This book should take its place as one of the key texts in humanities' programs throughout the English speaking world for three reasons. First, Peter Sedgwick of Cardiff University (Wales) has written a book that very accurately addresses the needs of a wide audience. University teachers with little specialized training in continental philosophy can learn much from Sedgwick's dense, sophisticated arguments; students who are trying to understand either contemporary philosophy or critical theory can also use this book as a comprehensive guide to this field. Second, thematically, the book is wonderfully conceived and orchestrated: the author manages to adroitly integrate many of the literary and cultural themes of Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari into his account of the backgrounds of continental philosophy (Descartes and Kant on metaphysics and epistemology). Third, the book orchestrates themes of great interest that are often neglected in US liberal arts programs: anti-humanism, ethical and political implications of critical theory, and the nature of philosophical language. Sedgwick writes with considerable lucidity: he explains sophisticated ideas of great complexity about as clearly as possible. The book has an outstanding "Further Reading" section.

This book is exhausting but well worth the time spent. Victor Serge was an active Bolshevik who lived throught he events he describes; thus there is almost a narrative feel to it. The book conveys the hardships of the revolution well; Serge shows how close Trotsky's army came to losing and the hope preserved by his victory. A must for anyone interested in the Russian or any revolution.

My copy of this book had misprints or misbindings, with 60 pages missing and 60 pages repeating. Articles by Hollingdale, Kofman and Kaufmann were obliterated by repeatitions of other pages. Also, some of the articles included are very confusing, like Tossini's comments on Rorty vis-a-vis Nietzsche, Derrida's take on Heidegger/Nietzsche and that thing about Weber. But most, like the article on Deleuze and on Shamanic Nietzsche are very nice.

The idea is a great one: a handy dictionary of terms for the jargon-laden and often impenetrable vocabulary of cultural theory. Just what is the "Frankfurt School"? Can anyone please deconstruct "Deconstructionism"? What exactly is "punk" and do I need to understand "symbolic interactionism"?

Entries on these and other terms are helpful, and the book includes quite a few unexpected little essays on cinema, popular music, etc.

However, many of the entries fall victim to the same kind of jargoneering they purport to demystify; I must fault in particular the writing of one of the editors, Peter Sedgwick, whose entries are often obfuscatory or just plain badly written, e.g., in this description of "essentialism":

"Whether or not adoption of this view commits one to holding that these properties must exist in reality prior to the act of naming an object, so that a definition, if it is true is a priori true (see Lyotard's criticism of essentialism in "The Differend: Phrases in Dispute" (1988), Section 88) is perhaps an open question."

Whew! The editor needs an editor.

In all this is a helpful book (with a helpful index and bibliography as well), but sometimes suffers from the ills of its field.