Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard: A guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum, 2006. pp.157. Cloth, £ 50.00, paper, £12.99. In Kierkegaard: A guide for the Perplexed, Clare Carlisle aims to provide the student with an accessible, comprehensive, and authoritative means to reach a full and detailed understanding of Kierkegaard’s thought. In doing this Carlisle might fairly be said to adopt a similar approach to Kierkegaard as he adopts to Christianity: to make things difficult, but no more difficult than they already are. Carlisle equips her book to this end by offering an overview of the philosophical, theological, and psychological aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought, before applying these insights to two of Kierkegaard’s most popular texts: Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments. As one would expect from an introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought: Carlisle’s first chapter consists of a brief account of Kierkegaard’s life and work, and the relationship between them. Carlisle then moves on, in Chapter Two, to treat one of the most interesting, and increasing popular, topics in Kierkegaard’s thought: the method of ‘indirect communication’. That Kierkegaard begins with this subject is useful, because it is a point on which numerous interpretative approaches to his work are easily seen to diverge. Carlisle outlines the connection between the method of indirect communication and Kierkegaardian subjectivity, exploring the question of why Kierkegaard’s texts have the peculiar stylistic features they do. The subject of Chapter Three is Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. In examining this topic Carlisle outlines how Kierkegaard’s thought responds not so much to Hegel as to the Hegelian inspired theological debate of Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen: specifically the controversy surrounding Hegel’s logic that took place between figures such as H. L. Martensen and Bishop Jakob Mynster. This material, so important to evaluating Kierkegaard’s thought, is typically only dealt with in biographies, and Carlisle has done the student a service in making it available in an introduction. Chapter Four outlines Kierkegaard’s views on subjectivity and truth, before connecting these with his notion of ‘existence spheres’ or ‘life stages’. Carlisle then moves to an examination of Kierkegaard’s theological and, she argues, psychologically significant observations regarding sin. To this end, much of Chapter Five is taken up with textual analysis of The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death. The final two chapters consist of textual studies of Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments. That these texts are treated is useful because the first is probably the most widely used in courses on Kierkegaard and Existentialism, while study of the second provides the student with a way into the monumental Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Carlisle concludes by briefly commenting upon the relationship between Kierkegaard’s thought and subsequent continental philosophy, specifically its influence on Sartre and Heidegger. In the back of her book Carlisle provides the student with a useful list of further reading on each of the topics covered. As for criticisms: this book could have, to my mind, connected Kierkegaard’s thought to contemporary debate about his work. For instance, devoting the amount of attention to the topics of subjectivity and truth that Carlisle does would have provided an ideal occasion to outline how different interpretative approaches (i.e. Post-modern (Roger Poole?); Wittgensteinian (James Conant, D.Z. Phillips, Stephen Mulhall); and Pragmatist (Peter J. Mehl)), stand on these issues. (In addition the dust-cover promises an assessment of Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein, which is mysterious absent from the text itself.) In summation, Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed is clearly written, and provides the student with a rounded introduction to the multifaceted nature of Kierkegaard’s thought in its philosophical, theological, and psychological aspects. It will, I should think, count along with C. Stephen Evans’ Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript and John Lippitt’s Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling: those texts that come highly recommended on the Kierkegaard reading list.