Simone de Beauvoir: The Basics, by Megan Burke

What is it about?

This review of Megan Burke's book Simone de Beauvoir: The Basics (Routledge, 2024) praises Burke's accessible and incredibly comprehensive introduction to Beauvoir's work, life, and political activism that will prove especially helpful for students and first time readers of Beauvoir. Burke's book is inspiring, because it presents Beauvoir as a complex figure, whose work remains very much relevant to this day, while also discussing some shortcomings of her thought and action. The book is written from a specific, today dominant perspective in Beauvoir studies - that of phenomenology, a philosophical method geared to analyzing first-person lived experience. It is regrettable that the author does not alert the reader explicitly that they are taking up this specific perspective on Beauvoir. This also leads to a partial presentation of her work, especially The Second Sex, that puts less emphasis on other topics and influences key to Beauvoir, such as the work of philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. All in all, however, Burke's book makes for a remarkable and very helpful introduction to Beauvoir's life and work.

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