I’d recommend skipping Irvine’s book and just going straight to the sources. I didn’t feel like he added much, and thought his book was poorly structured and overly didactic; too close to the style of the popular self-help book for my taste. I also felt like he projected many of his own opinions/conclusions back on the authors he was discussing.
Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.
I disagree. I thought that his book framed the larger issues of stoicism well, so I could better understand the source material as the next step. (Particularly since some of the translations use language that's not particularly accessible).
I agree completely. The subject matter in the book is worth review but I found his style so distracting it was difficult to finish. It has the feel of a first writing assignment where the suggested format was followed very closely chapter after chapter. Not a book you get lost in reading.
Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.