If you're looking for a good introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought for a general reader, this book is not as helpful as it could be. I don't think that there would be much understanding gained from Carman's "explanations" of Husserl and Gestalt psychology for all the ink spilled there if you weren't already familiar with these systems of thought. Excursions into contemporary theories are also a bit out of place for a book that really should be focusing on explaining M-P. Carman jumps around within texts themselves, defining terms with quotations sometimes hundreds of pages apart. His own reading of M-P makes less of his purported shift than other scholars, but he doesn't cue readers in on the fact that he is pulling from different chapters in order to make his arguments. What readers--or this one, at least--are probably wanting is a walk through M-P's major texts; what we get is a rather jumbled survey that gives the impression that M-P himself was just as sloppy.

Carman clearly has a great knowledge of M-P and an interesting reading of the philosopher. This book could be much shorter and deeper.