Margaret ****els wrote:
I won't. Free speech and free expression are at issue here. Amazon now
control something like 80% of book sales worldwide. They have killed
the small bookseller. Soon the medium-sized book store will follow, and
Amazon will have a monopoly.
I am so sorry that you have issues with Amazon.co.uk. Your issues,
however,
would be with Brittish Law, as .co.uk, implies that the website is based
in
the United Kingdom. Furthermore, NO COMPANY, and I will repeat NO
COMPANY,
has power to drive another company out of business. If you will, close
your
eyes for a moment, imagine a world where paper, and even electrical
impulses
had physical power over you. Hard to, eh? I know that was rather
sarcastic, and I apologize, my point is this, companies, are nothing more
that pieces of paper (Business Licenses). And even the people working for
those companies have no control over whether another company goes out of
business. Only CUSTOMERS can do that. It brings tears to my eyes to
think
that small business owners, (usually the ones without
marketing/business/accounting degrees) believe, and actually get other
people to believe that Larger businesses "put them out of business". I
can't help the fact that customers will happily walk past their store, go
home, get online and pay less. No one ever thought that lower prices had
something to do with it? That's right, it was just plot, maybe the mofia,
no no, the government, put you out of business. Again, I apologize for
the
sarcasm. This just really has my buttons pushed. Any small business
owner
knows the risk when they open. If they don't, they shouldn't be open
anyway.
"Margaret ****els" <margaretnospamplz@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:2005111201213119113%margaretnospamplz@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Gentle alt.books.anne-rice reader,
>
> First, my apology for cross-posting to this NG. Be assured that this is
a
> one-off. It will never happen again.
>
> My sole purpose is to draw your attention to what I believe are dubious
> practices by Amazon.co.uk. I also believe that at stake here is freedom
of
> expression.
>
> Amazon have rejected my reader review of a novel by John McGahern. In
the
> UK and Ireland it was published under the title, "That They May Face The
> Rising Sun". In the USA and elsewhere it's entitled simply "The Lake".
>
> You may have read it. You may even have thoroughly enjoyed it.
>
> That is not the issue. The issue is that Amazon refuse to publish my
> review. First, they ignored it. When it failed to appear, they fed me
the
> excuse of their moderators being too busy to read it. Next they insisted
> (three times) that it did not comply with their review guidelines.
>
> I copied their guidelines to my Amazon correspondent and asked her to
> specify the guidelines with which my review did not comply. She replied
> that she could not be specific.
>
> When I threatened to expose Amazon on the net, they relented, and said
> that my review broke two of their rules. (It did not.) But I amended it,
> and you can read it below. You'll see that, although it's critical,
there
> are other reviews on Amazon.co.uk that are far more critical than mine.
>
> So what's going on? Have they done a deal with McGahern's publisher? It
> would not surprise me; the book trade has became increasingly corrupt.
Why
> do you think that only a small number of books get reviewed in the
> papers - and that they're the same books in each paper? Because they're
> the best books at that moment? Think again.
>
> Read the actual READER reviews on Amazon and see how they compare with
the
> newspaper reviews. You will read lines like: "I bought this book because
I
> believed all the hype. I was very disappointed."
>
> We are being conned.
>
> Anyhow, I dutifully submitted the amended review, with the assurance
that
> it would appear within 5 days. It did not.
>
> The astute reader will understand that this could continue ad nauseam,
> with Amazon trying to wear me down so much that I would give up and
forget
> it.
>
> I won't. Free speech and free expression are at issue here. Amazon now
> control something like 80% of book sales worldwide. They have killed the
> small bookseller. Soon the medium-sized book store will follow, and
Amazon
> will have a monopoly.
>
> At that point they can do anything they please. Try posting a very
> critical book review then!
>
> Sincerely, and my apologies again for the cross-posting!
>
> Margaret ****els
>
> --------------------
>
> [The review Amazon didn't want you to see:]
>
> When MIGHT is right.
>
> In his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul wrote of
> "those who are being lost, because they didn't receive the love of the
> truth, that they might be saved. (2:10)"
>
> What a shame that John McGahern didn't read his Scripture with a little
> more diligence; had he done so, he might not have botched the grammar in
> the very title of his book, and might instead have called it: "That They
> MIGHT Face the Rising Sun". If the poor English had ended there then all
> might have been well. As it is, when one gets past the title page, it's
> all downhill.
>
> The novel provides clear evidence that, once a writer's book is
denounced
> by the Catholic Church, all subsequent work will be praised as
literature.
> We need only think of the frightful Edna O'Brien....
>
> And literature is what this book clearly is not, at least not when it's
> read objectively, without the baggage of the encomia that have attached
> themselves to McGahern over the years, like limpets on a whale's
buttocks.
>
> It's terrible. I could not get beyond page 36. I tried; I genuinely did.
> The lacklustre prose is indistinguishable from that of Alice Taylor - in
> fact Taylor's outdoes McGahern's quite often. There is a myth, no doubt
> put about by McGahern himself, that he overwrites excessively, then
prunes
> remorselessly. If that's the case, then the out-takes of "TTMFTRS" must
> have been excruciatingly bad.
>
> He has no style, plain and simple - indeed I'd have preferred "plain and
> simple" rather than McGahern's weak and often cringe-making attempts at
> style. The English language seems foreign to him. It's English for
> Beginners, the vocabulary of the semi-educated. And one would think, to
> read McGahern, that Peter Mark Roget had never drawn breath. "Sure why
use
> synonyms," he must reason, "when the one verb can be made to serve every
> situation?" Everybody "walks" for example; no sauntering, hastening,
> loping, striding or what have you. Clichés proliferate, and inept ones
at
> that: a bird drops "like a stone" (the only time I ever saw a bird
> dropping like a stone was when my husband let fall a frozen chicken in
the
> supermarket).
>
> All the characters speak with the same, dull, interchangeable voice. Nor
> does the dialogue always ring true; at one point, for example, a country
> person speaks the line, "None of us believes and we go", a usage I've
> never encountered in rural Leitrim.
>
> McGahern cannot write characters that engage me. Because all speak with
> the same voice, it was difficult to choose between them, and as a
result,
> no one character held my attention.
>
> His narrative is even worse than his dialogue: "His eyes glittered on
the
> pot as he waited, willing them to a boil." Classic Alice Taylor, that. I
> flipped through the pages and chose passages at random. There were no
fine
> words or interesting turns of phrase that merited a mention. In fact,
all
> I found was mediocre writing, hardly better than anything a schoolchild
> could write. And the syntax! Even that infamous torturer of English
syntax
> Anita Desai could do no worse than: "The Shah rolled round the lake with
> the sheepdog in the front seat of the car every Sunday and stayed until
he
> was given his tea at six."
>
> The dust jacket quotes the Observer; evidently it hailed McGahern as
> "Ireland's greatest living novelist". Whoever wrote that should hang
> his/her head in shame, and apologize at once to ... well, to everybody
> really; such poor writing as this does Ireland no favours.
>
> If I am wrong, and there truly is a great novel lurking between the
covers
> of this book, then why on earth bury it beneath such dreadful prose? I
> honestly tried to allow this novel to grip me, but it failed dismally.
> Should I have persevered simply because it was written by "the finest
> Irish writer now working in prose"? The hell I should! Two out of ten,
and
> that's being generous.
>
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