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Title: [Could have been a great book]
Review: This is so sad. A fun title, a delightful cover, a goldmine of raw material, but then the actual text is so very tedious. This book could have been thoughtful, but it's not. It is just a few hundred index cards assembled into a book. Incompently hundreds of obvious connections are not drawn. This book could have been amusing, but again and again stories that could have kept the reader in stitches are rendered in text that that has lost the ironic delight I bet their original sources had. The authors of numerious encyclopedias are weeping in their graves. Only the most dedicated reader will find some slight pleasure in this now doubled irony. The book could have been scholarly, but the absense of careful footnotes and careless about the materials leaves the scholar afraid that this is just tainted with urban myths that have rattled down the the ages over beers at the pub after Latin class. What waste! What a great book this might have been!
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