Reviewing a galley of ''The Phenomenon of Life'' in the journal Architectural Record in May 2002, William S. Saunders, the editor of The Harvard Design Magazine and an admirer of Mr. Alexander's early work, called the book ''full of contradictions, foggy generalities and extreme and unsupported assertions.'' He compared Mr. Alexander to Casaubon, the deluded scholar in ''Middlemarch'' who devotes fruitless years to compiling a grand synthesis of all the world's myths.