Philosophers and writers become easier to understand through the lives they actually lived in Sarah Bakewell’s intellectual biographies. How to Live uses Michel de Montaigne and his Essays to organise twenty questions about living, combining biography, Renaissance history and literary criticism. At the Existentialist Café follows Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger and others through the development of existentialism and phenomenology, while Humanly Possible traces humanist ideas across centuries of philosophy, religion and political thought. Bakewell’s prose is lively, anecdotal and conceptually clear, avoiding the tone of a formal philosophy textbook without simplifying disagreements out of existence. The most useful shelf associations are intellectual history, philosophy for general readers, literary biography and history of ideas. Read more Less
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