Exploring Existentialism at the Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

anonymous: As described. Great condition. No complaints.

United Kingdom on Dec 10, 2022

Juan Z.: It feels like a trip through history combined with entry points of existentialist philosophy making it accessible for non-experts. All this while having a great style of writing which makes you be stuck to the book. Definitely a page turner

Germany on Sep 03, 2021

Salvadore: I've not finished reading this book however the reading is not tedious on the other hand the outhor uses very comprehensive sentences for a non philosopher or specialist in the subject. For me this book is very interesting full of new vocabulary As a foreign language speaker it's helping me alot.

Mexico on Jul 14, 2019

Norman Douglas: An engaging exposure of some of the leading figuresof this movement..Sartre is not a philosopher. He is a cut & paste novelist, an essayist and playwrght mixing Heidegger, Husserl and others.into his philosophy.. He is an early example of a media personality. This book is an excellent fresh look at the ideas and milieu in which these people developed.Exhilarating

France on Mar 09, 2018

jeffrey quinzer: A beautiful, extremely pleasurable and invigorating read. The best I've read in a long time. It brought back the 'heady' exhilarating times when I first encountered existentialism as an 18 year old freshmen in college in 1970. It was my first encounter with existentialism. But initially not through the philosophical works themselves but through a course in 20th century literature: Sartre, Hesse, Camus, Malraux, de Beauvoir. It was eye-opening for an 18 year old who grew up in what was still a "1950's" suburban life. I was then so fortunate to take small seminars (6 - 8 students) on "Nietzsche", "Being and Time", and "The Later Heidegger" with professors such as Joseph P. Fell ("Emotion in the Theory of Sartre" and "Heidegger and Sartre") and Ernest Keen ("Three Faces of Being: Toward An Existential Clinical Psychology" and " A Primer in Phenomenological Psychology" and "Ultimacy and Triviality In Psychotherapy") . I will always be grateful for what they taught me to see and question.

I didn't know of Sarah Blakewell until this book. I don't where she might have been "hiding" but she is a tremendously gifted writer and extremely well-read scholar. I have never seen such...

United States on Jan 26, 2018

Kenneth L. Matheny: This is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. Like Bakewell, I was quite interested in the existentialists back in the 1970s and 80s, but I moved on to other thinkers and had almost forgotten the passion, brilliance, and excitement of existentialism. The joy is back for me, thanks to Bakewell. Reading At the Existentialist Café, I re-experienced the passionate brilliance of the women and men that made philosophy into a lifelong passion of mine. Bakewell writes beautifully, with great insight and an obvious love and compassion for the men and women who shook the world in the middle of the 20th Century. Bakewell doesn't just provide biographies of these great and controversial thinkers; she reveals how their lives illuminate their ideas. Indeed, she does this with a skill that is breath-taking. For anyone who is not familiar with existentialism, this book would be immensely helpful because Bakewell has a rare ability to make complex ideas comprehensible. For those who have studied the existentialists, this book is a beautiful reminder why these men and women are so vitally important and why we fell in love with them in our youths. Above all, Bakewell makes you want to go...

United States on Jun 01, 2017

Amazon Customer: A fabulous read for either closet philosophers or for the Parisienne junkie. This book puts existentialism in its many forms in readable and understandable prose. It is very well written and could be mistaken for a novel about two lovers in France in the 30's. There is a plethora of anecdotal tales to re create the times that Sartre and de Beauvoir lived in. Any one with an interest in existentialist concepts will love the book. One can easily imagine the stars of the book sitting in a Paris Cafe telling the story of their lives while we the reader listened in.

Canada on Dec 30, 2016

Thomas J. Cuddihy: Beyond question, this book is an entertaining read for anybody who has ever been interested in the mid-twentieth century’s existentialist wave of thinking. On the whole it’s also an informative book, though more than once, I was put off by Bakewell’s lapses into glibness. Occasionally, she was too quick to draw conclusions about issues that remain contentious to the present day, but on balance, she does a pretty good job of describing existentialism’s origins and development, as well as its influence on intellectual and literary history. A minor complaint, mainly apparent in the book’s early chapters, is Bakewell’s penchant for retelling stories that have been previously told many times over. The reader who is most likely to pick up this book is someone already familiar with existentialism’s spokespersons, and with many of the events and incidents that she relates about them. I found myself skimming and skip-reading through several overly familiar stories about the comings and goings of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, though in fairness, Bakewell also includes a number of interesting anecdotes about both French and the German existentialist thinkers that were new to me,...

United States on May 20, 2016