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Summary: Magnificent! A Literary Masterpiece!
Review: "The Spell of the Sensuous" is one of the freshest, most enlightening and insightful books I've ever read. As I turned each page I kept saying to myself, "amazing;" amazing in its wisdom, amazing in its expression, and most amazing that it has not yet received a Pulitzer Prize. David Abram, whose uncanny perception and deep understanding and appreciation of life, coupled with eloquent and inspiring presentation, has produced a significant and beautiful piece of literature for now and for all times. And it couldn't have been written at a better time, when the suffering world is examining its misplaced priorities and seeking the insight for understanding our connectedness, our interdependence, our oneness. Abram has cast his spell with brilliance and perfection. Under it, the readers and seekers are inspired in their quest.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool book...
Review: ...detailing the way academic philosophy can be adapted and shaped to aesthetics and lifestyle, or an appreciation of nature. Some very nice insights, and very nice desciptions of natural/cultural processes. I would mainly recommend this to academic philosophers who never get out in the sun.
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Summary: language and the walls it generates
Review: A fascinating odyssey through the mind, first with the philosophical viewpoint of phenomenology which at last tries to describe reailty as it shows itself to us/itself and the perspective of the other both indigenous peoples and animals and plants. At times lyrical and deeply personal and at others academic it nevertheless doesn't let go of the connection it forms at the beginning with tales of Abrams life. One feels that the experience of the world so honestly told throughout the book at times, provide the true wonder evident in Abrams life. It is a pity more of these experiences were not forthcoming. It reminds me of the answer given by a Zen student in Japan when asked about his practice : "the world is so beautiful you almost can't stand it"
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Summary: Challenges our assumptions about writing and language
Review: Abram has undertaken a fascinating look at language and not only the changes it has undergone over time, but also how these changes have changed human perceptions. Another reviewer spoke of all the disparate topics that are woven together in this work, and that is an apt description. As a storyteller, I found the accounts of the cultures with a largely oral tradition to be compelling. In one example, he tells of an aboriginal Australian man trying to tell the story of a dreamline at Jeep speed, and running out of breath. These tales are meant to follow the landscape at walking speed, and trying to tell them by car changes the entire texture of the tale. For those who are looking for a challenging read about our connection with the natural world, how language interacts with that connection, and a history of the development of writing, this is the book you want. Whether you agree with his ideas and philosophy or not, you will have much food for thought.
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Summary: Nearly perfect
Review: Abram has woven many abstract, complex ideas into this wonderful book. His concepts of participation, of a reciprocity between the inanimate (as well as animals) and humans, of a tension and exchange, helped me solidify many concepts I found seeds of in fiction books (especially Pynchon, Delillo, and Abbey). He never comes off as tacky New Age or bored academician--everything presented in this book is sincere, thoughtful, and thoroughly engrossing. The book bogs down slightly in the latter stages, as he discusses the nature of language, and his tone is on even keel throughout (only rarely does he stab with his words when something particularly bothers him), but overall this book will be remembered a decade from now as a landmark; hopefully, as the germ for a school of thought that will help America, and the world, to find a solution to our cancerous growth habits
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Summary: Sensuous poetry
Review: Abram's tract compares literate & pre-literate cultures, laments the loss of sensuous contact to the 'inside' and 'underneath' of our world's being and our 'presence' in it. In a bid to recover that contact, or even pose the question of its loss at the requisite depth, Abrams traces the western intellectual and linguistic structure through to twentieth phenomenologists, Husserl, Heidegger & Merleau-Ponty.It's a lucid presentation with enough personal experience to communicate to a reader coming to these big thinkers for the first time.I hope he reaches beyond converted environmentalists already actively redressing the deterioration of primal life and primary contacts. The penultimate chapter on our relationship to air is worth the price of the book alone; rhapsodic and persuasive. The Greeks, says Abrams, effectively desacrilised breath & air by introducing vowels into their written language. Vowels certainly have not impaired Abram's poetic utterances. This is a learned,sensuous and spell-binding book. I don't want to overclaim the author's importance in trepidation that he may be seen as yet another avatar of millenial disquiet. I worry, somewhat, that in areas he has not encountered first hand, he has trusted sources such as Bruce Chatwin, who himself was interpreting other people's field work. Given the largesse of the author's riches, this is a minor quibble.
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Summary: Outstanding, Complex & Thorough
Review: An outstanding animistic take of our world. Abram approaches the multifaceted phenomenology of human perception from the vantagepoint of our hunter-gatherer/tribal kin in relation to the modern world and how we shifted our senses to be who we are today. Abram's view is in-depth, much more so than I could adequately follow at times (my deficit, not his), and he establishes part of his thesis by asserting how: "Conventional scientific discourse priviledges the sensible field in abstraction from sensory experience, and commonly maintains that subjective experience is 'caused' by an objectifiable set of processes in the mechanically determined field of the sensible. Meanwhile, New Age spiritualism regularly priviledges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter, and often maintains that material reality is itself an illusory effect caused by an immaterial mind or spirit. Although commonly seen as opposed world-views, both of these positions assume a qualitative difference between the sentient and the sensed; by prioritizing one of the other, both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human 'subjects' and natural 'objects,' and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use." To top it off, although Abram's focus is on the phenomenology of perception, with emphasis given to language, the rise of the alphabet and phonetic writing, he acknowledges this view is merely part of vast-ranging processes that contributed to a fundamental cultural behavioral shift for humanity: from those who celebrated the surroundings within which they lived (simply, hunter-gatherers) to those that view themselves as separate from and dominant over the life-world in which they coexist in (us, the people of modern cultures). In other words, Abram leaves open the fact that "many other factors could have been chosen" for which to focus on, for instance, the rise of arable agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago. Abram's book flows with the complexity, subtlety and beauty of our natural world, so I recommend it with caution, that in our modern, so-called civilized age, many of us, though intrinsically capable of animistic awareness (because, as living beings, we are ultimately part of the same space, time and matter of that in which we inhabit), have been dulled on a daily basis by modernities and our incessant cultural commotion. Be that as it may, this work may be difficult to follow, especially if approached from a linear, mechanistic, technocratic viewpoint. Correspondingly, Abram is clear to remind us that this work is more about "a style of thinking ... that associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of a relationship." The Spell of the Sensuous is a one-of-a-kind document of animistic awareness. It is a brilliant compliment to aspects of Daniel Quinn's work as well as the efforts of many others concerned about the "depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world."
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Summary: A surprising look at nature and the alphabet
Review: David Abram argues persuasively that the alphabet and written language have alienated us from the world in which we live. He compares our platonism, which imprisons intelligence and subjectivity within humans and denies them to other creatures, to the animism of oral cultures, which regards all beings as intelligent subjects. The alphabet, invented by Semites and perfected by the Greeks, was instrumental in this great change. The knowledge and wisdom that our ancestors learned from other creatures we now find in the printed word. Abram, an ecologist and philosopher now living in New Mexico, says we are intelligent, subjective beings because we are part of an intelligent, subjective universe. The unfinished task he leaves us with is to reconcile the beauty of the written language of books with the living language of our environment.
Rating: 
Summary: HMMMM....
Review: Dr.Abram's book introduced me to a whole new way of looking at language and especially writing in relation to the sensuous earth, and for that I am grateful (and that is why i rated it a 3 out of 5). I would definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in the study of language, philosophy or the environment.
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Summary: David Abram has written a scholarly and poetic book.
Review: Every time I looked up from the pages of this book, I saw the world in a new light. David Abram claims that the invention of the modern alphabet drastically altered the way we see and interact with our environment. He backs this up with evidence from his own experiences in Indonesia and Nepal, and with studies done by anthropolists around the world. Each idea is well supported by the one that comes before and flows naturally into the next. Despite the potential for this to be a 'heavy' work, it is written with a graceful and light touch. Even today, images that David Abram crafted shine in my memory like a happy dream.
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