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I must admit that I was unable to complete this book. Halfway through reading this arduous book, I found myself deadlocked before a persistent question: why go on? What's the point?

This book is heralded as the first of a series of reflections on the gift. This seems like a noteworthy project but in the hands of this author, the project falls flat. For some, the conception of a series of studies implies growth at every turn. For Foucualt's The History of Sexuality, at every turn, the author was faced with challenges, crises, and redirection. It took 7 long years before Foucault continued the series; I doubt that the author here has ever faced such crises. I note that this gift series is well on its fourth edition. The gift series is on a roll... it is abundant, as the book repeatedly says (ad nauseum).

If Nietzsche was the greatest philosophical stylist--well, there is no comparison to Nietzsche here. Take for example a paragraph I found on page 167, which follows two quotes from Hegel and Heidegger (of which no direct link is ever made). It reads:

Only great art. Only poetry. Only thinking. Only humanity. Only man. Only only.

(resumption of the review)

What is going on here? Such pseudo-poetic turn of phrase appear throughout the book. By now we are accustomed to sentences that defy and challenge the conventions of logic and grammar. However, we have here just PLAIN BAD WRITING. This book, read as experimental prose will disappoint many. (I suspect that perhaps no one will be disappointed as no one should seriously consider this book at any length. The reviewer fully understands the irony here.)

But Stephen David Ross is a philosophy professor and this book covers the entire history of western philosophy from the pre-socratics to the recent works by Derrida, Butler, and Luce Irigaray. In its effortless and unconscienable 300 pages plus, this book does a great disservice to all. Technical phrases are haphazarously mentioned without explication. Otherwise, we are left with baffling and insolent phrases such as the following:

I interrupt this interruption before return from it to add that I understand one of the amrks of the good in our time, perhaps its most telling mark, to be the question of sexual difference, interrupting the hold of every category and identity with questions of gender and sexual identity. (page 12)

(resume review)

Interruption of an interruption for an interruption? Ross takes important themes of sexual difference, ethics, and justice and whirls them into a single, sprawled self-referential portrait. In the end, instead of promoting and drawing us to task on these issues and themes, the book repels any intelligent reader. I surmise that, metaphorically, the author paints exclusively in water color with emphasis on the pastels.

This is an incredible (incredulous!) narrative of a series that is based on the good but which stands without any real or explained connections. All is good by the virtue of the good that is forcefully squeezed out by the author. Enough is enough! this reviewer protests. Mercy, mercy. Enough of the good already! But as Ross repeatedly states: the good exceeds limits, always.

In the end, all is encased in this book as the good. But rather than challenging the history of western philosophy, Ross has virtually imposed and reified the very narrative that this work professes to challenge. What is the link between Heraclitus and Braidotti? The book answers: wht it is the good, of course! In the end this amounts to saying: que sera, sera.

And maybe somewhere between pages 200 and 300, the author cites from Doris Day as well. This reviewer, having said enough, having shunned the abundance of the good, may have missed this moment altogether...

It would be difficult to praise "The Gift of Beauty" too highly unless one has no penchant for fluidity and mobility, in which case one might cast it down like Moses did the tablets. One might become seasick in the ocean of truth, beauty and goodness as Ross presents it, particularly if one were too fixed or too much in need of firm anchorage. He ceaselessly rocks the reader on the waves of the impossiblity of holding truth or beauty fast. A kind of ecstasy is engendered in the reader if he or she moves freely with it. But woe unto anyone who does not! It would be easy to become impatient with Ross's style, especially if one were very linear in one's needs. But this very irritation IS the call of the good of which Ross speaks. Not to feel this in one's bones is to miss the entire point of the book and his style of presentation.

An important goal of the work, and the series as a whole, is to rehabilitate 'the good', a good which 'is not good opposed to bad, right opposed to wrong, justice opposed to injustice.' He constantly refers to 'the call of the good' and sees art as a response to the call of the good.

Without some training in philosophy, the book would be daunting. But one can dip into it at nearly any point and be immensely rewarded. This is a large work, guaranteed to disturb the reader's orientation, whether he or she likes it or not.

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