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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Stupid History by Leland Gregory

I really feel like I need to start out this review by stating that I did not pay for this book. I downloaded it because it was Barnes and Noble's Free Friday selection a month or so ago. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

This book had real potential. Stories about people being stupid? Sign me up! However, most of the stories aren't really about people being stupid, but about how somewhere along the way we twisted history so that we believe something that isn't actually true. This book sets out to tell the truth, but I can't actually attest that it does so, because there doesn't seem to be any footnotes or sources listed by the author. He could be making all this up for all I know. I wanted to tag this review as "Non-Fiction?" but I don't think we can have question marks in tags. And I haven't actually finished the book, so maybe there is some sort of bibliography at the end. I don't know.

But the absolute worst part of this book, pardon my French:

THE MOTHER FUCKING TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. There are so many typos in this book, I can only assume the author wrote the whole book while drunk, didn't spell check, and then skipped the editing stage and went straight to publishing. I started out highlighting errors I came across, but it became too tiresome after a while.

The stories themselves are fairly amusing, but I just can't deal with the typos. I'm glad I didn't spend money on this book.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

I always wonder how typos find their way into published books. Especially in this digital age where the program you use does most of the work for you as far as catching typos. So is it just laziness then? I understand one missed typo here and there but too many and it's very irritating.

miranda. said...

It's really irritating in this book, because a lot of the typos are stuff that would have definitely been caught by Spell Check. Like "Jndia" instead of "India." (pg 64)

Missing errors like "hear" instead of "here" are more understandable because they're both words, so Spell Check wouldn't catch it. There's just no excuse for "Jndia." Clearly more thorough proofreading was needed.

EVIL twin said...

I also downloaded this book also from BN on a Free Friday and was absolutely disgusted at the amount of typos. Sad to say, but I've actually found typos in a lot of the free books on BN. Somebody needs a proofreader!!!