Courage Is Calling

Courage Is Calling opens a new series from Ryan Holiday on the four cardinal virtues of ancient philosophy, and it starts with the one he treats as the foundation of the rest. Holiday earlier wrote The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key, books that found readers among athletes, executives, politicians and entrepreneurs and helped bring Stoicism to a wide modern audience. Here he turns to courage, which sits alongside temperance, justice and wisdom in the thinking of figures such as Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle and C.S. Lewis.

The starting point is that nearly every religion, philosophy and person has to deal with fear. The Bible's most repeated phrase is "Be not afraid," and the Greeks had a word, phobos, for panic and terror. The Stoics held that feeling fear is natural but that it should never be allowed to rule you. Courage, in this view, is the ability to rise above fear and do what is right, what is needed and what is true.

Holiday organizes the book in three parts: fear and the cowardice it can produce, courage and the bravery that expresses it, and finally heroism and the valor that goes with it. He illustrates each with stories of leaders from history and from our own time, including Charles de Gaulle, Florence Nightingale and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Along the way he shows how to face fear and practice courage in everyday life.

Less familiar figures get their due as well. Helvidius Priscus, a Roman senator, held his ground against the emperor Vespasian even when it put his life at risk. Frank Serpico, a New York City police detective, exposed corruption in his own department. Frederick Douglass drew inspiration for his fight against slavery from the fierce resistance of an enslaved woman named Nelly. Holiday argues that a world full of fear, where many prefer to stay on the sidelines, follow convention or look away from injustice, needs whistleblowers, risk takers, activists, truthful writers and leaders willing to listen.