Review:Just received this today. I had read the book, but wanted a refresher for a discussion of it next week. This book is incredibly poorly written. Grammar, punctuation errors, sentence fragments and sentences worded so poorly I just put the book down.
Get a copy of Vance's Ted Talk and read the book. Never heard of BriskReads, but barely made it through 40 pages. DON"T waste your money! Read more

Review:I purchased this book for a class to read a couple chapters, but kept it to read more about the philosophical spin that Hoff puts on the stories of Pooh.
Very interesting read, and makes one stop and ponder life and its wonders. Read more

Review:Wow this is a must read for anyone whos needing help and guidance with writing! This book not just help amateurs who are only now starting out with writing but also helps with the most experienced. I found it very easy to read and the way it was written and layed out made it a enjoyable educational read. There were pictures , pie charts and incredible helpful tips along the way. I also found with the style of how this was written came across more friendly and it felt more compassionate unlike wi... Read more

Review:It came extremely recommended and I just found it alright. The famous lobster essay, was second to the essay on the bit of new journalism he did in his coverage of the porno Oscars in Las Vegas. A very crafty writer who doesn't mind coming up out of the text and challenging the reader. He's also not afraid to write with flair. I'll read him again. Read more

Review:The essayist Joseph Epstein in his very negative review of this book pointed out that sentences are not ordinarily written as things in themselves but as parts of paragraphs, and whole compositions. Analyzing sentences in and by themselves may be alright for 'aphorisms' but does not make sense for most prose.
Another major error of this work is its contention that 'content' does not matter. Content shapes and content helps define the character and quality of a sentence.
The approach that s... Read more

Review:I was reading Ex Libris as my 9-year-old daughter Sarah was reading a Marguerite Henry book. I laughed out loud, and Sarah wanted to know why, so I read her a passage from Ms. Fadiman's essay on taking care of books. There are two camps of booklovers: the "words are everything" group, into which the entire Fadiman family, as voracious a bunch of readers as you could imagine, belongs. They write in margins, dog-ear pages, break spines. To them, a book is merely a container for the thoughts i... Read more

Review:Uh, I think I was expecting something different, but maybe not since it turned out it's exactly what the title promises, which is basically how to suck out all the joy from reading a book for pleasure and capturing a book's insights from that pleasure and not because you're looking for ways to fulfill your own ideological agenda as someone lucky enough to have a job for life. It did sort of make me recall how a lot of professors rip al the fun out of a book when they start deconstructing it. An... Read more

Review:This book is a delight. Some of the criticisms listed here remark that the biography, though beautiful, is not informative enough, humorless, or even fundamentally dislikable. I disagree. I believe that Nabakov possessed enough skill and intent to write an autobiography in any tone or context he might choose; I therefore believe that the lens through which he shows us his youth has been carefully chosen and rendered. Dry accounts of facts and events in so many biographies make them a struggl... Read more

Review:First of all, my Kindle download was for 34 books rather than 50 so they must have added some since I downloaded it. It took me over a year to read them all, but I am glad that I did. Chesterton is a great writer, and his writings included poems, plays, fiction, non-fiction, biographies, Christian apologetics, and newspaper columns. You get an excellent view of England of 100 years ago in the time that he wrote, but at the same time, many of the problems and political controversies he wrote ab... Read more

Review:The great classic are for everyone and a book like this one shows how everyone, from whatever background originally, can come to learn to appreciate the great classics that we have all come to know and love. You too can appreciate great literature - you don't need a Harvard degree to love Jane Austen or the novel Moby Dick. Greatness is within your grasp - get out there and change your life today! Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003) Read more