Customer Reviews

Sartre in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I picked up this book hoping that it would help me sort through some of Sartre's basic ideas....which I found quite challenging. The book was very disappointing in this respect. It was full of generalizations and opinions and failed to give me, a newbie to sartre, any valuable help. I would spend your money on "SARTRE FOR BEGINNERS" which I found much more helpful and useful.

One of the great things about the internet is that everyone has access to it. One of the problems with the internet is that everyone has access to it. This book "Sartre in 90 Minutes" by Paul Strathern is a fine book that doesn't pretend to be anything more than it claims to be. It is an excellent introduction to Sartre and is much more approachable than the faulty traslations from French that make reading Sartre like swimming in quicksand. Anyone who cannot gain a basic understanding of Sartre's basic premises from reading this book should give up on reading. It provides a succinct and comprehensive explanation of the philosopher, the events that shaped him and his place in history.

One always suspects that totally negative reviews are written by someone who has an ax to grind, another book they wish to promote, or by people who in failing to comprehend what they have read compensate by pointing the blame at the author rather than their own lack of lucidity.

It has been said that one million monkeys with one million typewriters could eventually dupliate the works of Shakespeare. The internet and the millions of monkeys sitting at their keyboards have proved that claim to be false.

As others have written here, skip this and get Sartre for Beginners instead. That book, while not comprehensive, does a better job of fleshing out most of his major concepts in a more useful fashion. This book you just sit down and read. The for Beginners series is a better reference that you can turn to again and again to refesh you knowledge.

Of the "90 minutes" series written by Prof. Strathern that I have read, I thought this work on Sartre to be the best. Intertwining biography with philosophy works quite well in the case of Sartre. His style was that of sheer genius, analytical and brilliant, and he was an outstanding original thinker, building on those before him whose thought bore on his development of existentialism. The crucible of the twentieth century produced in him not only one of the great philosophers, but a man of great courage and independence as well. Existentialism has affected our mode of thinking to such an extent in the modern world, that it is easy to underestimate the genius of Sartre. I think that Prof. Strathern's entertaining and clever writing communicates not only the circumstances of his life and character but some of the real importance of this seminal thinker.

As in the other books in Strathern's "90 Minute" series, when the author is not working so hard to be glib and witty, he manages to offer a nice doorway to Sartre's work. Bear in mind this is written for Joe Winedrinker or Joe NPR-Listener so any of Sartre's criticisms of the bourgeoisie or the middle class are quickly dismissed as ridiculous.

I would assume most people who pick up a book in the "90 Minute" series are, like myself, new commers to the thinker being discussed. Being a political theory student I was not totally ignorant of the 20th century French intellectual tradition, but I wanted a more in depth knowledge of some specific thinkers and Sartre seemed like a good place to start. Unfortunately the book only served moderately well as a primer.

My only real critique is the book spends far too much time with gossip, thus thinning out the space for Sartre's actual philosophy. You will leave the book well versed in Sartre's sexual tendencies and reliance on a cocktail of "uppers and downers" to stay mentally focused, but not as well versed on his existentialism.

However, when Strathern focuses on Sartre's massive philosophical arsenal the book shines! You will just have to read through 45 pages (2/3 of the book)of love stories, domestic drama, and war stories to get to it. It is quite the arduous task to condense such a deep and complex thinkers work into a 90 page pamphlet, but the task turns impossible when the author also tries to fuse the thinkers work with his life story. That's not to say that Sartre's story is unworthy of being told, just the opposite in fact. His life (like his philosophy) is too complex to be summarized in only a portion of a pamphlet.

This is one of the best works in this series. Strathern does not write about Sartre uncritically, but he writes about him with great sympathy and understanding. He retells the story of Sartre's unusual childhood and explains how and why he became a person who always heard the sound of his own drummer. And even the exposition of Sartre as a philosopher illustrates this point, as Sartre continually goes in a way of his own. Moreover the explication of the background to Sartre's major philosophical works is the most clear that I know. He shows how Husserl's effort to synthesize rationalism and empiricism in his phenomenology provides a take- off point for Sartre in 'Being and Nothingness'. There is also a brief but insightful description of 'Being and Nothingness' and its relation to the work of Heidegger. Strathern stresses that Sartre continually moved despite his radical individualism in the direction of taking responsibility for the world. He may have erred in practical political judgment again and again but he showed a courage in standing up for what he believed in. Strathern also gives us a clue to the famous Sartre- Beauvoir relationship so important to the life and work of both. This through the reading of the orphan Sartre's relation to his mother who was in some ways more sister to him than mother. The Sartre- Beauvoir alliance served them both long after it ceased to be a romantic relationship. Strathern comments that their 'open relationship' was something courageously 'new'for its time- a claim that a few old- fashioned folks like myself might have other terminology for. All in all this is a very fine piece of work. One feels in it Strathern's greater closeness to Sartre than to any other of the philosophers he has written about.

This book merits no review. It is insulting to mislead anyone to think he/she can understand Jean Paul Sartre in ninety minutes. Most people do not have the intelligence to understand his ideas; those who do spend years thinking. It isn't pablum, and there is no clue if you don't have a brain. There are those who get it and those who don't. A book which claims to have the key should have been written on disposable paper.