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 some new research into how people have used 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 themto 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.

At times I felt as though the book was using the concept of gestures as a framework to weave a lot of other bits and pieces together to sell a new book. 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 this book 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 – at least.

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.