Title: Commits the cardinal sin of books on usage
Product review: In "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," Lynne Truss does what a writer of a book on "correct" usage should never do--she commits the very errors she rails against. A book like this should always be copyedited and proofread to the highest degree, and here the publishers have failed. As the "New Yorker" says, "About half the semicolons in the...book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes." Beyond this, incorrect statements of fact are made. To top it off, a new edition wasn't prepared for the American market, which seems completely bizarre to me given the many differences between American and British styles of punctuation.People who are genuinely interested in English usage can do so much better than this book. It is a shame that it has done so well when greater works have remained relatively unknown.
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