Foucault For Beginners Paperback – August 21, 2007

I did not care for this book. I bought it for school.

I have this and a much longer version, too. I am always interested in a quick description because when you read the original works you are better able to understand what is being said. An important thinker in my view--more important an more eye-opening in describing how the world works than many other philosophers.

Loved this! It really helps before jumping into Foucault to get a basic understanding of the concepts he deals with and what general themes are in his work. Jumping straight into one of his actual texts is too intimidating and less useful if you don't understand the rest of Foucault's theories, and this book is a great place to start. Poststructuralism for Beginners is another great start.

+ I know this is only supposed to be a beginner's introduction to the work of a notoriously difficult thinker, but this is No-cal Foucault Lite, the rice-cake of primers, so airy its hardly there at all.+ First thing I'd like to know is who is the author? I mean, I see her name on the book but darned if I could find a bio or any credentials for her listed in the book. I'd like to think she had some...credentials, I mean...and wasn't just a hungry freelance writer with no special knowledge of Foucault who offered to pen a Foucault guide on the quick.+ Because that's pretty much what this book reads like.+ Well, whoever the author is, she seemed to resent that Foucault, being gay, didn't have enough to say explicitly about women and she felt compelled to point that out in annoying and unnecessary introjections throughout the text.+ Do not pay the cover price for this book. It's simply not worth it. You could read it in the bookstore while your kid is enjoying Waldo Storytime or whatever in the children's section. Or pick it up, used, for a dollar somewhere. I'd say this is the rule of thumb with any of these "for beginner's" guides, but especially so in this case.+ In fact, you likely could garner as much information about Foucault reading the back covers of his books--maybe even more.+ The more of this review I write the more I realize how poor this book was and how dissatisfied I was with it. It's losing stars faster than a wax museum on fire. I can't truthfully say that it was a waste of time to read, because it hardly took any time at all to read. But if I opened the book knowing one scintilla's worth of knowledge of Foucault I closed it hardly knowing one-thousandth of a micron more.+ In other words, I'm pretty much just as stupid as I was before which made reading this book kind of pointless.

I bought this book with an acceptable rating but it had a minor cosmetic flaw to the cover. Much better than rated! Great deal because it was in perfect shape but for the cover sticker...and saved money.

Just what I was looking for. I needed to know enough about his theories to interpret some literature for a paper I was writing and also to determine if I wanted to know more about his work.

This book will help you so much if you have to study Foucault in any way. I bought it because my gender studies courses use Foucault a lot and this book has saved me on multiple occasions.

This is so dumbed down, that it's insulting to the reader.

I liked the brevity and breadth of this introductory book, giving an outline of his work(s) and positions on various areas of investigation. The necessarily brief treatment is supported by a fairly extensive bibliography of Foucault and works on him and his writings, which will help those readers who want to explore further. The only negative is that some sections on his research/writings are maybe too brief. But maybe that's just me!

I think it is good to have an introduction book to Foucault before diving into any of his own. This one works ok and has a lot of drawings to support points given. However, far too many drawings to the point you suspect it's a page filler. Sometimes it's difficult to understand what is facts and what is the author's opinion. But, it still fulfils it's goal to be an introduction to Foucault and I still happy I read it.

Decent and informative

Very simple and clear

excellent!!