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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
What if the Amazon.com book reviewers took on the classics?
American satirist and writer Joe Queenan asks this wistful question in an article in the August 24, 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal: If the Internet had existed centuries ago, how would Amazon.com’s amateur book reviewers have assessed and rated the works of such notables as William Shakespeare, Marquis de Sade, and Virgil and the writers of the Bible?
Queenan speculates tongue-in-check that Shakespeare’s King Lear might have gotten only 2 stars out of the maximum 5 for its tendency to state the obvious, de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom a full 5 stars for its promise of extended erotica, Vergil’s The Aeneid only 2 stars for having so many whining and bellyaching characters, and Deuteronomy 3 stars for what turns out to be a nonstory and its obsessive preoccupation with clean and unclean beasts.
Conceding that some of Amazon.com reviewers “can get a bit course” in their reviews, he marvels nevertheless at “their absolute fearlessness when it comes to trashing high-profile authors that mainstream reviewers would hesitate to mix it up with.”Read Joe Queenan’s “Amazon Reviewers Take on the Classics” in the WSJ now!
