Customer Reviews
Absolutely brilliant - By: TopGun82, 29 Jul 2008 
The Stuff of Thought is a fantastic, mind-bending & mind-expanding book. It should be on the national curriculum. It really gets you thinking about thingsin new ways & makes sense of many things. As is typical of Steven Pinker, he also makes it very easy to read & understand.
Fascinating - By: ds, 23 Jul 2008 In all honesty, this is the first of Steven Pinker's books that I've read, coming to him roundabout through Noam Chomsky & a couple of other sources. It is a great book though, it has to be admitted, not what you would call a holiday pulp read.
If you don't have a backgroundin linguistics (I don't but have a keen interest) then some of the early chapters about speech parsing, which form the foundation for much to come are (by necessity) fairly technical, & might be slightly heavy going. That said, even these parts are written lucidly & attempt to make the material more accessible to a wider audience, largely with some success.
Inevitably, the most accessible parts of the book come when talking about naming (with a slight crossover with Leavitt & Dubner's excellent Freakonomics) & swearing. There's a nice little sidestepin this chapter when Pinker starts by appearing to be squeamish about introducing the words under discussion before finally laying them outin all their "glory". Another section I found interesting was his critique of some of the alternative theories of language acquisition currentlyin circulation, where he managed to present many of the competing ideasin as fair a way as I think he could, though it was made clear where his own standpoint was.
If you have an interestin linguistics or some of the psychology surrounding it, then I think this book is one you should have no reservations about purchasing.
