Caitlin
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2004
- Messages
- 8,502
This is not a review. This is gossip I just picked up, but just to remind you of the book.....The worst thing about “Tears of Mermaids” is its running metaphor -or maybe just comparison- to cocaine as a product making its way through the world, with pearl farmers and merchants. This just does not resonate. It barely clicks or clacks (as Steve liked to reminisce on the sound of his mother's pearls ....also a rather strained metaphor once you look at it)... As he does not take any time to establish the actual techniques and methods of cocaine farming and sales around the world, to show the reader how the black market works with cocaine, he leaves what the cocaine trade actually is undefined, and uses it as a bell to ring shudders through the reader and set up expectations of criminals conspiring to lay a product on the world so dangerous, it is illegal. ??? Or is it the character of the coke dealers that is so bad, that is the comparison with the pearl world? Whatever. This book needed an editor very badly, for a multitude of reasons, far beyond the number of typos in the final text. I can't remember being so aware of so many typos in any other professionally published book. It was blog-level editing. Worst of all, there are no photos... What the heck is that about? Methinks it is that having no editor, no funds, he gave up in advance on getting enough good quality photos to make anything he says worth a bit more respect.
He didn't even do the Kitty Kelly bit very well, or the book would have made a tidy profit. Since it did not, the only excuse left for writing it could possibly be good for, would be getting a position in an urban university instead of being one of 17 jews in Iowa.(according to his own account) Oh yeah, except for the owners of the kosher slaughterhouse in Postvale Iowa, or rather, NOT in the city limits of said town, LOL
Did it work? Nope. He got to do a sabbatical at Michigan, but then it was back to Iowa, a state he has turned his bilious eye upon in no less than a book, “Postvale”, and a an article in the Atlantic in 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...rvations-from-20-years-of-iowa-life/249401/3/. Whew. At last. Even if the article has a boring name- from a professor of journalism, I'd expect something more witty. Well, the article is about as witty as its title.
Oh ho. And the article got about the same response from IO as his pearl book did from the pearl world. http://jimromenesko.com/2012/08/10/stephen-bloom-is-back-in-iowa/
For a man who did not like like seeing a pubic hair floating in the greasy scum of a mikveh in “Postvale”, (no doubt offending its owners, by writing about that) he himself briefly became the floating pubic hair in the oily scum on the surface of Iowa politics. He pissed in his own mikveh. He just isn't creative enough to whip it into a frothy enough story to get that tenure anywhere but Iowa- or even make a name for Iowa with his pithy observations. He is no Mark Twain of Iowa- nor the pearl world.
I have to admit I love to see him taking a dishing, LOL.
He didn't even do the Kitty Kelly bit very well, or the book would have made a tidy profit. Since it did not, the only excuse left for writing it could possibly be good for, would be getting a position in an urban university instead of being one of 17 jews in Iowa.(according to his own account) Oh yeah, except for the owners of the kosher slaughterhouse in Postvale Iowa, or rather, NOT in the city limits of said town, LOL
Did it work? Nope. He got to do a sabbatical at Michigan, but then it was back to Iowa, a state he has turned his bilious eye upon in no less than a book, “Postvale”, and a an article in the Atlantic in 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...rvations-from-20-years-of-iowa-life/249401/3/. Whew. At last. Even if the article has a boring name- from a professor of journalism, I'd expect something more witty. Well, the article is about as witty as its title.
Oh ho. And the article got about the same response from IO as his pearl book did from the pearl world. http://jimromenesko.com/2012/08/10/stephen-bloom-is-back-in-iowa/
For a man who did not like like seeing a pubic hair floating in the greasy scum of a mikveh in “Postvale”, (no doubt offending its owners, by writing about that) he himself briefly became the floating pubic hair in the oily scum on the surface of Iowa politics. He pissed in his own mikveh. He just isn't creative enough to whip it into a frothy enough story to get that tenure anywhere but Iowa- or even make a name for Iowa with his pithy observations. He is no Mark Twain of Iowa- nor the pearl world.
I have to admit I love to see him taking a dishing, LOL.
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