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··
A browsable archive of all book and non-book reviews from the annual Astral Codex Ten review contest. This site is maintained by Rob Ennals. Contact Rob if you find any issues with this site.
SARAH BAKEWELL, AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ: FREEDOM, BEING AND APRICOT COCKTAILS, CHATTO AND WINDUS, 2017.
Islam is fundamentally a simplification, an Arabized version of the already straightforward strains of Christianity dominant in the Eastern Roman Empire and parts of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th...
“[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...
When the last giant panda died, the children of Beijing painted their faces white and black and ran through the streets weeping, and their weeping smudged the panda makeup down their cheeks until...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A History of the Jews is a classic. Paul Johnson wrote it in 1987. It is a widely praised book.
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...
Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century
“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.”
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...
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...
In the LAB. Fluorescent output measured at sixty hertz. Dr. Dwayne Poopenhaupt III logged the frequency as an equilibrium, maintained by a band of agents operating below the detection threshold....
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...
“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...
By 1979 when he wrote Headbirths, Günter Grass had completed his acclaimed Danzig Trilogy and The Flounder. The first book of the trilogy, The Tin Drum, had been made into a film which had just won...