and perhaps onward. […]
Jason Kehe at Los Angeles Magazine has chosen his four Critic’s Picks for January, and Hannibal and Me is “Best of the West”. He’s also captured the same issue with “genre bending” that Andres Martinez noted the other day. Kehe calls it a “shelving” challenge. How true. I plan to reflect on this in due […]
Well, it’s a busy day for reviews of Hannibal and Me. After the Wall Street Journal’s review, also today, the Washington Post has now weighed in, with a very short but sweet take. That’s now the 8th or 9th review, depending on how you count. (As a reminder, I’m keeping a list of everything here.) […]
The review in the Wall Street Journal is now out, and it is the 7th or 8th review by my count. (I try to keep the list current here.) Philip Delves Broughton is the reviewer, and he has grouped my book, Hannibal and Me, with two others: Julius Caesar: Lessons in Leadership From the Great […]
I just received the following email from one Matt Aaron, and it’s the sort of spontaneous, casual and genuine feedback that makes authors happy: I just finished the audio version of Hannibal and Me this morning, walking through a park in Bogota, Colombia. I am in a transition period, now in my late 20’s. This […]
Andres Martinez is a great journalist, writer and now think-tanker. And he’s had a career of Sophoclean ups and downs that could have been a storyline in my book. He and I had drinks the other day. Now Andres has penned a “Drinks With” column about me on Zocalo Public Square, an intellectual gathering point […]
There are reviewers, and then there are reviewers. And then there is … Mr Crotchety. Who is Mr Crotchety?, you ask. He (and I am reasonably confident that he is indeed both human and male, as allegedly pictured above) first presented himself to me in 2008, when he wrote a reader letter to The Economist […]
Jack Covert, the founder of 800-CEO-READ (America’s leading direct supplier of business literature to companies and organizations) and a sort of bestseller-prophet, has “selected” (ie, recommended) Hannibal and Me. Thank you, Jack! (The rest of you, remember: My book can be a business book, but need not be. It’s a life book.) He says that I do a fine […]
Here is an 8-minute podcast of a chat between Fiammetta Rocco, our Books & Arts editor at The Economist, and me, about Hannibal and Me. We were all over the place in our actual conversation, but our colleague Lucy Rohr did a Herculean job of editing it down to 8 minutes. Topics covered: Tiger Woods […]
Some of the first reactions to my book are now streaming in, which is enormously suspenseful for me. You are each projecting yourself into the stories in my book, each finding completely new ways of looking at them and, yes, your own lessons to take away from them. This is just as I intended, so […]