MacArthur: America’s General – Book Review
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[By Nick]
MacArthur’s intention clearly was to be a good book. All of you know as well as I do which road is paved with such good intentions.
It tries too hard, and ends up falling flat.
On the very first page, one finds an amateurish writing mistake; a sentence begins with the word ‘and’. That, in and of itself, is not a big deal, but it proves to be just a taste of things to come. It was a constant struggle to focus on the information presented in the book when grammar and punctuation errors pull me up out of the action every other page or so.
The punctuation and grammar errors in the book were far from the only thing that distracted me from the information it contained. Halfway through the second chapter, I became convinced that MacArthur was self-edited. Several sentences made almost no sense, requiring several readings of the paragraph that contained them.
Also, and I’m not quite sure of this, due to the unclear nature of the writing, but I believe there was an error in the first chapter, regarding General Douglas MacArthur’s father, or grandfather, again, I’m not sure. Whether or not the mistake really exists, that there can be any question about it indicates that the book is poorly written.
One final point: when I could overlook the errors and actually focus on the book, I was bored by it. I think I would have preferred to read a list of bullet points. Persons and events pop in and out of the story with little warning or introduction in some places, and nearly irrelevant persons and events receive a great deal of narration and detail that detracts from the story.
Such an impressive figure deserves to be treated better than this.
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I was “disclosing” before it was cool. See my Review Policy for the full scoop.
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