Very Short Introduction Series

I’m a fan of the Very Short Introductions book series from Oxford University Press. Each book tries to give you a short introduction about a particular topic and, at a 100-200 tiny pages, they can be read in just a few hours. I have been using them for exactly what they are meant for: a short introduction to something that I plan to read about in depth. For example, I read the Wittgenstein and Heidegger VSI books before reading more on/by them. The quality varies from book to book (I wasn’t impressed at all by the Hume and Nietzsche books), but insofar as they bring up major issues surrounding a topic and provide a “further reading” section, I find them a useful first run at something…

I just finished the VSI book on Continental Philosophy yesterday and really liked it. The split between “analytical” and “continental” philosophy has been an important issue for me since my undergraduate days studying analytical philosophy. The book does a great job of showing the history of the split, the various misunderstandings and stereotypes involved in the split as well as multiple ways of understanding the division.

Today I finished the VSI book on Postcolonialism by Robert J. C. Young and found it much less satisfying. Although it was a quick and easy read written in an anecdotal style that might have served well as an introduction for high schoolers, I found it to be naively simplistic in its approach to explaining the postcolonial world. All the chapter titles looked great, but the content left much to be desired. I did, however, find the section on the “ambivalence of the veil” (p80-92) to be a refreshing look at the issue and the further reading section was, as usual, very useful.

I also gave up on another one of his much chunkier books Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction after reading only the introduction and first chapter. His writing is seething with radical activist political material which often does no justice to the complexity of the events and issues he discusses. His work left me with a distasteful sense that the field consisted of nothing more than grumpy old socialists with fading Che Guevara t-shirts.