Becker was a moral philosopher at the College of William & Mary who, late in a distinguished career, turned to the project of rebuilding Stoic ethics for a reader who could not accept the school's ancient theology. The Stoa held that the cosmos is rationally ordered, providentially structured, and that ethical norms follow from the structure of nature. Becker, writing as a contemporary naturalist, asked: what survives if you remove the providential framing and keep only what the modern philosophical sciences will permit?
His answer in A New Stoicism is: most of it. The discipline of assent, the priority of virtue, the doctrine of indifferents, the orientation toward rational agency — all of these can be defended on grounds the modern reader will recognise. What gets dropped is the specific Stoic theology and the cosmic teleology. What gets kept is the architecture of an ethical life organised around the cultivation of practical reason in a finite agent.
The book is, importantly, philosophical reconstruction, not historical exposition. Becker is not reporting what Chrysippus or Marcus Aurelius thought; he is asking what a contemporary, naturalistically-inclined philosopher should think if she finds the Stoic project compelling. The 2017 expanded edition adds substantial replies to critics and refines the argument that virtue is the only constituent of well-being — a defence of the strong Stoic identity thesis that few modern writers attempt.
Becker is the modern Stoic the academic revival owes most to and the trade revival cites least. He is the writer to recommend when Pigliucci or Robertson has done its work and the reader wants to see what a fully serious philosophical defence of Stoic ethics looks like under modern constraints. Slow going, but worth it.