Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

I gave this book by Sarah Vowell to Maribeth, and then I read it myself(*), and it was very good. I recommend it, although the tightwad in me is slightly troubled by the thought that most or all of the content of this book could probably be downloaded for free on the Internet (in the form of American Life episodes, for example, or on Salon). I have a similar problem with Paul Krugman essay collections.

Sarah Vowell does need a better copy-editor, since I was struck by a couple of long sentences that changed direction in the middle and ended up not actually being sentences. I don't remember the examples now. Maybe they were in the essays which are almost-transcriptions of radio broadcasts. But even if so, you should make the sentences coherent when moving from spoken to written word. Don't you think?

(*-- This is a dangerous way to proceed, of course. I hate giving people books that they didn't ask for, but I think will be good for some reason, and then later reading the book and finding out that I don't like it myself.)

1 Comments:

At 5:46 PM, July 06, 2005, Blogger beam aims north said...

I liked the book too. Thanks!

 

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