Salmon's new book is An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida.
At the Guardian, he tagged ten of the best books about great thinkers, including:
At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah BakewellRead about another entry on the list.
Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has become the ne plus ultra of group biographies, to the point where any pitch for a book in this area these days has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a reason for this. Bakewell’s ability to connect a thinker’s ideas to their life and personality is impressive. I particularly love her slow, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the man: displaying Paul Celan’s books in the window of his local bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.
--Marshal Zeringue