Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering - Hardcover

Those who expect philosophy to be incisively analytic or synoptically profound will be disappointed by these reprints or later versions of five 1991-97 essays, together with a 13-page introduction and a 16-page conclusion in which little is concluded. Spelman herself regards the book as consisting of "patently cursory observations" about our everyday talk about sufferers and the meaning of their suffering. Unfortunately, cursory rather than keen observations are not philosophy. Whatever seems philosophical in the book is a summary of what other people have written (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, and Gabriele Taylor); likewise the sociologically interesting material about women and slaves, which includes references to work by female slaves themselves. Spelman's writing is diffuse and often sloppy. A book to be ignored.?Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
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