What?

Is this book by Mark Kurlansky one of the most genuinely thought-provoking things I've ever read? Does its author, in his desperate emphasis on the primacy of questioning things, literally phrase every sentence in the entire book (including contents, acknowledgements, and all) as a question? While this may seem to be the sort of thing that would become quickly irritating, is his writing style not so eloquent and cheery and the persistence of his running circles around the reader's mind with new and better questions, beckoning them, as they easily can, to follow him onwards, not sufficient to in fact maintain the brilliance of the book? Is the overall effect dramatically horizon-widening, refreshing, exciting?

   What kinds of questions does he ask? Does he ask roughly twenty of them? Am I about to list them?
   How to begin?
   How many?
   How?
   Why?
   What?
   So?
   Nu?
   Where?
   When?
   Isn't it?
   Thralls?
   Huh?
   Is this unlucky?
   Brooklyn?
   Who?
   What did Freud want?
   Should I?
   Do I dare?
   Where are you going?
   What do we hate about children?
   Can it not be argued that he in fact asks many more questions than these, and these are simply the chapter titles restraining the swells and eddies of his thought from spilling out into pure chaotic askiness? (Is that a word? Does it matter? I'm allowed to make them up sometimes, aren't I?) Are these boundaries helpful in steering our way through certain concepts such as the self, existence, and other people's input on our life? Together do they flow, with almost imperceptible seams, as a single winding thread teaching us the value and application of human inquiry?

   Throughout the exercise how does he guide us? How does he draw heavily in places on the great thinkers such as Plato, Confucius, Jesus, René Descartes, Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, and many others, who in their contributions to philosophy or art or religion were not only answer-givers but primarily and perhaps more importantly question-askers? Are the profound expositions of mystery that these thinkers left behind not answers to the fundamental questions but the mere process of asking the right questions? By this do we find the mystery and let it lead us where our thoughts may? In asking these sorts of questions are we prompted to become better with our own mental reality in seeking joy, with our own human sociality in engaging empathetically, with our own ethical propensity in striving for peace? If more people asked these sorts of questions would everyone be better?

   Does the book open and close with, in German and English respectively, a gorgeous portion of prose from the poet Rilke about the value of asking things? Are we not left with a deep sense of this value by the book itself? Does it enlighten us about the need to be philosophical, the essentiality of inquisitiveness in what it means to be human and to communicate or create? Did I mention that every chapter is also prefaced by a thought-provoking-in-itself little illustration? Would you appreciate those?
   Did I, having bought this book a while ago considering it to be a mere fanciful amusement, then when opening and beginning it last night, suddenly flood with respect for Mark Kurlansky and his daringness to ask so many questions and his comfort and being so good at doing so? Is it strange that though I was meant to be going to sleep and planned on only reading a short while, I got so sucked into the book while reading it aloud that I finished it there and then in one delightful sitting? Why would that be strange if it is such a potent little book?

   Is it true that he actually finishes this book with a simple statement to conclude (do I mean conclude? or do I just mean park where they have come to rest and allow the reader to continue asking if they will?) the roving streams of questions? What is the value in his doing so? Is it because, simply pragmatically, if we are to not only be excellent thinkers, but also adequate doers from time to time, we not only need the innate habit of asking but also to take the occasional answer as good enough for now?

   Should you also read this book to see what I'm on about?

   Yes.