Customer Comments

100 pages in and didn’t finish it. 1. A cascade of small factual errors. P. 10, Hector was NOT dragged to death. P.34, Strabo was a geographer NOT a physicist. P. 44 to enter the United States u DO NOT have to swear to not assassinate the president on the customs declaration. P. 54 The Rosetta Stone was deciphered in 1822, NOT the 1920’s. Egyptian symbols were inside cartouches NOT cartridges. P. 72 the author states Penelope, from the Odyssey, was suffering from menopause. That is NOT in the poem’s text. 2. At times excruciatingly poor writing with way too many comparisons to Art House films. That’s just lazy. At one point she says Alexander’s generals wanted to imitate him just like “a meticulous Elvis impersonator”. And finally, the author jars with her personal intrusions about writing or researching the book. I didn’t buy this book to experience the author’s emotional highs and lows.

Well written and at times, evocative. But overlong and tedious with angst.

Five stars for a great novel. Two stars for a terrible printed book. Cather does an excellent job of captivating the reader with believable characters and descriptions of nature that rise effortlessly off the pages. Gutenberg would be ashamed of the text. @ only 106 pages there were five printing errors in the first 20 pages. The rate of error slowed but continued throughout. Words run together without spacing like some medieval text. An abrupt indentation for a paragraph in mid-sentence. A few random spacings that create nonsense like the words “Gotoge” & “ther” for “go together”. The volume is certainly not classic and makes the annotation advertised on the cover suspect. Maybe the editor(s) shouldn’t be shot, but they should be fired for publishing such careless work. Buy the Modern Library or Penguin Classic editions instead.

Generally very good. Rousing action set pieces. Hero a bit to robotic perfect. The “love story” stilled and the novel’s biggest weakness.

The Good-Casey does a superb job of describing the deep ocean life and geology. And the engineering it takes to get there. An enthralling picture. The Bad-The author is to front and center at times. Especially in the last quarter of the book. Frankly, as a reader, how u are feeling, repeatedly, is tedious. I want your observations. The author seemed to fawn on people once they let her into the club of deep dives. This can lead the reader to doubt the objectivity of what she says. Yes, rich people can be fun to hang out with. Casey could improve her art by a close reading of John McPhee’s nonfiction essays. The Ugly-A minor point. The author drops some jarring pop culture references into the text when attempting to make explanations by comparison. These will only clunk more as the book ages. A good read, when u can see around the author.

Well researched, fluid writing and intriguing subject. Why only 3 stars? Sy Montgomery is so much in the foreground of this book that, at times, her thoughts and feelings completely obscure the subject. The book promises to be about octopuses and consciousness but it often becomes “these are my feelings about a particular octopus”. Science is good and the writing engaging when she gets out of the way. Despite her claims to the contrary, she often anthropomorphizes an octopus. This might be inevitable, given the subject. Sad state of nonfiction writing when the writer’s reaction to the subject takes precedence over the subject itself. Montgomery could learn much from John McPhee.

Five stars for content. ZERO for editing. The content is fantastic, learn something on nearly every page. The editing is atrocious. Half a line of text repeated later in the same sentence, missing words, incorrect verb tense, proper name transposition (from different chapters), words missing the -ing ending. AND I’M ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH. Content: Great, but like all experts, Cousins can become pedantic about jargon and sometimes rebellion/obscurity is a virtue without value. The scope is worldwide, judgements generous and the writing concise and clear.

There is little to no plot progression for the first 60 pages, instead there are repetitive physical descriptions reinforcing the setting from slightly different angles. All the characters, except Jackson Lamb, have truly endless interior monologues. This facet alone slows what little action there is and develops into an irritating obstacle for the reader, without developing the character. No character engaged my sympathy for long. In the second half of the novel Herron adopts a choppy, ping-pong, narrative style between two or three on going scenes. Too cute and again, simply irritating. Heron’s use of language has some British colloquialisms that will not be kind to his novel in the future and his writing tries, but fails, to be “hip”. The mystery itself is cynically predictable and trite. With less than 100 pages to go I abandoned Slow Horses with a sigh of relief.

Qualified Praise Not nearly as good as his lyrical The Secret Knowledge of Water. The subject is fascinating and the science sound, but the author? While mostly well written Childs occasionally jars with labored similes. My biggest problem with this book is Childs himself. Maddeningly he is too much in the foreground between the reader and the subject. At times his “thoughts & feelings” completely obscure the reason I picked this book up. I ponder, wistfully, what a master like John McPhee could have done with this material.

Using a single tragedy from the war in Northern Ireland, the author pens an incisive portrait of the the Troubles. This is not a general overview, but a beguiling true account set in the milieu of Provo Belfast. The work is well researched and documented. The writing is seductive and moves with the pace of a good novel. Highly recommend.

An intriguing idea for a story, defeated by the writing. Clair Huffaker made a living writing scripts for western movies and TV shows. Unfortunately, his commonplace talent derails the story. The novel contains every hackneyed western cliche, except the gold hearted whore. Then he smears a patina of Cold War attitude, circa 1973, over the whole thing. I really wanted to like this novel, but @ the halfway point I couldn’t stomach another turgidly laconic sentence.

Wonderful This chronological collection of letters leaves the reader with a real sense of the man, both public and private, in his own words. There is high mindedness, debate, personality, public policy and pet peeves. But there is always thoughtful reflection and, often, generosity of spirit. Read it and be informed and entertained. Either way it will make you think about making the world better.

Excellent! Sublime translation and wonderful notes. The notes give context and flavor to Dante’s epic. Pinsky’s translation surpasses even the great John Ciardi’s effort. If you read only a single version of the Inferno, make it this one by Robert Pinsky.

Great content and translation. Despicable format and font. In an insensitive effort to get Aristotle’s work into a single, mammoth paperback volume this Modern Library Classic has subverted the excellent work of professor Richard McKeon with a printing font that requires the reader to use a microscope during reading, or a guide dog afterward.

Exhaustively researched and well told, but... Chernow is forever saying, “he (or she) must have”, “She thought this”, “Her (fill in the blank) must have been”. The historian seemed to pay only lip service to ANY objective treatment of his subject. At this great distance how can he know motive, personality and thought (!). Chernow also never met a fact he couldn’t work in some how. Fortunately Hamilton’s life is dynamic enough to survive Chernow’s seance with the facts. I would recommend Hamilton’s life, but maybe not Chernow’s interpretation.

See You in the Piazza by Frances Mayes reads like notes for a book...or a travel guide. A light froth of history and literature and a heavy handed dose of I went here and did, or more precisely, ate this. Maybe she should have covered less ground with fewer companions. How can you go to Este and not even mention the incomparable Isabella d’ Este? Any of the four books on Italy by H.V. Morton are greatly superior. Especially A Traveller in Italy.