Karoliina’s Reviews > At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails > Status Update

Hmm, the description of racism in the US versus racism in Europe in the 1940s seemed simplistic and too pro-European. Just because there was no segregation in Europe doesn't mean that things were good.

Finding it really interesting how different philosophers were affected by the Second World War. Wasn't expecting this much history from this book but really enjoying it.

[Beauvoir] wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult she wrote, 'I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.'

Well, this is uncomfortably relevant: "Sometimes the best-educated people were those the least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last."

It will probably take me a while to finish this since I have to take it one chapter at a time - there's only so many fundamental existential questions I am ready to face in one afternoon. But so far I'm loving it. Mixing existential philosophy with biographies and memoirs just works.