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Albert Camus
- A Very Short Introduction
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
Few would question that Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist, is a major cultural icon. His widely quoted works have led to countless movie adaptions, graphic novels, pop songs, and even t-shirts.
In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Gloag chronicles the inspiring story of Camus' life. From a poor fatherless settler in French-Algeria to the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gloag offers a comprehensive view of Camus' major works and interventions, including his notion of the absurd and revolt, as well as his highly original concept of pure happiness through unity with nature called "bonheur". This original introduction also addresses debates on coloniality, which have arisen around Camus' work.
Gloag presents Camus in all his complexity a staunch defender of many progressive causes, fiercely attached to his French-Algerian roots, a writer of enormous talent and social awareness plagued by self-doubt, and a crucially relevant author whose major works continue to significantly impact our views on contemporary issues and events.
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On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.
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Sadly, the story is timeless.
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Square Haunting
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
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A Thousand Small Sanities
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A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.
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Erudite and entertaining!
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Looking for the Good War
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In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans - all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.
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Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.
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The Craft
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Founded in London in 1717 as a way of binding men in fellowship, Freemasonry proved so addictive that within two decades it had spread across the globe. Masonic influence became pervasive. Under George Washington, the Craft became a creed for the new American nation. Masonic networks held the British empire together. Under Napoleon, the Craft became a tool of authoritarianism and then a cover for revolutionary conspiracy. Both the Mormon Church and the Sicilian mafia owe their origins to Freemasonry.
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The best book about Freemasonry out there.
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Looking for Lorraine
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
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The Islamic Enlightenment
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This absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam during the 19th and early 20th centuries offers a game-changing assessment of the Middle East. Beginning his account in 1798, de Bellaigue demonstrates how the Middle East has long welcomed modern ideals and practices, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from seclusion, and the development of democracy.
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fascinating story not told.elsewhere in one place
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Goddess of the Market
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Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.
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Unfortunate
- By Andrej Drapal on 03-14-18
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What listeners say about Albert Camus
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-23-22
Good summary
A good summary of Camus’ thoughts and experiences and of his disputes with Sartre. Also a fair treatment of his internal contradictions.
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- Robert Lynch
- 12-28-21
Camus: Great poet but not a good man.
Excellent analysis of Camus' life and work in spite of its brevity. Gloag reviews the unsavory attitudes and views of Camus in his later works that most biographers and many of his admirers do not want to discuss. Camus, although always insisting that he was never a follower of any ideology, was at the end of his life firmly in the camp of Algeria remaining a colony of France today, tomorrow and forever. In one of his novels he glamorized French colonists (pied noirs) who utter racist epithets and describe the Algerians as contemptible animals. To the end he described the French as having an inalienable right to their holdings in Algeria. You do not get exposed to this poison by reading The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus or The Plague, books which I loved as a teen. But in his later works, especially The Last Man, the full extent of his lack of humanity is exposed.
In the end, Camus was a magnificent writer of poetic prose and gorgeous essays. His lyricism was in many cases, without peer. But as a human being, he failed miserably to consider the plight of anyone other than himself and his beloved settler/invader class. Just like Mersault in The Stranger, he imagined that the nameless others, the original inhabitants of Algeria, could be disregarded and erased from history with a few pulls of the trigger.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-05-24
Tedious and uninformative
Half of this book is a shallow and disjointed introduction to the life and work of Albert Camus.
The other half is the author incessantly announcing their contempt for Camus for not being a communist.
That's all well and good, but unfortunately the two halves alternate with each sentence, so every fact you're given about Camus or his work, is followed by a breathless analysis of how it relates to his nihilism, his cowardice, and his love of imperialism,
I came away from this book with a sense that a good author could have taken the same source material and written a good book on the topic of Camus's weakness and irrelevance.
I wouldn't have read it, because I wanted to read a very short introduction to Albert Camus.
But if you want a bad introduction and a bad critique, this book is for you.
And I mean it, I can't think of anyone else this book is for.
The narration is terrific.
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- Fritz Tegularius
- 09-19-23
Too much biography, not enough philosophy
The historical context was useful but the book barely touched on Camus’s philosophical views. His personal and social bickering with Sartre and others get way too much airtime. His thoughts on life, almost none. Left me feeling like I got a lot of tawdry gossip and not much insight.
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