Unreadable and boring
599114
I found this book unreadable and extremely boring. It was so dense with meaningless detail that the narrative flow virtually ceased - the endless inclusion of irrelevant detail sucked the life right out of the book for me. After a while I began skimming the pages in an effort to escape the onslaught of useless details. Although this book claimed to be a biography about a life, the writing style itself lacked life. I have read several books by Ron Chernow who also writes biographies and Chernow proves that you can be scholarly without sacrificing readability.
3599329
I have never read such a boring book, there is no character development, and it gives the same details over and over.  I never write reviews, however I wanted to save someone the time of even opening the cover.
919340
Boring. Incoherent. Spelling mistakes. Felt like it was written by a 5th grader. The book was not consistent. No emotion. Just bland reading. Don't bother
3535186
Like everyone else, I got this book for free and I regret accepting it.  This trash is so wordy that it is impossible to read.  There are rediculous metaphores, bland dialogue, and bombastic description galor.  It seems like Shapero tried to show off his vocabulary, but that ended up exacerbating the problem because now you'll need college text-books to understand some of the stuff they're talking about.  How awful.  I really tried to get through it.  Really, I did!  But I just couldn't get any farther than chapter 7 (There really is no point in reading this book because the story is ruined on the first two pages!!!!!).  Rich Shapero must be quite the fool.

If you want to have anything to do with this book, I suggest reading the amazon.com reviews.  They are WAY more entertaining than this piece of garbage.
2777659
I am baffled by the good reviews. This was so boring, largely because of the stilted dialogue, pages of summary, and lack of a decent plot. I read 7-10 books a week, and this is the first time in months that I skimmed pages due to boredom.  Don't bother with this book.
360235
Disjointed,  poorly written, a total pain to read.  Important details are skipped while insignificant parts drone on. I was looking forward to the book but it approaches unreadable in parts. The author should have paid an editor.
1129086
Utterly unreadable. This so-called book didn't come within 10 miles of an editor. Picking words at random out of a dictionary would be a much more enjoyable reading experience.
4455091
I cannot understand how this book has so many 5-star reviews. It's absolutely unreadably awful. If you're at all tempted to buy this, try the 'look inside'  preview first and see for yourself.

The characters are uninteresting, the dialog seems to have been written by a twelve-year-old, and the plot is just stupid.

The worst thing, though, is the translation from German to English, which may very well have been done by someone who speaks neither language. Grammatical errors abound, and the resulting prose is consistently excruciating to read.

I could not get past 30 pages of this drivel. Run away!
4840951
the worst book I have ever attempted to read, forced my way through 146 pages
2709367
The authors are badly in need of an editor.  E.g. in the chapter supposedly about Columbus, Ohio, D. Fallows goes off on a nationwide tangent about public libraries and "makerspaces", apparently because she really likes them.  Since they don't seem to have an editor, the authors seem to write about whatever they feel like.  Frankly, the writing is boring. I chose this for our bookclub, and I am very embarrassed.  IMO it is unreadable.
Despite other glowing review, you have been warned.
2393402
Straight up unreadable.  I love DP, but this is recycling an old book and not particularly well.  It was so bad I returned for a refund.
4693174
Intensely boring, pathologically boring, stultifyingly boring...This book is like reading the daily Facebook comments of someone you're sorry you friended who has to describe every mundane activity of her life. Maybe it's meant to be that way for those who love to read about a fantasy world where everyone gets along, romance has no sparkle and there is almnost no action. This doesn't ressemble any family or relationship dynamics I've ever experienced. Spoiler alert: actually I can't call it that because there are no spoilers in this book. But anyway, even the supposed drama of the estranged mother returrning to hit up her daughter for cash carries no major call for mayhem or even therapy. Everyone is so nice to the character involved that ruffled feathers are quickly smoothed. Give me a break! So why did I select this book and even more pertinently, why did I finish it? I moved near the author where she is a local celeb. To fit in to my new surroundings, I read the first book in this series which was only marginally less boring than the second. Then I went to her store for a book signing and had to present one of her gems for a signature. Logically, I picked the next in line, figuring maybe the trilogy improved as it moved along. I finished the book with the cognitive dissonance that such a famous author could write something so amazingly bad. I am not even tempted to read the final book.
1191337
Based on this book's title, I expected it to be fascinating from a historical perspective. Omg so boring and dry. And I've never seen a kindle book so poorly formatted, it's nearly impossible to read. Many of the pages have the dialogue centered on the page with words skipping over to various other lines. Yuk
3177904
It's completely unreadable.  The text and art are too small to read.  There's no pinch zoom within the app, so you are s*** out of luck.  Too bad I was looking forward to reading it.
2211434
This novel is very boring; none of the characters, save Gerasim, are likeable (in my opinion). Also, the book is riddled with typos and grammatical errors.
94297
This was a horrible version of this book.  It was completely unreadable.  The sentences aren't even indented and chapters run together.  I don't know who printed this book, but it's terrible.  (my son enjoyed the story itself quite a bit, but we ended up getting a readable copy from the library)
3943386
I'm assuming this was self-published, because it's unreadable.