Who
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist, a MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist, and the author of Plato at the Googleplex, which sends Plato on a book tour through our own century. She first read him at twelve and has not stopped.
The book
Four dialogues that hold the whole of Plato. The Euthyphro, where Socrates picks a fight about the gods while awaiting his own trial; the Apology, the speech that got him executed; and the Symposium and the Phaedrus, two arguments about love that contradict each other on purpose.
What you’ll come away with
The questions Plato asked first and never settled, why Socrates was willing to die for them, and one argument about God and goodness you will carry out of the book.
