Title: God this book bored me to tears
Product review: I love detective novels about forged books, my all time favorite being, "An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets", by John Carter, and Graham Pollard. The very best books about forgeries tell you a great deal about books and manuscripts, not just the fraud in question. I had hoped that this book would be in that vein -- cool, dry, utterly objective, facts-only, and absolutely convincing, while at the same time opening up the world of ancient manuscripts and how to reason about them.Instead it is unconvincing and inflamed in the *weirdest* sort of way. It seems as though Stephen Carlson really wants to settle a score with Morton Smith. I was looking for an exquisitely argued piecing together of a puzzle. Instead I got a very erudite, very lengthy disquisition bundled up with a huge number of angry neurosies, not all of them Smith's by any means.
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