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by: Steven Pinker  List Price: $29.95 Amazon.com's Price: $19.77 You Save: $10.18 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 401 EAN: 9780670063277 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0670063274 Label: Viking Adult Manufacturer: Viking Adult Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 512 Publication Date: September 11, 2007 Publisher: Viking Adult Studio: Viking Adult Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous booksincluding the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slatehave catapulted him into the limelight as one of todays most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday lifewhy is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - not as good as Language InstinctSteven Pinker's Language Instinct was a pleasure. But The Stuff of Thought is a disappointment. I couldn't get through it. The writing is dull and lacked the lively quality of Language Instinct. The points that Pinker is trying to make are less compelling than in previous books, and I wound up unconvinced as well as uninterested. Even Pinker seems to realize that he is boring us: at one point in Chapter 3, he says "My point - and I do have one - is...." I thought to myself, I sure hope you will ... Read More Rating:  - The chicken-and-egg of languageSteven Pinker is an experimental psychologist involved in research into the human mind, but he is also an unabashed popularizer whose books are full of pop culture references (especially comic strips). Apart from a few tedious sections, "The Stuff of Thought" is one of his best books. It applies a scientific perspective to a favorite subject of mine, the relationship between language and thought. But it does it with style, exploring a range of Americana from the semantics of Bill Clinton's lies (a ... Read More Rating: - Insightful, but broad at the expense of depthPinker makes a very good case for neo-Kantianism based on liguistics. In a nutshell, we humans are hardwired to categorized our experience in certain ways. His arugument for this is based on the observation that children make some very subtle linguistic distinctions in cases for which they could not possibly have had enough exposure for learning from experience. My only complaint is that I wish he had gone deeper on this particular issue instead of giving us a broad catalog ... Read More Rating: - Not quite as great as some of Mr. Pinker's other booksI have read some of Prof. Pinker's books (How the mind works, the language instinct, the blank slate), and I bought this one only because those books were phantastic! The stuff of thought was not that interesting to me. It seemed more "technical" to me, particularly the first chapter. It got better, but never reached e.g. "How the Mind Works". Still, Prof. Pinker can write! The same subject by anybody else would have been very boring. I guess, only Richard Dawkins is a match for Steven ... Read More Rating: - Too Stuffy for my ThoughtsI admire Steven Pinker and have heard him present his work in one of the most interesting, educational, and entertaining presentations. Having 4 of his books puts me in the category of major fan. I was astounded at the brilliance of insight presented here, but just could not follow it, so gave up after Chapter 2. I spot checked a few of the later chapters, finding too much minutia for me to comprehend. I am astounded that one human mind can understand so much and write a book like this, but I am far from the ... Read More 
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