I don’t allow myself to read academic books while I eat, because otherwise I’d never read anything but academic books. So, anyway I finished off Jane Eyre (yes, I hadn’t read it before, get off my back, and those stalkers out there can cross off ‘English Lit’ from their lists of my possible fields – as if my prose weren’t proof enough there.) and I was looking for another book. I danced on the line of my rule by getting a fairly well-reviewed mass market book written by a quite popular mass market author that examines something in my field. I figured it would be interesting to see what people outside of the field might pick up and learn if they were moderately interested in the subject.
Oh, my.
Granted I’m only two chapters in, but this is a very problematic book – very biased. The author is also doing the world no favors by making the book look very well-researched and very academic – ‘You can trust me! I’ve been to libraries from around the world!’
A basic example would be, in talking about an important person, the author says: “X was schooled here, and had such and such a background. He was connected to Y in this way. It’s easy to see that he was a cruel heartless bastard who ate the flesh off of his newborn children and hated puppies. His teachers all said he was quite gifted.”
I guess this proves I can’t go back and be a regular person anymore. Higher education has corrupted my soul.
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