Albert Camus: Elements of a Life

Zaretsky (French history, U. of Houston, Texas) aspires to neither a full biography of French Algerian writer and philosopher Camus (1913-60), nor a scholarly commentary on his work. Rather he traces some familiar ideas about the man, pegging each to a specific event in his life. They are his 1939 visit to Kabylia to report on the conditions of local Berber tribes, signing a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist Robert Brasillach in 1945, his quarrel with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of communism, and his silence after 1956 about the war of liberation in Algeria. Some unexpected figures turn up, among them Thucydides, Augustine, Montaigne, and Synge. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)