Category: Scholarship

The parade of celebrity dust-cover reviewers clearly saw something in Extra Time which I missed. For by page 132 the book was being slammed shut while cool was recovered. The author had been meeting one Professor Leonard P. Guarente of MIT. And then the poor reader gets this: “Does he look 64? It’s hard to tell. Balding, but spry (sic), in a check shirt and faded jeans, kind eyes twinkling owlishly (sic) behind rimless spectacles, he could be younger or older (sic)”. Nobody should be asked to pay for journalese so inert and so pointless. Extra Time is jammed with the kind of observational banality so popular in American non-fiction that it should be the object of serious import restrictions. Even more tellingly, the book does not really have a…

Heavens above! One just does not know where to start. This is a book so badly conceived, written and edited that it should never have made it out of pulp. All the distinguished persons whose applause rings through the promotional blurb - some favourably name-checked in the text - should consider their position as celebrities and opinion-leaders. On the Future rises not very far above vanity-publishing. All copies should be bundled and shot back to the Big Bang. Proof? Shame on the people at PUP for letting pass into hardback a work with so many disembodied sentences, devoid of self-awareness, as dull as dark matter. Here is a sample (drawn from the dozens available) - coming not from someone passing through a writing-course novitiate but a Cambridge don and the…

You are, one way or another, perhaps in the age business. Your company is trying to build a rich dialogue with older shoppers, tourists, students… Your campaigning organisation lobbies for better treatment for elderly patients, grey voters, the locally bereaved and bereft... Your political party has to consider how the sexa-septua-octogenarians ought to be addressed, captured and, the bitter thought, afforded... (more…)