Postmodernism for Beginners (Book Review)




Jim Powell, Postmodernism for Beginners, Chennai: Orient Longman Ltd., 2001, ISBN
81-250-2023-3, pp. 163, $12.74, Rs. 246.

Recently, I attended a course on Postmodernism. The aim of the professor was to debunk some of the false notions people had about postmodernism. This of course, was not revealed to us at the start of the course. He began by asking us to share whatever we knew about postmodernism. All of us had something of significance to state and evidently our knowledge was very vague and clouded by hearsay. None of us had made an attempt to understand what postmodernism was about in the past so the professor made it his chief task to get us acquainted in no uncertain way with the philosophy of postmodernism.

In my zeal, I challenged myself to do extra reading on the topic and found myself the present book which I am reviewing. I must say that I was at once taken up with the book. The minute I laid hands on it and flipped through a few pages I knew that this book is a must read. I do not regret the time I spent on the book for it was definitely not wasted. The book was unlike any other philosophical book I had come across before. It told its tale with the help of well-shaped cartoons. Jim Powell has written the book well and Joe Lee’s animes are a delight. They bring so much life to the book and represent postmodern ideas in cartoon form. What Powell says with words, Lee says with pictures. The combination is wonderful.

I highly recommend this book for all students of philosophy and also for anyone with an interest in philosophy. If this is the first philosophical book you read it is misleading with its style, but it probably will be the most fascinating one you ever read. I commend the author and the illustrator for this wonderful work and I hope others will take a cue from them and come up with similar fascinating books on philosophy. 

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