jamesnotjim 's review for:

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Mauri by Sarah Bakewell

5.0

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This is a fun book for anyone with any familiarity with existentialism. It's a particularly interesting read because of the way it approaches the subject. Most overviews of a philosophical movement focus on the ideas themselves, leaving out all but the briefest of biographical details. But the lives of the major thinkers in the movement were, in many cases, deeply entwined. And, even when they weren't, Bakewell's gift for biography makes reading about their personal and, in many cases, political lives part of the fun. That said, she doesn't ignore the ideas and focus only on the lives of the thinkers. Nor does she collapse one into the other. But she does point out potential linkages between the, if you will, art and lives of the philosophers in question. She also, on occasion, brings in her own autobiographical connection to key texts, which began for her--as it did for me--early in life before she circled back to them, with a deeper understanding, later.

Anyway, it's a great read. And now I have a long list of works by existentialists I've never read before, chief among them Maurice Merleau-Ponty.