Philosophy for beginners by R Osborne (illustrated by Ralph Edney) The idea of presenting an academic subject in the form of a comic strip may at first appear startling; but on reflection it has a number of merits. To anyone familiar with the academic literature, this book will come as a breath of fresh air: the novelty of seeing normally faceless and obscure thinkers waving their arms in the air while they attempt to explain their philosophies in less than 50 words brings life to what can so easily be a heavy and ponderous subject. For, instead of requiring readers to plough through the pages and pages of featureless, uninterrupted prose that constitute most philosophy books, here the arguments are summarised in a mixture of lively black-and-white sketches, brief commentaries, and diagrams. Moreover for many teenage students comics are a cult, and they too may be attracted by the cartoon illustrations and the laid-back style in this book. (Anyone who has to teach introductory philosophy might find this a useful bonus.) One major advantage of this medium is that cross-references between ideas can be conveyed pictorially, not just by verbal directives. A philosopher expostulating pompously through a long series of frames can be deflated by the head of a rival popping up in one corner of the final frame with a scathing remark, or simply a withering look on his face. The author himself appears as a bearded bloke in a vest, shorts, and bush hat to profess puzzlement or to ask leading questions at crucial points. The book is permeated by witticisms, both pictorial and verbal. Francis Bacon's untimely death from a cold caught while stuffing a chicken with snow is bemoaned by the head of  William Shakespeare, who says "if only he'd had an hypothesis about the effects of cold on people as well as chickens he might have lived to write more of my plays".  Thomas Hobbes said that life in the state of nature was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. Despite this, he lived a long life with lots of friends and died happy at the age of 91." Locke, Hume, and Kant discuss cause and effect over a game of billiards. Sartre and friends sit around making puns on the names of their books. Structuralism and deconstructionism are debated by two Daleks. And so on. The subject matter is very much Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks to post-structuralism (Christ and Mohammed are mentioned, but not Buddha or Vishnu). The book takes us through the history of the subjects in approximate chronological order, and include such favourites of Perception readers as Descartes, Newton, Locke, Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Leibnitz, Kant, and William James. As well as epistemology and scientific method, religious, moral, political, and linguistic philosophy are included. If you've ever wondered about semiotics, hegemony, or dialectics, this book is a good place to start. The only negative note is that there is an atmosphere of 'political correctness' permeating the book which some may find irritating. For instance, I cannot fathom why the work of Galileo and Francis Bacon should be described under the heading "The Rise of Bourgeois Science". The dangers in presenting such a Cook's tour of the whole of Western philosophy are of oversimplification and superficiality. On the whole I think these have been avoided; given the brevity of the book, Richard Osborne has selected material that does reflect accurately the gist of the various ideational movements and personalities. Thus, to misquote Douglas Adams, most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time I read it. The meaning sinks in even further on second and third reading (for the depth of meaning interwoven into the illustrations and asides means you can get more out of this book when you re-read it—and that's a rare compliment). This book is thus educational as well as entertaining.