by Stephen Vincent O`Rourke
“If you are a Steely Dan fanatic, you don't mind terrible writing and bad punctuation and you want to read all that has been written about the band, then you should buy this book. Otherwise, read Brian Sweet's "Reeling in the Years", a much better written and more exhaustively researched work.
Given the author's evident love for Steely Dan and respect for the obsessive effort that went into creating their polished recorded masterpieces, it is highly ironic that the author of this book clearly didn't have an editor (or even a proof-reader) assisting him. The staggering amount of run-on sentences, omitted commas, improper use of apostrophes in contractions and possessives, misspellings, sudden changes in font-sizes and formatting and just plain disorganized thinking made this book painful and difficult to read. Finally, the text is very large, leading the reader to believe that the author was shooting for a minimum number of pages in the book, but came up short on word-count and thus resorted to the freshman-year trick of increasing the font-size until an acceptable page count was reached.
While I generally try to observe the maxim that states "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", I felt compelled in this case to let other potential buyers know this is a really shoddy piece of work, and that the author apparently either doesn't respect his readers enough to have gone through the trouble of proof-reading his work, or simply lacks the level of literacy required to form a proper sentence on a consistent basis.”
