Reviews of Substantific Marrow

His arguments, conjoining tidbits of history you never knew about or never thought of relating to each other and suggesting contacts and influences standard history knows not of, take side roads that tend to be far more enlivening than the well-trodden highway that bored us in high school. If you're going to read about Aristotle, would you rather it be in the context of analytics and the five elements or the sex life of molluscs? I thought so.

His credo is "To me studies of concrete particulars (history, geography, philology) are infinitely more interesting than their theoretical explanations, and the fully-theorized studies (marginalist economics, analytic philosophy, 'literary studies') are abominations," and I happily subscribe to it. If you prefer shiny and unusual facts and suggestions to the dull coin of Standard Theories, this is the book for you.

Language Hat

Emerson puts himself squarely in the camp of the Renaissance humanists, like Rabelais and Bacon, who derided scholasticism (and he uses the same word, equating it with modern analytic philosophy) for its narrowminded pedantry—and in Rabelais's case, for its lack of fun. John wants the humanities to be kept at the generalist level—he wants it still to be fun. And so he contributes, with both his blog and his new book, to our enjoyment of the humanities at the generalist level.

Varieties of Unreligious Experience

I haven't yet had the chance to make it through every last word of John's book, but I've spent enough time with it to be dazzled by its cabinet-of-wonders quality. Though basically a collection of quirky mini-essays on topics from Freud to Parmenides to Bob Dylan, it also has its own Borges-like, Calvino-like character. John is a perfect person to be using Lulu -- he's a freelance intellectual with his own way of making sense of the world, and his own distinctive way of piecing things together. His book is both a stimulating browse and an act of intellectual pointillism that coheres into something larger.

Michael Blowhard

An Elegant Author Deserving of the Patronage of a Refined and Enlightened Public

I am currently holding my lovely, brand-new copy of John Emerson's Substantific Marrow. If you enjoy this blog, then it is very likely that you, too, want to buy a copy of Substantific Marrow, though you may not be aware of this fact.

Cosma Shalizi

John Emerson has self-published a book of essays. They're short and wildly varied -- a really funny reaction to one of the sillier bits of Freud; an argument for atheism based on the proposition that God couldn't hide in a sock drawer; a piece ranging from the Barbary pirates, through the mutiny on which Billy Budd was based, to The Good Ship Ruben James; reviews of books, mostly history; and unclassifiable bits of other stuff.....  If this is the sort of thing you like, it's a great book to have in your bag for a commute, or any time you have fifteen minutes to read a couple of pages on something odd.

Unfogged.com