Book excerpt: The standing of the Danish philosopher and religious thinker S¿ren Kierkegaard has gone up in recent years. Yet because he regarded communication as being as much about self-concealment as about self-revelation, he can still seem a forbidding and difficult figure. The deliberate ambiguity of Kierkegaard, in which he set out to repel as much as to attract his readers, is here explored by George Pattison, who gives full attention to the scandalous element of the philosopher's work, and does not shy away from his ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality, the body, marriage, and the family. This book is unlike other nontechnical introductions to Kierkegaard in that it does not seek to promote one part of Kierkegaard's writings over others, but offers, rather, a perspective on his life and output as a whole. That Kierkegaard grappled in his own age with many of the problems which beset our own, and frequently offered fascinating responses to those problems, is a major incentive to examine his thought today. By placing Kierkegaard in the context of a "crisis of faith"and making valuable connections between events in the philosopher's life and the development of his thinking, the author of this timely, readable, and attractively written study has produced a book which should be of interest to a wide nonspecialist readership.