At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
SARAH BAKEWELL, AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ: FREEDOM, BEING AND APRICOT COCKTAILS, CHATTO AND WINDUS, 2017.
2022·43 min·PhilosophyHistory··
ACX Review Archive
A browsable archive of all book and non-book reviews from the annual Astral Codex Ten review contest. This archive is maintained by Rob Ennals and is not officially endorsed by either Astral Codex Ten or the authors of the reviews.
Reviews
685 reviewsThe Simulacra
“[I]s a twenty-year-old novel successful merely because it seems cleverly predictive or contains scenarios that feel ‘relevant’ to later audiences? If that were the mark of enduring fiction, Philip...
2023·21 min··
The Mind of a Bee
Sadly, this is not a review of a book called The Mind of a Crab Spider. But as you crab spider lovers know, crab spiders and bumble bees are natural rivals.
2023·24 min·Biology··
The Internationalists
In The Internationalists, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro (H&S from now on) work to raise the profile of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, at the time the most-ratified treaty in history, in which...
2022·40 min·HistoryPolitics··
THE PACIFIC WAR, by Saburo Ienaga
Before I read through Ienaga’s The Pacific War, I understood fairly little as to the war between Japan and the U.S.-Chinese alliance, despite having a history knowledge that resulted in me easily...
2023·6 min··
World Empire Lost
Written by a convicted Nazi war criminal from his cell, World Empire Lost is a history of World War II such as you’ve never read before. It combines lucid military analysis and geostrategic insights...
2024·57 min·History··
Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed
My copy of Ten Days That Shook the World starts with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor, a celebrated British historian and socialist. He explains that the British Communist Party rejected the...
2021·20 min··
L'Ambroisie, by Bernard Pacaud
It's the question that's haunted at least a few ACX readers, not to mention its writer. But surely everyone has felt its tug when they glance at the clothes of passersby on the street, the megalithic...
2025·26 min·Memoir··
The Reckoning by David Halberstam
The Reckoning, written by David Halberstam, published in 1986, is about the sacking of Detroit, aka the US automobile industry, by the Japanese. It is a classic underdog tale, and Halberstam tells it...
2022·13 min·EconomicsHistory··
Mice, Mechanisms, And Dementia
“The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”
2025·32 min·ScienceBiology··
We Should Never Have Gone to Mammoth Caves
In the late Spring of 2019, I was pregnant with my first (and only) child. My husband and I decided to go on a road trip from South Jersey to New Orleans and back before we couldn’t travel for a...
2025·24 min·Memoir··
Choosing Elites by Robert Klitgaard
Forty years ago Robert Klitgaard was a Harvard golden boy. Still in his mid-thirties, with three Harvard degrees (A.B., Philosophy; M.P.P., Public Policy; and Ph.D., Public Policy), he was an...
2024·14 min·SocietyEconomics··
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
I enjoyed Scott’s Dictator Book Club series [1, 2, 3, 4] and was hoping he would eventually cover Vladimir Putin, but that hasn’t happened yet so I decided to do it myself. The book is The Man...
2023·25 min··
Face the Fear, Worldbuild the Future: The Games and World of Project Moon
“The City” is Judge Dredd meets Warhammer 40k with plenty of shounen anime sprinkled on top. Its official map, as shown here, implies that it occupies approximately 44000 square kilometers, or around...
2025·28 min·Fiction··
The Gulag Archipelago
A priest, a Communist and a farmer walk into a bar.
2021·24 min··
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
They say cognitive biases are what other people have. In that vein, “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt is a book about how other people think. Specifically, how they think about morality and make...
2022·52 min·PsychologyPhilosophyPolitics··
unORDINARY (WEBTOON comic series)
Each narrative work is essentially a response to some “what-if” question.
2025·21 min·FictionPolitics··
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
One hundred years before Nixon and the hippies, Ivan Turgenev wrote of a very different Sixties generational conflict than the one we remember today. His novel, Fathers and Sons, published in 1862,...
2023·20 min·FictionHistory··
In Search of Canadian Political Culture by Nelson Wiseman
I wrote this review for two reasons. First, like all Canadians, when I come across something about America, my instinct is to ask “what about us? Why is no one talking about us?”. It was this...
2022·36 min·PoliticsSociety··
Why Nations Fail
1. Why Nations Fail is not a very good book. 2. Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman their thesis as best I can, but it's still debatable. 3. Even if correct, it...
2023·23 min·EconomicsPolitics··
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