In Modernity's Wake: The Ameurunculus Letters

I picked this book up the other day at a used bookstore and I haven't been able to put it down since (I'm almost finished with it). When I saw that the only other reviewer of this book gave it one star, I had to defend it.First of all, what is fascinating about the book isn't so much the ideas expressed (Phillipson's ideas about modernity are nothing new, even in 1989 when the book was first published) but how this collection of essays is assembled. The book is epistolary in form: it's a series of letters written to the various artists and philosophers (Mozart, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) about whom Phillipson is writing. But more than that, Phillipson plays with text fonts and genres to make each "essay-letter" just as much a work of creative writing as it is a work of criticism/philosophy. This makes the book fun to read. In fact, not since Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism" have I found a work of criticism so enjoyable to read.The other reviewer whines that the book is difficult to read. Well, not really--at least it's no more difficult than Derrida or any other work of philosophy that you might pick up. And not all of the essay-letters are difficult to read; one of the letters is addressed to the protagonist's (named Ameurunculus) mother, and that isn't hard to read at all. In fact, what Phillipson/Ameurunculus does throughout this book is mimic the writing styles of Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida, etc. at the same time that he is writing to them. He does this to make the point that language underlies all of our thought processes and assumptions, and making some of the text difficult to read calls our attention to the unnaturalness of all written texts.Obviously this isn't for everybody, but if you are interested in the critical theories underlying (post)modernism, then I'd recommend this book. I like it.