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Rating: 
Summary: Important contribution
Review: A very important contribution to pragmatic philosophy and contemporary cultural criticism.
Rating:
Summary: Cornel's Got Game!
Review: Anybody who compares Professor West's work to an undergraduate paper is ... well, probably a confused undergraduate. This is an excellent, highly subtle book. It is interesting and persuasive on the American pragmatists, especially Dewey and Peirce, but equally perceptive in its judgments and assessments of such major thinkers as Roberto Unger and Michel Foucault. As with anything written by Mr. West, the vibes in the prose are powerful and mixed: the rythms of jazz and subtle tones of Harvard-accented English (yes, there is such a thing!), blend smoothly with ghetto-flavored idioms to render the scholarly assessments, at least for me, MORE and NOT LESS vital and organic. The passion for empowered democracy comes through here, as it always does with West, and so does the Christian sentiment. I would say that there is in this excellent book a bit of the Christian romanticism that Professor West attributes to Unger. Love you, Cornel. Keep it up my brother.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: AS a reader intimately interested in pragmatism I came to this book in anticipated expectancy. Unfortunately Cornel West has managed to write something I could scarcely credit: a book which makes pragmatism and pragmatists seem turgid and boring. I think this is primarily because West's own interests seem always to be overpowering his descriptions of the pragmatists he is writing about. West wants to write a manifesto but he has dressed it up as a genealogy. Unfortunately for this reader the clothes don't fit properly and what is presented seems vaguely ridiculous. I don't mean to be rude. Apparently in the States West is something of an intellectual celebrity who writes on matters of race and religion. In my own locality West is unknown and his agenda seems just as foreign. His idea of pragmatism as "cultural criticism" is the one bright spark in this book that I will take away from it. However, as his interests and mine are doomed to be forever different the lasting impression this book leaves is one of a writer over-intellectualising what is meant to be a philosophy of plain common-sense. Sorry Cornel, we just didn't hit it off.
Rating:
Summary: What made him famous
Review: I found myself wondering, after arriving at Harvard, how Cornel West achieved such a high position in academic circles. For example, he is a University Professor, which simply put means he can teach at any school or department at Harvard University. His current works deal primarily with race and though they are extremely illuminating, they are more popular than academic. This is the book that put West at the height of Academia, Race Matters made him publicly popular. I suggest you read both in order to get into the mind of perhaps the most publicly influential intellectual of the last 5 years.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice try, if you're an undergraduate
Review: Nothing I could say about this book would be as compelling as reading an excerpt from it. Any excerpt. The writing lumbers with precisely that kind of late adolescent turgidity and overweaning insistence that makes reading undergraduate papers so unbearable; the argument is nothing more than a series of unsupported and simple-minded generalities; the depth of scholarship reaches about as far as the water in a children's wading pool. The only thing this forgettable little book establishes is that Cornel West knows as little about pragmatism as he does about effective writing. But as I said, don't take my word for it. Read the excerpt and see for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Highly Subtle Book.
Review: This is an excellent, highly subtle book. It is interesting and persuasive on the American pragmatists, there are especially interesting comments on Dewey and Peirce, who are new to me, but equally perceptive judgments and assessments of such major thinkers as Roberto Unger and Michel Foucault.
As with anything written by Professor West, the vibes in the prose are powerful and mixed: the rythms of jazz and subtle tones of Harvard-accented English (yes, there is such a thing!), blend smoothly with more familiar idioms to render the scholarly assessments, at least for me, MORE and NOT LESS vital and organic.
The passion for empowered democracy comes through here, as it always does with West, and so does the Christian sentiment. I would say that there is in this excellent book a bit of the Christian Romanticism that Professor West attributes to Unger.
Fine book, let us hope for more from Professor West.
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