Book Review
I was looking forward to reading Damon Young’s recent book: Immortal Gestures, Journeys in the Unspoken. I am intrigued by people and how people move and how they communicate through gestures. Was this a book I had been waiting for?
Nope! Very disappointed. My rating: 2 out of 5
I suspect I had different expectations. I was looking for new research into how people have and are using their hands as gestures. There are the occasional new opinion within this book but I could not detect new research.
The book is more about an author taking a group of gestures and then linking them to all manner of other topics. In some chapters there was a theme. Obviously the author likes to fence and has an interest in swords. I do not. So that chapter was skimmed! Another hot topic was the movies Star Wars. Nope – no interest there, so they were skimmed!
The author spent a lot of time with Greek mythology. This barely holds my interest. I regard the over earnest study of Greek Mythology as being equivalent the study of other forms of story-telling, religious myths, or even elaborate fairy-tales. I felt as though the author was retelling stuff a lot of readers may already know about – more or less.
Some essay writers triumph at the art of meandering through topics and then taking you back more or less to where they started. For most this book it was a weave of favoured topics that the author was jamming together. But not successfully. The author was not working hard with this one.
but
back 2012 I bought and read Damon Young’s Philosophy In The Garden.
If my memory is correct, I enjoyed reading this book. I no longer own it, and so I may have to re-purchase it and see what I think today.
I looked online and agreed with a couple of reviews of Philosophy in the Garden.
Click here for someone else who likes this book.
From memory, I would have given Philosophy in the Garden a possibly 4 out 5.
I will be interested to experience Philosophy in the Garden again not as the person I was in 2012, but as the person I am in 2026.