Hannah Arendt. 
 
Chicago: 1958. First edition. Hardcover. Octavo. Tanning along the edges of the boards. Tips of the boards are bumped and one of them is exposed. Along the edge on top of the back board there is some tearing. Crown and heel of the spine a little bumped. A sprinkle of foxing on the top edge of the text block, and a stain on the top of the fore edge. Former owner's name and purchase date in ink on the first free endpaper. 332 pages. Very good. 
 
Arendt is known as a political thinker, but her famous books came out of her incredible erudition and philosophical reflection as much as her (and our) need to make sense of turmoiled times. A title as grandiose as The Human Condition exceeds even Arendt's reputation. It is a charting of how human action has been understood from the ancient Greeks to the end of the twentieth century. Arendt's writing is always pschyoactive, giving not just new understandings of historical change but unexpected illuminations of your own mind in motion. 
 
“Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”