It's a greatest book about woman and wrote to hers

In The Second Sex De Beauvoir, Sartre's live-in lover and practical goddess of the feminist movement, reveals an epic of sociological writing, and the chief text on genderized notions of citizenship. Detailing both the myths and facts, past and present of the female suppression, she uncovers facts in society which have remained hidden, covered by nothing more than obvious lies. As relevant today as ever, I urge anyone with a notion of equality, male or female, to read this book.

"After the War: Force of Circumstance Vol. 1" by Simone de Beauvoir is the shortest of the five volumes of her autobiography and picks up right where 'The Prime of Life' left off. At the end of 'Prime,' France had been liberated, but the WWII was not over, and this book outlines the end of the conflict and the emergence of the non-Communist left, which de Beauvoir later fictionalizes in 'The Mandarins.' Again, she writes compellingly of her life in Paris with her famous circle of friends including Jean Genet, Albert Camus, Richard Wright and Alberto Giacometti. She writes of interesting travels, including a trip she took to Northern Africa, and of Sartre's work and her own writing (during the course of this book, she writes 'All Men Are Mortal,' 'The Second Sex' and she drafts 'The Mandarins').

But the central focus of this volume is her love affair with Chicago writer Nelson Algren ('The Man with the Golden Arm'). She meets Algren on a tour she makes of the United States that is funded by a group that brings her over on a reading/lecture tour. (She and Sartre are now becoming famous by the years of this book, 1944 to 1952.) She spends time with him in the United States, making a trip south through the southwest, Mexico and Guatamala with him, which she doesn't outline completely here as she has written of it more extensively in her book 'America Day by Day.' The relationship runs its course within the pages of this book as Algren gives up on her ever being for him what he wants, remarrying his ex-wife by the last pages. Resigned to this fate, not able to leave Sartre or France (though she and Sartre seem to have an agreement to share finances, take long vacations together and work together, they never lived together and are free to see others as they wish), she is still very disappointed by the end of the affair. On the last visit to his cabin outside Chicago, she says she is glad they have come to a mutual understanding and will be friends. Algren replies to her that he can never offer her anything less than love.

The French intelligentsia during this time are grappling with the knowledge of the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Sartre and de Beauvoir were deeply sympathetic with the world's communists, but Sartre never joined the party, apparently because he couldn't countenance on a daily basis the 'thought-control' aspect of the central committee. De Beauvoir writes quite a bit about the various left and right publications in Paris at the time, the political views of their editorial boards and the personal and political attacks that were made from their various pages. Their friendship with Camus breaks up by the end of the book as he has become too anti-communist for Sartre and de Beauvoir and the other editors of their monthly publication, Les Temps Modernes.

This was a much quicker read than the first two, but engaging in the same episodic way. I don't know if it could as easily stand on its own, as she references many things from the second volume as if one should know of them. The story of her love affair with Algren is very moving and sad, and she writes from time to time of difficult times, emotionally, as she ages and confronts herself as a woman in her 40s, making a name for herself.

Simone de Beauvoir the memoirist was one of the great literary stylists of the century. This book focuses on the end of WWII and the disappointments which followed when French intellectuals and politicians failed to unite; when France's power diminished and when Communism's inability to solve the problems of mankind became obvious. Reading Simone provides insight into how the McCarthy era evolved and how the Cold War came about. Alhough its cast includes the philosophical and literary stars of the mid-20th century, this book is more than a gossipy treat: it is a road map to the understanding of how Europe and America dealt with mending the wounds of war and how the remainder of the century was shaped.

This is the second volume of de Beauvoir's five-volume autobiograpy, and it covers 1929 to 1944.

This one was harder to break into than the first, I felt, as she began somewhat vaguely about her philosophy, the things she was working on, etc. The first part of the book vaguely and distantly describes the beginning of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, so the personal is perhaps rather squashed here (maybe that's why I found it less engaging than "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" at first). But as I made my way forward, I found the same compelling qualities of the first, and more -- as de Beauvoir is older: Her interests and her circle of friends are expanding.

This book is interesting on so many levels, and I would recommend it to stand on its own (it doesn't have to be read as part of the whole), as well. It's interesting, as the first one was, for the way she describes her life in Paris at the time (she names all the cafes, neighborhoods, etc., that she frequents), and, as the first one, because it still dwells on how she is beginning her professional life that would lead her to be one of the foremost twentieth century philosophers and writers. So it's got something on both personal and broader themes.

But this book also adds the elements of the writer, as during its years, de Beauvoir writes her first books "She Came to Stay" and "The Blood of Others." I like to read about how writers work, their processes, and de Beauvoir very interestingly dissects her work in retrospect, writing things like, "What I was trying to accomplish at the time through Francoise's character was... but I see now that she comes across as ..." De Beauvoir was a very vigilant and disciplined worker, researcher and writer, and she writes of these routines. For writers interested in how others work, where they get their ideas and how they edit and redraft, I would certainly recommend this.

But this work is also interesting on another level; its most compelling part is when she details the beginning of WWII and the occupation of Paris. Rather than summarize it with the view the passing years have given her, de Beauvoir excerpts her diaries from the time, so that the reader feels the fears, understands the unknown dangers that she felt and gets the immediacy and intimacy of the worries of Parisiens such as de Beauvoir. I really couldn't put these sections down as she wrote about fleeing the Nazi occupiers, then deciding that if Sartre were released, he would only be able to find her in Paris and her desperate journey home again.

The book also starts a theme I can see will continue in all of them, outlining her travels as she (sometimes alone, sometimes with Sartre or others) goes around France and abroad and writes of how she feels and what she discovers there. In this volume, to name a few, she goes to Greece, Spain and all over
France.

The voice of these autobiographies is somewhat distant and aloof, which I find useful, as she seems intent on presenting her life very objectively, but when Sartre is attacked or criticized, she loses this coolness of tone and makes personal attacks on his critics.

The last aspect I'll mention of this long volume (nearly 500 pages) is the circle of friends she creates. She happens to befriend Alberto Giacometti, who is my favorite artist, in Paris and writes very fondly of his intellect and engaging conversations. She meets Hemingway and is an aquaintance of Picasso and his longtime lover Dora Marr. She also meets Cocteau through Sartre's theatrical work.

I found the wartime writing of this second one particularly engaging and probably of wider interest than the episodes of de Beauvoir's daily life later on... but we'll see!

This is my favorite volume of de Beauvoir's autobiograghy. It covers her life from her graduation at age 20 to the beginning of her fame after the war, when she was about forty. This book paints a vivid piture of now famous Left Bank intellectuals; their philosophies, politics, love lives, travels, and various predicaments they inevitabley get themselves into. I stumbled across this book by accident as a teenager and read it only because I was bored. It opened up an entire world for me;existentialism, feminism, socialism, French history and culture, all of which I now study at university. This book is aslo a great introduction to de Beauvoir's THE MANDARINS, which is a fictionalized account of the same people and places

"The Madarins" won the Priz Goncourt, FRance's highest literary award. Can one really give an award to a novel? The winner of a race is usually easy to spot, but how can a novel win an award? In the case of The Mandarins, the merit may have been due to the depiction of the political fragmentation of France immediately after the War. Simone de Beauvoir was bitterly disappointed that France did not emerge as an authentic world power with the coming of peace. The division within the country, however, was more painful to her than France's diminished stature. During the War, some of the factionalism of that country with more than 260 kinds of cheese abated somewhat, but peace meant a return to acrimony. Most of Simone's fiction is based on her life and the people in it. However, no character is ever a one-to-one representation of any individual. To say that the fictional Anne is Simone and Anne's husband is Jean-Paul Sartre is to over-simplify for Simone invested some of her personality traits in both characters. The correspondance between Anne and Simone is greatest when Anne falls in love with the American known as Lewis. (Lcarver of Florida thought this was the weakest part of the novel and I heartily disagree. I knew Nelson Algren. I think Simone wanted to love him but there were many reasons why she never fully allowed herself that luxury.) Once Anne meets Lewis, Simone's writing becomes freer and more relaxed. Simone desperately needed an editor, someone who would have sent the manuscript for the Mandarins back to her with orders to tighten. It may have been that by the time she wrote The Mandarins, she was an embryonic sacred monster. One of my criticism's of Simone as a novelist is her 19th century habit of acting as the omniescent author. It is annoying when Anne smiles knowingly or Lewis nods sleepily. The young Simone (aged 10) read and admired Louisa May Alcott -- who had more in common with Simone than most Americans might suppose -- and Louisa loved melodrama. So did Simone. In fact, her novel, "She Came to Stay," has been criticized as being melodramatic. Toril Moi, who has written a study of Simone called "The Making of an Intellectual Woman," says that book is melodramatic because existentialism is a melodramatic philosophy. There is more than a bit of melodrama to The Mandarins. It is a shame that the fine writing of which Simone was capable -- America Day by Day and Force of Circumstance -- didn't transfer to her novels.

There are plenty of great books and films about the squalor of life during wartime, and even more about shellshocked soldiers coming to grips with life during peacetime. But surprisingly few novels deal with civilians faced with the task of rebuilding the devastated world around them. The Mandarins would have to be at the top of that very short list. Most critics, here and elsewhere, have tended to focus on the book as Beauvoir's record of her affair with Nelson Algren, but like all great artists, Beauvoir transforms the raw material of her life into something far more profound and encompassing, especially as it is played out against the grand, ruined backdrop of postwar Paris. The resulting book succeeds on so many levels: as roman a clef (Camus, Sartre, Koestler, and obviously Algren all feature prominently), as novel of ideas (of the "where do we go from here?" variety), as a love story (really two love stories--we can't forget Henri/Camus, whose story takes up half the book!), as a Jamesian exploration of brash New World vs. exhausted Old World culture, and finally as a portrait of an intelligent, civilized woman wrestling with her darkest impulses in the wake of Europe's darkest moment.

Is the book overly long? Probably. Melodramatic? At times. Too cluttered with phrases of the "smiled knowingly" variety? Without a doubt. But it's redeemed time and again by the keen intelligence Beauvoir brings to bear on her characters and herself. For days after I put the book down, I found myself literally pining for the company of Anne, Lewis and Henri. Is there any greater testament to a novel than that?

The reason that I love Simone so much is defined in this book. What happens when you live with atrocities? What happens when you have to see lives terribly torn apart by evil? What can a person do?

DeBeauvior takes these questions and makes them human, and gives hope to our world. But, with any great existentialist thinker, makes the point that living is hard. To exist well we must make choices and be able to live with them. All of the characters in this book show the angst and chaos of war. How they are able to live with each other and themselves is displayed with amazing depth and insight. The complexities of women are shown vividly - especially if you have read The Second Sex. Each of the woman characters are shown struggling with their societial place as Other, yet, show this trancendence that is even more important to her gender.

This is also an incredible demonstration of the power and pain of love. I read this book as a teenager and found that I reread it at least once a year to remind me of the beauty and pain of life. It is a wonderful book about being a woman, and a thinker. I recommend it to anyone who is disturbed about events in this world and how to deal with them.

While enjoyable, this isn't a particularly great memoir. I find it to be a bit choppy, and most of the characters (including De Beauvoir herself) come off as exceedingly unlikable. Still, the subject of death is an interesting one, and the novel is short enough that anyone who is interested enough to consider reading it really has nothing to lose.

What I do find most interesting, however, is how De Beauvoir (who consults her over-rated companion Sartre in the memoir) seems to be preaching Albert Camus' concept of the quantitative life, and living life with full consciousness. Ultimately, the memoir is rather tragic because De Beauvoirs' dying, once inauthentic mother realizes this on her death bed, when it's too late. It's an excellent message, and although it's better from Camus' pen, it is interesting hearing it from De Beauvoir as well.

This is a book I would put on a must read list. Death has been spirited away behind closed doors, and banished from our thoughts until it forces its way through, as it always will. This is a must read for anyone working in "Health Care" or with the elderly, also anyone counseling families and the dying. I would hope to find it on a required reading list for medical schools as well. de Beauvoir gives an honest, raw account of her thoughts and fears as her Mother dies; it is a bit reassuring to see that not all of those thoughts are pure and idyllic. She gives any ethics committee a firm reference point in the consideration of assisted death vs. assisted living. Read this book, it will enhance your life.

The connection we have with our mothers is sacred. They are what brought us into this world, but the only thing that could separate us tighter is death. Our spirits and memories are ours to keep, but there is no longer any physical connection. In "A Very Easy Death", a relationship with a mother and daughter had gotten closer because of a death. In this death is what bonds the daughter to give full dedication and devotion to be with her mother. Unfortunately, the death that is connecting both daughter and mother is the death of her mother that is about to occur. Cancer is what is taking her mother away from her. While her mother is suffering and fighting against the cancer, the daughter is there by her side. She notices, "a full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated (Beauvoir 43)." Simone, the daughter, sees her full-hearted, spirited mother inside, but the cancer is the stranger of her body that is deforming and mutilating her. Although, Simone shows no suffering when she's around her mother, but she is indeed disturb when she's alone. Her mother is leaving her. Simone state "everyday had an irreplaceable value for her. And she was going to die. She did not know it: but I did. In her name, I revolted against it (Beauvoir 83)." Simone is spending precious time with her mother - spending valuable time, but the cancer is what is stopping her mother to notice it. The cancer has taken over her mother's life. This still does not stop Simone from being with her though. There is nowhere in doubt I'll leave my mother while she's miserable and suffering all at once. I cannot bare to think my mother actually leaving me, but it has to happen eventually. In "A Very Easy Death", Simone's mother demonstrates a role model on her own daughter and me. She displays a true role model that is fighting against her death. I enjoyed this novel dearly. It showed me that I should always keep that connection I have with my mother until the day "I" die.

This was my first experience of de Beauvoir, and I remember it vividly: I was seventeen and staying at my grandparents house, supposedly studying for my final high school exams, but it was a sweltering afternoon and I was bored and listless; I found an old 70s copy of "The Woman Destroyed" on the bookshelf (it must have belonged to my radical aunt during her university days.) Anyway, I picked it up and couldn't stop reading until I finished it. While "The Woman Destroyed" described experiences very removed from my own limited seventeen year old world - mainly, the pain experienced by three different women as they grow old and watch their children, husbands and even sanity abandon them - these stories absorbed me totally. These are intense, complicated, ambiguous tales, and de Beauvoir has a breathtaking ability to capture and elucidate the knottiest of emotions. It's certainly a bleak collection of stories; de Beauvoir is unflinching and sheds no sentimental tears for her women characters. They are wrenchingly, sometimes pathetically human, and that's why you come to inhabit them so completely and care about them so much. Highly recommended.

Too many people can't separate the ideas of "militant feminism" from De Beauvoir, and why this is, I can't understand. De Beauvoir is hardly extreme or radical; she simply advocates equality between the sexes... and who among us doesn't? How is this radical.

Anyway, to get to the book, this book is not like "All Men are Mortal" or "The Second Sex" in that, there is less advocation and pontificating going on here (this is a neutral judgment, by the way). It is more straightforward fiction; I would liken it to a minimalization of Balzac's view for the French society: It captures three woman in sharp, short snapshots at specific points in lives. What comes of this? Read and find out.

This is the first book I read from Simone de Beauvoir and I was very impressed. As usual, she is very realistic and thoughtfully describes the feelings of the three women in the stories, any of these women could be you. It is definitely a great book for any women of any age.

Simone de Beauvoir was the founder of neo-feminism, but her deepest affinity was with Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. This is made utterly apparent in this book. Beauvoir was still passing out Maoist leaflets in the 1970s, years after Mao's crimes against humanity were well-known. To understand the legacy of American feminism, you have to explore the founder's orientation.

While Simone de Beauvoir grew up in one of the most privileged families in France and went to all the best institutions, and never worked a day in her life, she nevertheless, along with a great number of the French left, fell under the sway of Chairman Mao in the 1950s and never recovered. A companion volume to this read would be Julia Kristeva's Chinese Women.

The two of these feminists, still considered stellar intellectuals in the world of women's studies, were both simply Maoists for a great part of their life, and a great deal of their thinking went into supporting and amplifying the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Cultural REvolution is now being relived in every women's studies program in America.

Read this book. It is central to understanding the French mentality in the 1970s and the American mentality today in women's studies.

Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, and remains the foundation of the feminist movement. Unfortunately, I feel that it has become severely dated, which detracts from the advantages of reading this work.

I felt that the first third of the book, dealing with philosophy (particularly existentialism), and Freudian psychoanalysis, was not as interesting or informative as the latter parts of the book. While some people may disagree, I tend to dislike using a lot of big words to describe simple things, as often happens with philosophers and psychoanalists.

The remainder of the book, dealing with women at different times of their lives, or in different situations, was stronger. Its major deficiency was its being dated, but a large number of her arguments are very relevant today. Many of her then novel reasonings are now standard modern political fare, for example, her arguments about abortion. It was interesting to see them in the original.

Overall, despite its importance, I cannot give this book five stars. It has simply lost too much relevance over the years. The best arguments from this book have become part of the standard fare, while the weaker ones have been lost in time. A modern reader of this book will not gain much insight into women as they are now, but merely a historical view of women and the feminist movement. While this is still a worthwhile goal, "The Second Sex" is simply not as important as it once was.

The Second Sex is an excellent philosophical work on woman; the English translation is not. Terms are translated poorly, such as "l'experience vecue" (the lived experience similar to Husserl's life-world) being translated as "Woman's Life Today" (a slam), "en-soi" and "pour-soi" being translated interchangeably as in-itself and for-itself (they cannot be used interchangeably-they are not synonyms), etc. In fact, while the original work was published in two volumes, the English translation fits into one...because the translator cut some three-hundred pages that he felt were "boring." The original French is lucid, direct, and quite beautiful. The reason that the book sounds so "dated" in English is because the man who translated it was. (He was a zoology emeritus with no background in philosophy). Thus, a lot is lost in the translation, and, since the publisher will not commence with a new translation for the sake of accuracy while the poor one sells so well (think dollar-signs), one could probably learn French and read the original writings first. "The Second Sex" (or rather "Le Deuxieme Sexe") is a good opening forum into what it is to be the Other, and the philosophical ramifications are just as relevant today as when the book was written.

It is interesting that a previous reviewer at the site called this the most accessible volume of Simone's memoirs while another wrote that this is not the best place to start with Simone. I agree with the latter. I have come to the conclusion that Simone's own diligence sometimes brought her to her knees. This was a woman capable of working for hours on end. . .and drinking just as hard. Clearly, she was ambivalent about herself:she knew she was of superior intelligence -- she finished her aggregation at the age of 21 -- yet she maintained a position that she was second to Sartre. She said that she never felt handicapped as a woman and yet she suffered from many of woman's woes -- crying and jealousy. I started with Simone's war-time memoirs -- Force of Circumstance -- which are so riveting that they draw you immediately into them. I expected the same sort of lush and wonderful writing here. I may have approached this volume with my hopes too high. A word of warning: Catholicism obviously made quite an impact on the young Simone. Readers who are not Catholic maybe mystified by this book.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the first in a series of autobiographies by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir tells the reader of her early days as a child and she concludes while she is a young women with the loss of her beloved friend Zaza. The memoir is at times a bit dry, and dull, but I dont think it was the intent of Beauvoir to write an exciting tale of her childhood. Instead I believe that the book was written more to show the path Beauvoir took in being an intellectual and why. Many times in the book French bourgeios soceity is criticized by Beauvoir because there was a double standard that exisited. For instance as Beauvoir writes about her mother "Convention obliged her to excuse certain [sexual] indescretions in men; she concentrated her disapproval on women; she divided women into those who were 'respectable' and those who were 'lose" (38). All throughout the book the reader is presented with a double standard-- men do what they want have carrers, jobs etc. while women must be pure and stay at home to have children. Not only is bourgeois society criticized, so too is the Catholic church in its regards to French private and public education. Besides the main themes Beauvoir talks about her childhood recolections-- her visiting relatives, her love of books, and her friends which culminates in the death of her life long friend Zaza. Beauvoir sees Zaza death as the fault of the French bourgeois system becuase Zaza died died of a broken heart at not being able to marry her love. The book is full of criticisms, and odinary tales. The best atribute of the book is that it presents the reader to the world of early 20th century French bourgeois society.

This is the first (and, admittedly, the easiest to read) of Beauvoir's multi-volume journals. It is an amazing account of the philosopher's beginnings, and I press it on young women in high school and college when they talk to me about their struggles to understand their place in our world.

Granted: Ethics of Ambiguity is an easier reader than those existential tomes "Being and Nothingness" and "Being and Time" but I wasn't that impressed. It's still full of that metaphysical jargon that makes many people dismiss philosophy. It seems very "he" orientated as someone else mentioned. Some parts are very good, but most of it was pretty dry. Yes, the Ethics based on freedom is interesting but it was still all too easy to put this book down.

If you're really into existentialism, I'd recommend it. If you're into Simone de Beauvoir, stick to the Second Sex, which is a much better read, and her fiction.

By exploring the meaning of "existence before essence" and the fundamental reality of choice, Beauvoir presents the reader with a livable program for life in the modern and multiplicit world; namely existentialism. Ethics is both concise and poetic, maintaining a clarity that Being and Nothingness lacks. The Second Sex is essentially an entailment of the ideas explored in this book. Few other philosophers of the 20th century were able to combine practical philosophy and rigorous metaphysics with such eloquence.

This book changed my life. In precise, but understandable terms, this book offered a compelling view of existentialism, devoid of the terminological wilderness of other books on the subject (e.g. Being and Nothingness).