At the turn of the century, there was a fad of cheeky comic books covering non-fiction subjects.
This one uses a gimmick of the Caterpillar teaching Alice in Wonderland.
This conceit works surprisingly well for a broad overview of Indian and East Asian thought.
It is awkward to read such books as an advanced beginner.
I’m not a bewildered neophyte, the intended audience.
But I don’t know enough to judge the veracity of the work.
However, it turned out to be a great moment to read this book.
It’s tough to jump into a new subject.
A pure beginner confronts too much information all at once.
But every book embeds a bias, especially the basic ones.
With a little familiarity, you can better converse with the author.
So a student should (re)visit an introductory text after some study.
I used this tactic when learning to bake bread.
After reading every baking book at the library, I could discern implicit instructions.
So I could mine the most basic cookbooks for their unwritten assumptions.
The hard part is humbling myself to open an beginner’s book.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t picked up a cookbook in years.
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The graphics in this book haven’t aged well, but that wasn’t the point. These books were designed to be appetizing at the time of publication. Given the extent of the series, I’d say they worked.
I got this book at the Spring Valley Friends of the Library bookstore along with several volumes. This is the first that I’ve read. I should get onto the rest of them.