Giacomo Casanova :Worlds Greatest Lover - Charm, Wit, Vulnerability, and the Art of Human Connection Across Eighteenth-Century Europe   #957398

Giacomo Casanova is one of the most written-about figures in European history, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. His name has become a synonym for sexual conquest — a shorthand for the shallow, manipulative pursuit of women as trophies. This is, as this book will demonstrate, a profound misreading of both the man and his memoirs.
Casanova was a complex, contradictory, brilliant, and deeply human figure. His twelve-volume autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), is one of the most intimate and intellectually rich documents of the eighteenth century — a text that serious scholars of European history, literature, and social psychology have studied for generations precisely because of its depth, not its titillation.
This book approaches Casanova with the same seriousness. It does not celebrate or glamorise manipulation or coercion — encounters in his memoirs that modern readers would rightly find troubling are examined critically and contextually. What it does celebrate is Casanova's genuine gifts: his extraordinary conversational ability, his emotional intelligence, his intellectual curiosity, his courage in the face of imprisonment and exile, and his late-life determination to preserve his experiences honestly for posterity.