Simone Weil: A modern pilgrimage (Radcliffe biography series)

A wonderful biography of Simone Weil (1909 - 1943), a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the Anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a laborer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class. Taking a path that was unusual among twentieth-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, though most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. She died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34 but whether it was from a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, or from refusing to eat remains unanswered. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous on continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her. Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times". The author, Robert Coles (b. 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.