A wide-ranging and comprehensive guide filled with practical advice that will be most helpful for beginning writers.
A manual for beginning writers to start transferring their spoken ideas onto the page.
“The key to becoming a good writer,” Klein writes in his introduction, is “Getting your speaking voice out of your head and putting it down on paper.” After running a freelance-writing business and publishing several Sudoku instruction books, he decided to group his best pieces of technical writing advice in this manual. Music and speech are at the core of his arguments about what makes great writing; he cites scientific studies about how crying babies mimic the musicality of spoken language and cites other writers, such as Gary Provost, who stress the importance of re-creating cadences on the page. Klein distills a lot of basics that more experienced writers will remember from Strunk & White’s concise handbook: choosing active voice over passive, varying sentence structures, and choosing unexpected or unusual words. However, Klein does try to keep his examples fun and engaging, such as by comparing Stevie Wonder’s repetitive “I Just Called to Say I Love You” lyrics to those of the Young Rascals’ “How Can I Be Sure?” His most interesting advice comes when he explores the distinction between free-writing and flow-writing; he encourages writers to attack a subject they know with a general plan in mind, without fixing one’s grammar or other mistakes at first. Klein’s book is primarily a textbook for beginners; as such, he delves into technical matters such as time management, self-publishing, and getting the most of word-processing programs. He also synthesizes advice from numerous other authors and includes an extensive quotes and references section, all of which will be helpful to those just starting out. However, the book might be too expansive for those who are simply looking to polish their skills, and Klein includes very little about his own personal stories and processes.
A wide-ranging and comprehensive guide filled with practical advice that will be most helpful for beginning writers.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5485-6846-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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