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Title: a disappointment
Review: This is a fascinating topic, with some fascinating protagonists, but at least in the paperback edition (is there a difference?)the author fils to really engage us. The opening chapter is a nice college essay on the topic that basically contains the rest of the book, and I found myself constantly saying "Hey, you already told us that" for the next hundred plus pages. There is lots of florid prose about how evil and conniving some folks were, but we never really get a feel for them. I suspect that the author either 1) could have used a good editor or 2) got edited to death in order to fit some sort of page limit. As a result there are lots of teasers & some gratuitous statements (WHY for instance do we have to hear in a one-liner that the man who cleans the clocks at the end of the book had a difficult personal life?)& one walks away wondering what one missed.
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