I made the mistake of looking up my books on Amazon and found this stunner:
Andrew Gelman is the worst writer I’ve read thus far in the Political Science field. The book was painfult to read, he never made his point, it was incredibly redundant. This book should not be a book, it was an article unnecessarily stretched out for a book. Not for Political Scientist at all, nor for anyone with sincere inquiries about the paradox of voting in the States.
This sort of thing doesn’t really bother me (much)—the wonderful thing about the Web is that people can broadcast whatever they feel. What surprised me, though, was that this reviewer gave our book three stars! What would it take to get one or two-star review under these standards?
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Well, I liked the book. Shows what I know!
FWIW, I did think it was a bit repetitious, but I just assumed that was because the authors were trying to straddle an audience made up of ‘laypersons’ and academicians.
It was repetitious because . . . we’re not such good writers. I’d like to think we’re as good as the average political scientist (!), but we just don’t have the skills and experience to write as smoothly as most journalists. That’s one thing that made Freakonomics special: Levitt/Dubner really know how to write, and the stories really flow. Our book is more choppy: we threw in facts and reasoning where they fit in, and it’s less of a relaxing reading experience.
Also, in our defense, we present a lot of information–over 100 graphs, I think–so maybe there’s no way the book could ever really be easy to read. It is, unfortunately, the academic style that when things are confusing, to try explaining over and over in different ways.
I gave you three stars because I was worried my comments might have been too harsh.
Hah–people have a hard time matching up those rating stars with the substance of their comments, all right!
You mention that “it is the academic style… to try explaining over and over in different ways” — but I’d argue that that is one place where academic books have an advantage over the basic trade nonfiction title.
Most academic books I’m familiar with marshal many approaches to a core question, and in exploring that question from each approach, they add new layers of understanding resulting in a more textured analysis.
Trade nonfiction often tries to do this (and some of those journalists do get it spot-on) but more often than not, it winds up being just chapter after chapter saying exactly the same thing in slightly different words.
Of course, I may have a skewed perspective, being deeply steeped in the world of academic books as I am. (And in the interests of full disclosure: I haven’t read your book, so I can’t comment on it specifically!)
It could have been worse:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-worst-book-review-ever/
When considering Amazon comments, only consider those that are properly spelled and make use of accepted sentence structure and punctuation. To do otherwise is to consider the opinions of the illiterate.
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