www.jeffthefish.com

One of my favorite things is to find horrible reviews on the Internet. Before I go to a new restaurant I check the reviews on Yelp. I pass up the four and five star reviews in the hopes of finding rare jewels such as, “Restaurant was too far from my house. One star.” or “Takoyaki (Japanese pancakes*) didn’t taste anything like pancakes. One star.”

I do the same thing for books. Before I buy a book about science, I check for reviews from creationists. Here too there is no shortage of gems for the dedicated digger, such as the guy who called The Plausibility of Life “one last attempt to save a dying theory” and observed that if the book “were a political persuasion it would vote ‘moderate’” in the ironically insane way that only creationists can.

But none of that prepared me for this.

Amazon sent me an email with book recommendations today, one of which was a book called Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of Earth. As the title implies, the book is about how we can determine Earth’s history via geology, a topic ripe for creationist hilarity.

Welp, that didn’t happen. Here is the review that made me shudder:

Build Your Mansion On A Rock.
Basically, you might find rocks and waterfalls as the backbone of this ‘granite planet,’ from the Appalachians to the caverns out West, like that big one, Grand Canyon in Arizona. From shale, sandstone, the volcanic rock in Hawaii, “the rocky middle layer of the Earth’s mantle, constitutes more than eighty percent of the planet’s volume.”

The whole mountainside in Peru, Machu Picchu is made up of rock, while England has those huge slabs called Stonehege; Easter Island is only twelve miles long and has those giant carved statues (hundreds of them, some lying untouched weathered over centuries. There were volcanoes there, also, as America had Mt. St. Helens and Old Faithful. In Knoxville, we had pink marble quarries from which many government office buildings in Washington, D.C. and here in town were built. The black marble is in the hills west of here.

Niagra Falls has the monolith rocks for the water fall over, as many waterfalls in the Western states where Lewis and Clark mapped out that part of the continent. Below ground we have the caves, as they do in Spain, and caverns like Luray in Virginia and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Lookout Mountain is made up of many rocks of all sizes, a maze only a skinny person like myself can get through at times. Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, is built on a hillside of rock. At Cumberland Gap, a controversial tunnel was built under a mountain through the rock; it is fun to traverse, more so than that one under the ocean as you ride into Norfolk, Virginia.

As a Norwegian geologist who teaches in Wisconsin, she uses the rocks as background for tracing the planets, her own political views on America, and sources of fun places to take her children. “Rocks may even cause us to rediscover thoughtful discourse about complex environmental issues and to instill in children an appetite for understanding deep origins and histories.” Touche.

What??? The book is not even mentioned, unless those quotes are from the book, an assumption I don’t feel safe making. This person has over 1500 reviews! It’s weird.  And the ending is ominous and creepy.

And this post is boring.

*That one’s funny because takoyaki are NOT the Japanese equivalent of pancakes. Not even close.

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Posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 in Category Bad Reviews. Please comment, ok?