Peter Salmon gave me a real feeling for Jacques Derrida as a person, from his childhood in colonial Algeria, through obscurity, followed by fame, including the words of both admirers and disparagers.
He isn't an easy philosopher to understand, but he did help clarify for the rest of us how every philosopher, including himself, comes with a context. And all writing, especially philosophy, includes (Derrida would probably put 'includes' in scare quotes) includes undefined terms, implied assumptions, and other inconsistencies. And these kinds of inconsistencies can show what the writer was up to.
I still can't 'define' his terms like diférance, trace, deconstruction, and the like, but I'm closer to understanding them because of this book. ( )