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Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought
Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.
In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues like life that have the power to revive philosophy.
As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with. "
In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues like life that have the power to revive philosophy.
As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with. "
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2008
15 people are currently reading
170 people want to read
About the author
Michael Thompson
1 book2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Michael Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 1, 2020
Brandom and McDowell are often seen as more Hegelian than Thompson, who is viewed as - and presents himself as - a peculiar sort of Aristotelian. But on a third reading of Life and Action, I am struck by how fundamentally Hegelian this text is. (Of course, one of Thompson's fundamental claims is that Hegel - with Marx - is a quintessential modern Aristotelian.) As such, this book can be read as laying the basis for a virtue-theoretic neo-Aristotelian naturalism but it can be also read as elaborating upon Hegel's critique of morality as lacking actuality. In this Thompson shows the fundamental unity of the Aristotelian tradition as he presents it.
July 15, 2008
Thompson is a member of a group of contemporary philosophers (which includes Mark Wilson, Charles Travis, Stanley Cavell, and Jim Conant) with a distinctive, unorthodox, anti-philosophical-establishment literary style. Thompson's style flows around typical impediments to the movement of philosophical prose. Engagement with opposing views doesn't take the form of carefully listing presuppositions and conclusions, and then knocking down one or more of the former. Thompson's approach exhibits a kind of aerial point of view, which enables him to deal with potential opponents by locating them on his expanded map and then moving around them, without having to battle it out with them (though he scores points against a range of serious philosophers in passing).
Similarly, the kind of philosophizing Thompson engages in is deep, in that a casual read through doesn't touch the bottom of what's going on. There's also a sense (at least the sense I had in reading him) that what Thompson is doing is fecund, that it is just waiting to be applied to other areas of philosophy. For example, his discussion touches on issues of generic and dispositional statements that clearly apply to related discussions in philosophy of language.
The basic contention of the book is that there are distinctive logical forms involved in statements about animal life, about action, and about practices. A sentence like "The domestic house cat has four legs" might express any of the following propositions:
1. Some particular house cat currently has four legs. (Such a statement might be false if Tibbles the house cat has just suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
2. Some particular house cat has, in virtue of being the kind of animal it is, four legs. (Such a statement would not be made false by Tibbles having suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
3. A particular kind of animal, the domestic house cat, has four legs. (This statement is about a kind, not about a particular animal. And it says that that kind of animal has, in virtue of the kind of animal it is (it's "form") four legs. The existence of house cats with only three legs doesn't make this kind of statement false.)
The idea that there are distinct logical forms at work in those statements goes beyond the standard version of that view, which would try to find some ambiguity in one or more of the expressions that compose the sentence (though there will be ambiguities, in the definite description, for example). Instead, there is a different form of predication, a different "nexus" in those statements. That presents a deep challenge to standard semantic treatments of these phenomena, and points towards a novel approach to certain contextualist debates.
Similarly, the kind of philosophizing Thompson engages in is deep, in that a casual read through doesn't touch the bottom of what's going on. There's also a sense (at least the sense I had in reading him) that what Thompson is doing is fecund, that it is just waiting to be applied to other areas of philosophy. For example, his discussion touches on issues of generic and dispositional statements that clearly apply to related discussions in philosophy of language.
The basic contention of the book is that there are distinctive logical forms involved in statements about animal life, about action, and about practices. A sentence like "The domestic house cat has four legs" might express any of the following propositions:
1. Some particular house cat currently has four legs. (Such a statement might be false if Tibbles the house cat has just suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
2. Some particular house cat has, in virtue of being the kind of animal it is, four legs. (Such a statement would not be made false by Tibbles having suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
3. A particular kind of animal, the domestic house cat, has four legs. (This statement is about a kind, not about a particular animal. And it says that that kind of animal has, in virtue of the kind of animal it is (it's "form") four legs. The existence of house cats with only three legs doesn't make this kind of statement false.)
The idea that there are distinct logical forms at work in those statements goes beyond the standard version of that view, which would try to find some ambiguity in one or more of the expressions that compose the sentence (though there will be ambiguities, in the definite description, for example). Instead, there is a different form of predication, a different "nexus" in those statements. That presents a deep challenge to standard semantic treatments of these phenomena, and points towards a novel approach to certain contextualist debates.
May 8, 2018
I have to preface this review with two remarks:
1. I only read the first 2 parts.
2. I am not the intended audience.
It is possible that I do not possess the prerequisites for appreciating the work, whether in terms of qualifications (I am not a professional philosopher, even though my work is directly relevant to the academic understanding of actions and decisions, and I have a substantial philosophical background) or in terms of intellectual dispositions (I do not subscribe to Thompson's approach to philosophy). Nonetheless, this review should be useful to anyone who is in the same position as I am, and who might be tempted by that book. And for them my advice is: skip it.
The intended audience is professional philosophers. This is reflected in the style in which the book is written: readers are expected to have a good understanding of Frege, Hegel, Aristotle, Anscombe, and Davidson, at least. This is enforced by constant referencing to their work (explicitly or implicitly), usually with minimal reformulation or explanation. As a result the book is very far from self-contained, and it is often unclear to what precisely Thompson is alluding when he references some other work.
This is one symptom of a more general stylistic problem. Much like Thompson prefers alluding to another philosopher's work rather than re-stating the relevant argument, similarly he prefers using a fancy word in place of a simple one, whenever that is possible. For instance, the initial chapter of part 2 is labeled "introductory" in place of "introduction"; "recherché" replaces "contrived" and "outré" replaces "excessively"; and so on and so forth. In many cases it is not possible to explain these choices by improved precision; they are more like flourishes, unnecessary decorative movements that are perpendicular to the thrust of the argument. I get the impression that Thompson is disdainful of his readers: "here are my work notes; read them, appreciate my brilliance, redo the work, and you might learn something". Consider the following passage (which, admittedly, is made even harder when isolated from its context):
Ugh!
Finally, I'll voice an argument that will reveal my insufficiently "sophistiqué" (sophistic?) philosophical background. Besides the writing style, the philosophical style strikes me as problematic. I suppose it is the logical product of a certain philosophical tradition. It bothers me that language is taken as an entry-point for identifying the categories of thought, even though language is prone to accidental transformations, to superficial forms that stand-in for most complex ones, and so on and so forth. The sheer difficulty of the book suggests that language does not provide a productive, solid ground for philosophical intuitions, especially if one is limited to a single language (English): there is simply too much wiggle room, especially decades after the linguistic turn, after philosophers and linguists have built such a large toolbox to exploit what wiggle room there is to the utmost. Also, since I am not a native English speaker, I would sometimes transpose arguments to my native language (French) and find that... they didn't work nearly as well. What would happen if a Chinese native read this book? Why do we bother with such a close analysis of language in the first place, if it must lead to so many complications and, in the end, we must switch to deeper, non-linguistic intuitions anyway?
In the end, I did not gain much from this book; which is not to say there is nothing of value in it. It is just well-protected, and the amount of effort between each useful insight is so large, and so infuriatingly unnecessary, that people who do not specialize in the philosophy of action would employ their time more efficiently by reading or re-reading something else.
1. I only read the first 2 parts.
2. I am not the intended audience.
It is possible that I do not possess the prerequisites for appreciating the work, whether in terms of qualifications (I am not a professional philosopher, even though my work is directly relevant to the academic understanding of actions and decisions, and I have a substantial philosophical background) or in terms of intellectual dispositions (I do not subscribe to Thompson's approach to philosophy). Nonetheless, this review should be useful to anyone who is in the same position as I am, and who might be tempted by that book. And for them my advice is: skip it.
The intended audience is professional philosophers. This is reflected in the style in which the book is written: readers are expected to have a good understanding of Frege, Hegel, Aristotle, Anscombe, and Davidson, at least. This is enforced by constant referencing to their work (explicitly or implicitly), usually with minimal reformulation or explanation. As a result the book is very far from self-contained, and it is often unclear to what precisely Thompson is alluding when he references some other work.
This is one symptom of a more general stylistic problem. Much like Thompson prefers alluding to another philosopher's work rather than re-stating the relevant argument, similarly he prefers using a fancy word in place of a simple one, whenever that is possible. For instance, the initial chapter of part 2 is labeled "introductory" in place of "introduction"; "recherché" replaces "contrived" and "outré" replaces "excessively"; and so on and so forth. In many cases it is not possible to explain these choices by improved precision; they are more like flourishes, unnecessary decorative movements that are perpendicular to the thrust of the argument. I get the impression that Thompson is disdainful of his readers: "here are my work notes; read them, appreciate my brilliance, redo the work, and you might learn something". Consider the following passage (which, admittedly, is made even harder when isolated from its context):
The relation to our capacities of sense and conception that is necessary to secure the intentionalness of the actions falling under such nested descriptions ought to be realized if only (a) all of the descriptions involve some such conceptual complex as: moving it from here to (), (b) this conceptual complex is appropriately in play, and (c) the constituends arise from an analysis of the intuitive given path and are not outré definite descriptions. The nested descriptions are homogeneous in a certain respect, a respect that is apprehended, and the corresponding actions are homoiomerous; if some of them aren't alien to the agent's mind in the intentionalness-destroying way that a description in terms of muscular contractions is likely to be, why should any of them be?
Ugh!
Finally, I'll voice an argument that will reveal my insufficiently "sophistiqué" (sophistic?) philosophical background. Besides the writing style, the philosophical style strikes me as problematic. I suppose it is the logical product of a certain philosophical tradition. It bothers me that language is taken as an entry-point for identifying the categories of thought, even though language is prone to accidental transformations, to superficial forms that stand-in for most complex ones, and so on and so forth. The sheer difficulty of the book suggests that language does not provide a productive, solid ground for philosophical intuitions, especially if one is limited to a single language (English): there is simply too much wiggle room, especially decades after the linguistic turn, after philosophers and linguists have built such a large toolbox to exploit what wiggle room there is to the utmost. Also, since I am not a native English speaker, I would sometimes transpose arguments to my native language (French) and find that... they didn't work nearly as well. What would happen if a Chinese native read this book? Why do we bother with such a close analysis of language in the first place, if it must lead to so many complications and, in the end, we must switch to deeper, non-linguistic intuitions anyway?
In the end, I did not gain much from this book; which is not to say there is nothing of value in it. It is just well-protected, and the amount of effort between each useful insight is so large, and so infuriatingly unnecessary, that people who do not specialize in the philosophy of action would employ their time more efficiently by reading or re-reading something else.
August 8, 2024
Michael Thompson is a bona fide Pittsburgh cryptid. I took an undergrad class with him on Marx but while it was evident that this man is a genius, nobody learned anything.
For instance he assigned us to read a section on natural purposes from Kant’s Third Critique, a section on Aristotle’s category theory, and a part of Hegel’s section in the Subjective Logic about the concept of life. All of these Thinkers are more or less taken into consideration in this book. While this is a brilliant context setting for interpreting Marx as relying on some of these assumptions or conceptions on the back of his mind while writing Capital, I don’t think very many people in the class understood what the hell he was even doing.
He frequently showed up late, cancelled more than half of the classes, rambled incoherently (it was coherent but one had to be on the same wavelength of brilliance to even begin to understand him), vaped in class (his vape was on a string around his neck, as were his glasses, presumably not to lose either). Some of my favorite rants involved his ranting about a profound child experience with worms, and how it was possible that one could never walk into the same 711 twice.
On the day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he came twenty minutes late, discussed how an impending nuclear apocalypse would only give about 20 minutes for people to post a final “fuck you, I’m right” series of tweets before we are all inevitably obliterated. He used this to segway into how Putin’s justification of the war was based on Putin’s value judgement of how the early Soviet Union under Lenin’s control figured into that justification. Of course, this was just a segway into discussing how Lenin prescribed one ought to read Capital, and what Thompson thought was the correct way to read capital by further reference to other practices of recommendation and their insufficiency for understanding Capital. He of course, left 20 minutes early from class, while still talking on his way out the door, by which everyone in the class could hear him still rambling as he went further down the hall and out of ear shot. We all looked at each other, stunned by the sheer audacity and incredible ridiculousness of what our tuition was going to. Needless to say, he never actually graded our final papers and the department had to manually give us all A’s for the trouble of dealing with the mad vaping genius the whole of semester. He also never checked his email, and the only way you could reach him was by text.
Overall, the only thing I actually learned in that class was how not to run a classroom. I frequently had to ask leading questions so as to cover the material, but many of us soon gave up. I have many more anecdotes, but I want to leave some mystery to the man.
This is all to say, it is truly an incredible fact that this man has some stunning things to say about the philosophy of action, and is much more ridiculous considering that this man is living his own philosophy of action. It is often remarked that the true test of a philosophy is to look to the life lived by the philosopher and see how either measures up.
I can firmly say, that his account given in this book, as novel and brilliant as it is, really is his philosophy of action in action. Thompson—as a Human instance of an Aristotelian generic category life-form, embodying a naive philosophy of action that could be fleshed out into a table of logical categories but ultimately resolvable to “S is doing A,” where A is an act instantiated in a larger practice, such as his practice of doing philosophy—it is clear that this man is an exceptional case of a philosopher and a human being more generally.
My background in both philosophy and anthropology made this book especially interesting, as terms like “practice” and “action” are tossed around willy-nilly by theory mongers, and open themselves to a variety of objections that eschew broader implications and contexts.
He essentially commits to a three stage structure of exploring the human as an organism, whose acts precede many sophisticated forms of rationalization, and whose acts are instantiated in a more or less normal form that is a practice. This is just to say that he is giving a neoclassical account of philosophical anthropology by way of heavy hitting analytic philosophy. That in its own right is truly a thing to behold. I doubt that this book is intelligible to anybody who wouldn’t have a similar appreciation of large swathes of the history of philosophy. His mastery of them is also evident.
There are a few spots where I would have liked him to more thoroughly work out some accounts in each chapter, but these are mostly esoteric enough that they only deserve a passing comment. For example, his treatment of the concept of disposition as something non-psychological could be extended in respect to Putnam’s Supersuperspartans. Treating dispositions as reliable instances to abide by the practices inherent is noble enough, but for the strict analytic philosophers that read him would benefit by him discussing this to thoroughly dispel a psychological treatment of what are at the end of the day, practice instantiated treatments of events brought out in the accordion of time.
I probably enjoyed the first chapter on the concept of life the most, just in virtue of his treatment of generic concepts from Fregean universals in terms of the logical inferences one could draw and be granted in conclusion. His treatment doesn’t really come to close until the final chapter where one can appreciate the full scope of his quietist conclusions about the typicality/regularity of our practices as something that humans do take seriously until exceptional circumstances draw us evaluate the standards that we hold ourselves and others accountable to. For acts of fidelity, we normally don’t consider the implications of the practice, until someone is clearly out of bounds in the typical circumstances.
For instance, promising to help our friend move can be a promise that would be understandably broken just in case our mother dies and must attend to matters of organizing her funeral. Thompson doesn’t construct a theory so much as he lets everything lie where they are and warns one off of constructing a faulty account whose scope is meant to include all the potentially disqualifying circumstances. Any of the constructive elements he uses are only in service of guiding one back to the general practice of being a human. They are elucidating insofar as we can see the kind of perspective that is demanded of us as relevant to the thing considered. That is to say, this is all “proper” philosophy, and lets one keep science as another side of the same categorial coin.
So while he actually understands Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Marx, and Frege in a really unique, and I think in a fundamentally right way, this book probably won’t convince you unless you have a similar appreciation to him.
As much as I absolutely loved every moment of this book, in good faith, I cannot recommend that you read this book.
For instance he assigned us to read a section on natural purposes from Kant’s Third Critique, a section on Aristotle’s category theory, and a part of Hegel’s section in the Subjective Logic about the concept of life. All of these Thinkers are more or less taken into consideration in this book. While this is a brilliant context setting for interpreting Marx as relying on some of these assumptions or conceptions on the back of his mind while writing Capital, I don’t think very many people in the class understood what the hell he was even doing.
He frequently showed up late, cancelled more than half of the classes, rambled incoherently (it was coherent but one had to be on the same wavelength of brilliance to even begin to understand him), vaped in class (his vape was on a string around his neck, as were his glasses, presumably not to lose either). Some of my favorite rants involved his ranting about a profound child experience with worms, and how it was possible that one could never walk into the same 711 twice.
On the day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he came twenty minutes late, discussed how an impending nuclear apocalypse would only give about 20 minutes for people to post a final “fuck you, I’m right” series of tweets before we are all inevitably obliterated. He used this to segway into how Putin’s justification of the war was based on Putin’s value judgement of how the early Soviet Union under Lenin’s control figured into that justification. Of course, this was just a segway into discussing how Lenin prescribed one ought to read Capital, and what Thompson thought was the correct way to read capital by further reference to other practices of recommendation and their insufficiency for understanding Capital. He of course, left 20 minutes early from class, while still talking on his way out the door, by which everyone in the class could hear him still rambling as he went further down the hall and out of ear shot. We all looked at each other, stunned by the sheer audacity and incredible ridiculousness of what our tuition was going to. Needless to say, he never actually graded our final papers and the department had to manually give us all A’s for the trouble of dealing with the mad vaping genius the whole of semester. He also never checked his email, and the only way you could reach him was by text.
Overall, the only thing I actually learned in that class was how not to run a classroom. I frequently had to ask leading questions so as to cover the material, but many of us soon gave up. I have many more anecdotes, but I want to leave some mystery to the man.
This is all to say, it is truly an incredible fact that this man has some stunning things to say about the philosophy of action, and is much more ridiculous considering that this man is living his own philosophy of action. It is often remarked that the true test of a philosophy is to look to the life lived by the philosopher and see how either measures up.
I can firmly say, that his account given in this book, as novel and brilliant as it is, really is his philosophy of action in action. Thompson—as a Human instance of an Aristotelian generic category life-form, embodying a naive philosophy of action that could be fleshed out into a table of logical categories but ultimately resolvable to “S is doing A,” where A is an act instantiated in a larger practice, such as his practice of doing philosophy—it is clear that this man is an exceptional case of a philosopher and a human being more generally.
My background in both philosophy and anthropology made this book especially interesting, as terms like “practice” and “action” are tossed around willy-nilly by theory mongers, and open themselves to a variety of objections that eschew broader implications and contexts.
He essentially commits to a three stage structure of exploring the human as an organism, whose acts precede many sophisticated forms of rationalization, and whose acts are instantiated in a more or less normal form that is a practice. This is just to say that he is giving a neoclassical account of philosophical anthropology by way of heavy hitting analytic philosophy. That in its own right is truly a thing to behold. I doubt that this book is intelligible to anybody who wouldn’t have a similar appreciation of large swathes of the history of philosophy. His mastery of them is also evident.
There are a few spots where I would have liked him to more thoroughly work out some accounts in each chapter, but these are mostly esoteric enough that they only deserve a passing comment. For example, his treatment of the concept of disposition as something non-psychological could be extended in respect to Putnam’s Supersuperspartans. Treating dispositions as reliable instances to abide by the practices inherent is noble enough, but for the strict analytic philosophers that read him would benefit by him discussing this to thoroughly dispel a psychological treatment of what are at the end of the day, practice instantiated treatments of events brought out in the accordion of time.
I probably enjoyed the first chapter on the concept of life the most, just in virtue of his treatment of generic concepts from Fregean universals in terms of the logical inferences one could draw and be granted in conclusion. His treatment doesn’t really come to close until the final chapter where one can appreciate the full scope of his quietist conclusions about the typicality/regularity of our practices as something that humans do take seriously until exceptional circumstances draw us evaluate the standards that we hold ourselves and others accountable to. For acts of fidelity, we normally don’t consider the implications of the practice, until someone is clearly out of bounds in the typical circumstances.
For instance, promising to help our friend move can be a promise that would be understandably broken just in case our mother dies and must attend to matters of organizing her funeral. Thompson doesn’t construct a theory so much as he lets everything lie where they are and warns one off of constructing a faulty account whose scope is meant to include all the potentially disqualifying circumstances. Any of the constructive elements he uses are only in service of guiding one back to the general practice of being a human. They are elucidating insofar as we can see the kind of perspective that is demanded of us as relevant to the thing considered. That is to say, this is all “proper” philosophy, and lets one keep science as another side of the same categorial coin.
So while he actually understands Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Marx, and Frege in a really unique, and I think in a fundamentally right way, this book probably won’t convince you unless you have a similar appreciation to him.
As much as I absolutely loved every moment of this book, in good faith, I cannot recommend that you read this book.
October 20, 2013
I read Thompson's essay on life, the first in this volume, for a course on Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness. Thompson's project in this book is to establish a place for practical philosophy of the sort done by Aristotle, grounded in the everyday world in which we find ourselves. Such an Aristotelian view has at times been found quaint, but the project begun by Anscombe and Geach (with clear roots in Wittgenstein's thoughts on language) opens up new realms of plausibility.
Thompson's work here is on the logical or grammatical structures of thought, those forms of judgment we necessarily rely upon in recognizing life and its phenomena. This category of judgment is a central piece of Foot's ethical naturalism, and I found it to be a strikingly original way of grounding the ethical in the natural while avoiding the usual tiffs with Hume and Moore.
The two other essays are on action and practical rationality, respectively, and I have not had any opportunity to dig into them. Thompson nevertheless conceives of these essays as building on one another in a progressive manner, so that action requires a notion of life, and practical reason in turn relies on a conception of action. I suppose I will have to make my way into these at some point.
Thompson's work here is on the logical or grammatical structures of thought, those forms of judgment we necessarily rely upon in recognizing life and its phenomena. This category of judgment is a central piece of Foot's ethical naturalism, and I found it to be a strikingly original way of grounding the ethical in the natural while avoiding the usual tiffs with Hume and Moore.
The two other essays are on action and practical rationality, respectively, and I have not had any opportunity to dig into them. Thompson nevertheless conceives of these essays as building on one another in a progressive manner, so that action requires a notion of life, and practical reason in turn relies on a conception of action. I suppose I will have to make my way into these at some point.
March 26, 2021
I recommend reading this book in one go, since it is fairly complex. Even though Thompson maintains that each of the three essays are linked, I think he should have paid more attention to linking them, especially in the last essay. The whole focus on fidelity was not that interesting to me. Still, writing an overarching theory is hard and ambitious and I think Thompson has a nice, and to be recogned with theory (although I think it is a shame that he only focuses on the English language, and that one could disagree that agency necessarily requires the agent to be a living being).
March 4, 2021
read for phil class: action
December 7, 2021
Oh dearest Michael, do say more!
Read
May 17, 2010Didn't quite finish, but it's three related sections and i read the first two and a bit of the third. Very good.
September 17, 2009
Doesn't resolve into anything as much as I wish it did. Still, parts of it are really interesting.
August 26, 2009
I pity the person assigned to review this book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews