mantareads’s Reviews > The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland: Forgotten Hero of Natural History > Status Update

This is a badly written and badly edited book, and the words are: needless digression. Huge chunks of text could have been trimmed by the simple question of "so what?", a simple question this writer seems to never have asked about his tiresome prose. Many historical texts written by pedants read more substantially and smoothly than this. I'm not sure what is exactly "popular" about such an odious genre.

Sure, i get it. You need to "historically contextualise". But spending 3-4 pages talking about things that are only distantly linked to the point you're trying to make reads more like lazy editing, excess, and lost-the-plot than "historicizing". Frustrating reading. Can't wait to be done with this book.

Promising title and interesting life, but 40 pages in, I already realize this book is joylessly written. The author seems bent on cataloguing every detail he can find tiresomely, with no regard for the fluency of the overarching narrative. Reading this for the juicy bits, NOT for the clumsy, clunky writing (the word here could be "pedantic", but I know a lot of pedants who can write more smoothly AND critically)