the book rigidly suck to its tested formula without taking chances or expanding ...
342540
This was a very entertaining sequel to Inferno.  However, the book rigidly suck to its tested formula without taking chances or expanding on truly memorable Hellishness.  Characters like Rosemary and. especially, Sylvia Plath, were well developed; however, we needed more than 2 sentences for major bad guys like Hitler and Stalin.  More context would have been nice for other characters such as Billy the Kid.  Nevertheless I did really enjoy the book, which was a very quick read.
1059501
Once in a while, you find a book that you can't put down, and read cover to cover. This is not that book. I repeatedly found myself putting the book down again after a few pages, usually after one character or another repeated the same internal dialogue that I had just read from another character. Unfortunately, there is so little wothwhile fiction these days that I would pick it up again, and repeat the 'few pages and quit' cycle.  I feel I tortured myself with this book more than enjoyed it.  Each character has one trait that is mentioned over and over. Each character gets to overcome a challenge by yelling 'No!' internally at themselves.  Each character will be exactly the same from beginning to end; no growth, no development.  I feel cheap and used, and write this review as penance, although I'm sure all of you are just as desperate for fiction as I am, and will buy anything as long as it has more than 200 pages and no twinkling vampires.
3717577
It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality.  The entire work could serve as a clich&eacute; for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism.  Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.'  This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry.  Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense.  In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity.  How could this be entertaining?  I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.

I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life.  I disagree.  The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other.  Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.
292454
Thank you, Herr Baron, for stating the plain truth, and never mind the huffy outrage of deluded fanboys. While the IDEA of a line of 'horror-mood' comic magazines was an intriguing one (made more so by the one area in which Skywald was competitive, their cover art), its consistently bungled execution on the interior pages instantly deflated the reader's enthusiasm. One would be hard-pressed to find a more inept and tone-deaf conductor for these would-be Gothic symphonies than Archaic Al, who seemed to start out each of his "epics" armed with nothing more than a lurid title, a berserk premise, and a gravity bong, and stop dead right there - having no idea of plotting, characterization, story logic, etc, beyond making scary faces at the reader in his ludicrous and nonsensical text and dialogue. Assuming you can find a reasonably-priced copy, the book's primary value is instructional, emphatically reminding the reader that not every pop-culture artifact of the 1970s is a gem awaiting rediscovery. (Unless we're talking about the sort of 'rediscovery' that Ed Wood and Jess Franco enjoyed in the 80s and 90s, that is.) You'll close the covers of this book thinking what I did whenever I'd pick up a Skywald mag way back when, to wit: what in God's name was THAT all about?
2021616
While I'm a big fan of Bruen's Jack Taylor novels, where he can get away with what is called "spare, hard-boiled prose," I was left completely dissatisfied by this effort -- or lack thereof.
What do you get for the $22.95 hard-cover version of this "novel"? You get, at best, a novella, which is more lazy and un-researched than "spare or hard-boiled."  Wanting to make it last, I still managed to read it in less than six hours. How can a professional novelist get away with literally one-word paragraphs, double-spaced, no less, sometimes six in a row?
The absolutely unlikable characters are paper-thin at best. There is no character delineation: nearly early every secondary and tertiary character acts like a jerk, the vernacular unimaginative and hackneyed. It's like reading a college term paper written by a freshman whose only experience comes from watching TV.
What would I have wanted to know before buying this book? That it reads more like an outline than a novel. That Bruen turned gold (the idea of an exchange of 20 cops between Galway, Ireland and NYPD) into garbage. That Bruen evidently wasted no time on research or details. I know it's fiction, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't at times ring true.
I've read every Taylor novel and may read one or two more, but I'm done with Bruen. Don't take a dump on my head and tell me it's a hat. I know the difference, unlike the majority of these reviewers.
Here's a four-word paragraph a la Bruen that you should definitely heed:
Save your money!
4210493
Certainly an interesting premise -- a story shifting through tense and perpsective in order to highlight the fluidity of time and associations. Too bad, then, that in execution the book fails miserably.

The novel is filled with detestable characters, especially the protagonist Claudia Hampton. Of course, one need not like characters in order to enjoy a book. But when the reader stops caring about the characters there is a problem. It's not as much that the characters are detestable as they are inaccessible. The prose becomes merely two hundred pages of self-absorbed nonsense that saps the reader of his or her own life.
Ms. Lively becomes too bogged down in her own rapture of creating a clever book -- any issues or styles that might have been fresh or original with the book become only annoying.
Yes, the novel deals with issues such as time, death, children, parenting, lost love, fate, choices et cetera et cetera. But it offers nothing unique that a better written book does not already offer -- even Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, though radically different, would be a much better choice.
This novel cannot be recommended to anyone who values both literature and not wasting time on inanity.
2600075
The book has some sweet moments, especially between the protagonist and his adopted daughterr, and there is a comic ensemble surrounding the central figures that provides some funny moments.  The premise is so insultingly improbable, however, that I found myself rolling my eyes so often it was hard to keep reading.  Also, the ending is maddeningly and gratuitously obscure.  The reader is forced to play the author's little game to figure out which lady the Count is ending up with and what exactly is happening.  This post-modernist gimmick is inconsistent with the rest of the book and is so contrived it left me irritated and disappointed.  Bottom line: the investment in reading this book was worth it, but barely.
1332462
I came upon this book via glowing reviews on amazon, citations on websites, and exalted praise from cutting-edge web developers. This was THE book to read if you want to build websites that didn't rely on spaghetti code and deeply nested tables, I was told.

I was greatly disappointed. While I appreciate the overall message of this book and some of the techniques are helpful, not only is it exasperating in its lack of information, but it actually commits the very sins that it relentlessly cites as the scourge of 99.9% of websites - redundancy, verbosity, and lack of clean, clear structure of what little information it imparts.

-REDUNDANCY AND VERBOSITY GALORE

The book really doesn't even get started until Chapter 6 on page 153 (and even that is being generous), after mind-numbing repetition in the form of exposition, bulleted lists, and executive summaries about why one should design and build websites using web standards. There's even a sentence on page 137 that proclaims, "Now let's stop exulting and get down to work." Well, guess what? It's just a tease - and there will be plenty more -- because the proselytizing never really stops.

When the author finally comes around to showing examples and their accompanying markup, it is sadly deficient. CSS that works with the markup is not even shown alongside it, although we are promised to be shown in another chapter. I learned very little about how to actually employ the techniques that Zeldman advocates so strenuously.

The meaningless subheads drove me nuts! Here's a taste: "CSS: The First Bag is Free; The F Word; How Suite it is; Not a Panacea, But Plays One on TV; Inherit the Wind; Miss Behavior to You." I know this might seem like a petty criticism, and maybe people are used to this style from the Dummies books, but 1. They're stupid 2. They impart absolutely no meaning, so if the book is used for a reference, they are less than helpful and 3. The subsections are constantly referred to in all of their absurd and useless glory. This constant reference to other sections by Chapter Number, Chapter Name, Subsection Name smacked of gratuitous page lengthening to me. (If you must refer, why not just use page numbers? Takes up about 1/10th of the space (LIKE GOOD WEB CODE), or better yet, use footnotes!)

-CRINGE-MAKING BANTER

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't get this stuff. I bought a serious, technical book about the new age of coding websites. It cost $35 and at 415 pages, that's about 8.4 cents per page. I don't need breaks for mindless digressions about blueberry tofu pie, what title you were thinking of for chapter 6, or for that matter why you want to write in the first person plural. At times, Mr. Zeldman seems to almost flaunt it in our face that he's wasting our time, e.g., on pg. 214 (after a discussion of how this isn't a CSS manual, and how he's introducing us to the "thighs" and "drumsticks" of CSS), he writes: "On the other hand, how many full-blown CSS reference manuals use the word "thighs" three times in one paragraph? You're right none of them do. Your money was well spent on this book."

And when he does actually explain something, it's like being hit over the head with a jackhammer.  It took more than half of page 159 to explain this XHTML rule: "write all tags in lowercase".

-BAD TEACHING

The book is also sprinkled with pointless putdowns like "none of this is rocket science" (pg. 164), but the most egregious teaching technique occurs on page 196, when, mind you, very little actual teaching has even taken place. The author gives an example of markup from the Microsoft homepage (eek!) of what he calls "toilet debris" code and then goes on to say:

"Because redundancy is as bad in books as it is in code, we'll avoid explaining what's wrong with this markup. If you don't know by now, one of us hasn't done our job."

Should the phrase "we'll avoid explaining" ever be part an educational text? With all due respect Mr. Zeldman, I think it's you who didn't do your job.
2059789
Based on a long, glowing interview of Clive Barker in the San Francisco CHRONICLE, I wanted to love this book, the first by the author I would try to read. The I recalled the infamous '30s Dorothy Parker review: "I put this book down and could not pick it up." I did persist to the end--my mistake.
Only a much longer review could capture the breadth and depth of Barker's inadequacies as a writer, glaringly evident in this dreadful book. Beyond the grammatical, syntactical, structural and associated technical problems, the characters are paper thin and unrealized, the 'plot' replete with inconsistencies, the descriptive material pedestrian and full of clangers (example: an earthquake he calls a 'trembler' is actually a temblor, but there are scores of others).
A glance at the excruciatingly self-referential acknowledgements should be warning enough. Barker, though British, has come over to the U.S. to prove with his writing the aphorism attribted to the great H.L. Mencken: "You'll never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public." And he fails the basic test for writing credibility immortalized by Coleridge, the 'willing suspension of disbelief' a reader must perform to accept a piece of writing, especially fantasy such as Barker attempts. Little in the book meets this test. Stay away. Why would HarperCollins want to produce such a mediocre mess? How many much worthier writers won't be published because Barker gets the gig? Won't Amazon create a new review category: no stars?
362830
I really wanted what this book promised, what it held out to me in the "search inside" feature - but the deficiencies in style, content, and format are severe enough to warrant a serious warning against purchasing this book, or at the very least, this edition.

The text is written like new-age spiritual guidance lit - there are gaps in logic everywhere, and every argument is based off of a story instead of a fact. Providing some acuity on a color or its psychological effects would be what I would expect from a book that costs as much as a textbook, instead, the reader is put in the mood for the upcoming chapter with descriptions of color that read like horoscopes. Reds are divided up into "Powerful, lusty, and defiant reds," & "Anxious, angry, and romantic reds." Why not start off with cool reds and warm reds? Because you're being sold on the words, not on the colors, and not on some sort of proof.

Which leads me to the fact that there are 28 stills from films in this 243 page book. To reiterate: 243 page book on visual storytelling, 28 examples. Oh, there are some nice pictures of road signs and various other stock photos, and - no joke - some paintings the author's students made. 12 of those inside. They're kind of nice. But they are nothing more than a cheap magician's misdirection - these students come up again and again as proof that people "see" a color a certain way. Yeah, red's "anger" or "passion." I don't need a book, or someone else's experience to tell me this - I bump my head, or rub my eyes, and I see red. I want to be told how red communicates anger and passion to an audience. Simply stating that it does so is not providing me with a fact, it's providing a tautology.

Now let's look past the medium and to the message: as long as we take the emotional cues we're told to, we have a little interesting analysis underscored with flecks of color theory, but this is in fact still a problem - the text ought to be centered around the color theory; instead, the sections read like some films were screened, the author wrote down a couple obvious ideas, then filed them by color - and missed the best films and points entirely. Where is Kieslowski's COLORS trilogy? Three top-shelf films, each based around a color, ignored. Talking about the color orange in "The Godfather?" How about, I don't know, mentioning the ORANGES present when main characters are killed? No sir. How about a chapter for black, and a chapter for white? Not technically colors, sure, but we use them as and/or with colors. A lot.

If you're really considering purchasing this book, try very hard to find it at a library first. Or look up a color on wikipedia. If you're set on spending money, buy a color wheel, or simply look further for color theory.

I'm going to donate my copy to the library.
2837636
Dean's journey exemplifies the "whatever it takes" attitude towards success. I can admit that Alexander does gather some momentum with the many short stories which build on this theme. You could even throw some of the apparently controversial sexual exploits under that category with reasonable justification. This drive towards a singular goal, apparent in many of Dean's relationships and decisions, is an interesting one, but you don't really need this particular book to tell you that.

As a purely literary venture, it's simply terrible.  Another reviewer noted the "horribly constructed sentences" and that barely scratches the surface. I'm not an English major, technical writer, or anything of the sort, but this was a rough read--cringe worthy at points. I'm genuinely surprised that the editor didn't take a stronger hand. Beyond that, let's see, people and plot points are left hanging, transitions are often nonexistant, and the whole thing is written from a strangely biased, almost obsessed-fanboy perspective.  Had Alexander been able to check his personal feelings at the door and allow for a little proofing, his work would have gained a lot more credibility.
1698668
This book is basicly just a Mary Sue, Gary Stu fantasy in which nothing truly challenging is faced. It's a group of survivalists who decided to devote a massive amount of money to build their very own fortress complete with years worth of stockpiles and fuel. There's never a real shortage of something important to the 'group' or a challenge that can't be overcome easily.

Part of the reason this book fails so badly is because anything that could be an obstacle to his group of Mary Sues overcoming the evil UN invaders, is conviently left out. There are no special forces with night vision gear hunting them down, there are no armored combat vehicles being used intelligently, even M1 Abrams tanks are defeated effortlessly by homemade bombs. There are no spy drones, or helicopters. C'mon, even in Red Dawn the helicopter gunships were the downfall of the Wolverines.

In short, there's very little about this book that is compelling or makes you care about the characters. Even the author doesn't care about the characters, because at one point, one of the founding members of the group, who the group has known all of their adult lives, is killed. There's not so much as a panic or a tear shed during the scene, and instead the survivors just go on to calmly fix their truck and have a casual talk about what to do next.

There's also a lot of hypocracy about religion in the book. Basicly, anyone who isn't a Christian in the book are protrayed as poorly as the white guy in a Spike Jones film. You have gangs of raping, looting, godless bikers. Oh, and cannibals. Wait, not just cannibals, but literally, baby-eating, communist, looter cannibals. I'm not kidding.

The 'group' views looting as one of the biggest sins in the post-collapse world, but they never miss an opportunity to loot the corpses of the people they kill. On the subject of killing, these so-called Christians sure aren't shy about killing. Not only do they kill people, but they do so joyfully, often telling jokes or making wisecracks after shooting folks. They also routinely execute the wounded, helpless and unarmed.

There's a strange conflict in the author's message when early in the book there's a scene where two brothers are on the road without a driver's license. They got pulled over by the police, and they tried to make a constitutional argument that they don't need a driver's license to freely travel on the road. The cop, despite being in public with witnesses, and having a dashcam in his cruiser, pulls his gun to execute the brothers for being crazy right-wingers.

But later in the book, he has his main characters stopping everyone passing by on the road near their house, holding them at gunpoint and demanding to know the contents of their bags. In at least one case, when they find something they don't like, they execute two men on the spot with no questions asked.

The timeline of the book is really screwed up also. I suppose that comes from the fact that this was just a web story back in the 90s that has been updated several times. There's often conflicting dates during the backstories, sometimes on the same page.

There's a sort of detachment from the characters. You never really get to know any of them, and quite honestly, they're all pretty much the same person with the same ideals, same opinions and the only inter-group conflict I see in the entire book is the group arguing over which guns to buy.

After reading end-of-the-world books like Lucifer's Hammer, The Ship and Alas Babylon you are left feeling like you haven't really experienced what the characters are going through. Even House to House by David Bellavia, which is real point-of-view book about the fighting in Fallujah manages to pull you in so that you get to know the people/characters, and you care about what happens to them. Which goes to show that even when telling the gritty, awful story of real combat, you can still pull your readers in.
137188
I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book.  Alas, I should have passed.  The author has done his historical homework, yes, but the book reads like it's marching straight off notecards.  I never imagined such a story could be made tedious, but here it is.  This is paint-by-number writing, full of information but nowhere close in bringing it all to life.  Here and there the story does manage to break through, only to be throttled again. It's full of cliches, painfully amateurish transitions, and a catalogue of repeated words and phrases.  Of course dealing with so many characters is always a challenge, but resorting to lists throws us out of the story rather than drawing us in. If all historical narratives were as clunky as this one, folks would give up the genre.  A shame really, and if turned into film, one of the few times the movie will far outclass the book.  Ack!!
367295
You would think a book that aims to teach you about logic would use logic in its design.  Unfortunately, this is just another piece of major publishing trash that is pushed on college students.  Even my professor complained about this book, but because cartoonishly evil McGraw Hill publishers paid my university a bunch of money, EVERY SINGLE discrete mathematics course requires this waste of carbon.  The teachers didn't even get a say in it.

The biggest problem is that this book reads more like a rushed review than teaching material.  It is infuriatingly obvious that it was slapped together, comprehension be damned.  It goes over the subjects in clunky blocks, without breaking down each concept piece by piece.  I kid you not, this is a direct excerpt from the book:

"...an island with two types of inhabitants, knights who always tell the truth, and their opposites, knaves, who always lie.  You encounter two people A and B.  What are A and B if A says "B is a knight" and B says "The two of us are opposite types?"

Solution:  Let p and q be the statements that A is a knight and B is a knight, respectively, so that ~p and ~q are the statements that A is a knave and B is a knave, respectively.
We first consider the possibility that A is a knight; this is the statement that p is true.  If A is a knight, then he is telling the truth when he says that B is a knight, so that q is true, and A and B are the same type.  However, is B is a knight, then B's statements that A and B are of opposite types, the statement (p /\ ~q) \/ (~p /\ q), would have to be truth, which it is not, because A and B are both knights, respectively.  Consequently, we can conclude that A is not a knight, that is, that p is false.
If A is a knave, then because everything a knave says if false, A's statement that B is a knight, that is, that q is true, is a lie.  That means that q is false and B is also a knave, then B's statement that A and B are opposite types is a lie, which is consistent with both A and B being knaves.  We can conclude that both A and B are knaves."

These rushing vomit run-on words are not accompanied by graphs of any kind.  Graphs are incredibly useful in helping students visualize abstract comments.  This excerpt was from chapter ONE.

The book is required, probably because the sons of female dogs paid your university a ton of money to make it required.  The university gets a cut from the ridiculous amount you pay for one brick of low-quality toilet paper.

Happy learning, guys!
2285120
If you have time to wade through all the jokey junk that's supposed to make it interesting, because you can't concentrate on a single concept for more than one sentence at a time without comic relief in the middle of it, by all means, buy this book, you are its target. What a waste, I'm really annoyed that I can't return it.
1802526
I lasted 300 pages before giving up on this forced, pretentious, and not very compelling novel.  At least I only wasted my time and not my money--I had obtained a copy that cost me nothing and was initially intrigued by the baseball angle.  The reactions to this novel are yet another example of the disparity between book critics' reviews (overwhelmingly positive) and those of the reading public (many lukewarm or negative).  Few book critics have the courage to write what they really think and risk offending agents, authors, and others in the publishing world.
3834890
If I could give a book a ZERO this would be the one...UGH!!