Professor George Minois’ sweeping history of human depression begins with the confession of an Egyptian living nearly four thousand years ago: “It is folly for my soul to try to persuade a miserable person like me to stay alive, and not seek death before my time…Show me instead how beautiful death is!” Minois uses this “Egyptian Hamlet” as a starting point for his comprehensive examination of the various names, guises, causes, treatments, artistic representations, and conceptions of depression throughout history. The result is a fascinating portrait not only of the disease, but also of the various societies that dealt with it in vastly different ways. The Greeks, for example, established the theory that an excess of black bile was the cause; the devil was blamed in the Middle-Ages, while the roots of the malady became more intensely personal later on with the Romantics. With each suspected cause came an accompanying conception of the depressed, be it diseased, possessed, artistically gifted or emotionally troubled. Minois lucidly describes how these relationships illustrate the prevailing trends of the time, whether it is the rise of Christianity, the shift towards the primacy of rational observation during the Enlightenment, the age of Freud, or the current focus on brain chemistry. Depression, acedia, spleen, melancholy, mal de vivre, nihilism, ennui: whatever the name, Minois engages with abundant energy the entire history (up to the present day, where a suicide takes place every thirty seconds and six percent of the U.S. population is chronically depressed) of this specter haunting humanity, as well as the great philosophers and artists who have addressed it over the millennia – Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dürer, Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Beckett, and many others. All in all, Histoire du mal de vivre is a grand and evocative synthesis.