Most people who come to this book are probably already Eco fans or have a specialized interest in the subject matter. For the rest of us, probably the best predictor of a positive encounter will be an inclination to enjoy the odd historical fact for its own sake rather than requiring that it add to some strong thesis. For example, that Leibnitz was working on binary math is for me somewhat intrinsically interesting, as is the fact that he was exposed during that time to the I Ching's hexagrams. But Eco's claim for this coincidence is appropriately modest: "another case in which someone discovers something different and tries to see it as absolutely analogous to what he already knows." He does not argue that it played any important role in Leibnitz's math, let alone in the "discovery" of the calculus, as the Booklist synopsis laughably mischaracterizes it. The strongest essay is the fourth, "The Language of the Austral Land," which actually does have serious, and for me non-obvious, ideas concerning the nature of language to impart. So in general I enjoyed it. The minor downside was that the erudition elsewhere occasionally became a tad tedious: the 21 pages devoted to a demolition of de Maistre's "puerile" linguistics seemed out of proportion, for example. But the book is only 130 pages long including the index, and contains only five short essays, so you're soon on to something else. It will help if you can feel some of Eco's fascination with the magical power of words and the idea of penetrating to a luminous reality through a recovered or invented perfect language. This is an idea that lends itself to utopian and fantastic literature, as in Borges-- and (as a side note to the ubiquitous sf buffs) this book will give the literary antecedents to the linguistic trope in Heinlein's minor novelette "Gulf," the first installment of which appeared in the famous November, 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
