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A review by rebeccacider
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy
2.0
Didn't end up finishing this! Many of the essays were very enjoyable and weave together linguistics, existentialism, theology, anthropology, and literary criticism. The book as a whole is something of a love letter to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the author has interesting things to say about the extent to which we can say meaningful things about the world, explain scientific behavior in a world of cultural relativity, and whether "scientific" solutions to problems actually make people happy.
However, some of his arguments feel as dated as the sixties and seventies "science will cure everything" belief that he is critiquing, and near the end he seems overly interested in trying to describe and solve human problems with a "normative" anthropology that will somehow be different from the prescriptive science he decries. I got bored and confused, and decided to return the book to the library.
However, some of his arguments feel as dated as the sixties and seventies "science will cure everything" belief that he is critiquing, and near the end he seems overly interested in trying to describe and solve human problems with a "normative" anthropology that will somehow be different from the prescriptive science he decries. I got bored and confused, and decided to return the book to the library.