Reviews for Local Government in England and Wales

The average rating for Local Government in England and Wales based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-25 00:00:00 Elizabeth Koeppel First, the rating of two stars is misleading. The first 2/3's of the book is probably a high three or four in the stars rating system. The last 1/3 would earn zero stars. Averaged out I have to give this a two. Mathematically it probably comes closer to three, but that would be misleading. I do not want to mislead. The Good part of the book was written in 1950-something, by a guy who is now dead. If there is an afterlife he is probably very very angry at the man who ruined his perfectly good book on the history of books. The Good part of the book wasn't great, it was a nice survey though. There was one problem with it, but that was the fault of the meddler. Now on to the Bad part of the book. The meddlers name is John Trevitt, if the Meddler were a Batman villain he'd be sort of like the Riddler, not too effective, irksome and annoying when having to be exposed to him for any amount of time. The meddlers name is John Trevitt. In a perfect world with a perfect Dantean Hell he would be sitting right between Judas and the King of Hell himself. Yes what he has done to this book is that bad. In a book where the primary, or original author, is basically a stickler for Good Book design, this book has terrible design, mostly in the case of 7 illustrations being left out. Oh what's a few illustrations you might ask, well they are supposed to be showing what the different types of design are, and it would be fine if there weren't just big gaping holes left on the pages with the captions still there. Can that be forgiven? Well no, because the Meddler "is a book designer and editor, formerly Art and Design Director and a commissioning editor of Cambridge University Press". It's kind of unforgivable. Nevermind that through out the book the illustrations being used sometimes have nothing to do with the text near them, are for examples not mentioned in the text, or aren't in the same order as the text. The pictures chosen are nice to look at, but they are annoying to have to flip through the book trying to see exactly what a William Morris design looks like, or what this particular book would look like that merits it the only good piece of design for a certain error; or when the Meddler states that a particular look is greatest example of Fine Printing in the 20th century, only to find that the picture for this example is one of the big gaping holes. I'd probably be able to overlook the poor decision made by a professional who has apparently chosen to make his book look like a piece of self-published Urban Fiction, if it wasn't for the fact that his writing is just as bad. After 2/3's of the book being a great example of how to jam 450 years of publishing into an informative and never feeling rushed 175 pages or so, the meddler choses to take the undergrad approach to writing. Difficult topics are handled by saying things like, this is one of the most important advances in printing and the length of this book could not do it justice; and then he says nothing more about whatever this important thing was. I have tried that kind of approach on essay exams in the past. It doesn't work. There are also gems like this, "one of the noblest monuments to nineteenth-century devotion to learning is the Oxford English Dictionary, the greatest dictionary of modern times (much of it written or edited by James Murray), which was published in parts between 1884 and 1928. Its complex design was hand-set from type cast at the Press and made over 16,000 pages: some compositors stayed with the Dictionary through their working lives. The printed version of the second edition was published in 1989: it took over 100 keyboarders 18 months, expanded the coverage from 400,000 to over 500,000 words and the extent to over 21,000 pages, and was set on a Monophoto Lasercomp. It was since been published as a CD-Rom..." That's all great information but it's in the post 1955 chapter of the book. Shouldn't the OED be considered a triumph of printing for it's original, not as monument to data-entry? Am I being too picky? Maybe, but this is just one example of superfluous facts that take the place of actual meaningful content for the last 1/3 of this book. When the reader is not snow-balled over with undergrad attempts at avoiding topics, or being given trivial facts in the place of content, the reader can expect to be exposed to the value or judgment based opinions of the author, that are just confusing. The meddler has opinions, and he likes to give them, but as facts. One example would be when talking about the lack of literary merit in most bestsellers through out history (note, the biggest sellers right out of the gate of printing were Eramus, Boccaccio, and Luther - three people who still have their share of supporters in the quality department, but that is a fact from the first 1/3 of the book, so it's like it's in another text). So he's what the Meddler has to say, "Undoubtedly this holds good for perhaps the greater part of fiction bestsellers, from the Amadis romances (which were killed only by Don Quixote), through Richardson's Pamela (which Fielding's Joseph Andrews emphatically did not oust), down to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (greg's note, it did win the Pulitzer Prize, and it is called a good book by the author a few pages later, opps), and in our own time such popular novelists as Catherine Cookson, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Jeffrey Archer, Graham Greene and John Updike." I dislike Updike but to call him unliterary is a bit strong. I don't think he's going to be remembered a hundred years from now, I think he's a good stylist but with no real lasting power or originality to speak of, but he expresses what he chooses to express in a way I could only wish to half half the clarity of, but he's no Jeffrey Archer. And Graham Greene? Really? Making blanket statements like this is fine in a forum like Goodreads.com, but as an author for an 'authority' text on the history of books? Of course this isn't the only example, he spouts his opinions off like this elsewhere, he also goes back on them and so forth. This book angered me. I wanted to like it more. Where it's good it's quite satisfying, but the travesty that has been done to the original text (apparently the Meddler cut out an equal number of pages that he added to keep the book at the original length, so somethings he decided we should not have to know, so that we could have space to find out that he doesn't like Graham Greene or John Updike (and never mind Agatha Christie, it's not like she defined a whole genre or anything)). Maybe you will not agree with me that the Meddler deserves punishment for what he has done, but that is only because I believe I have failed to adequately express myself, and not because he is any less guilty of the crimes against good books that he has committed.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-18 00:00:00 Robert Walshire 100 pages fell out of this book in one big clump, vanished into the papery chaos of my house, and did not resurface again. I feel ok about this. It was an educational read, but one which felt really, really educational - the book equivalent of lima beans. The most enjoyable parts came when the author let loose with some venomous comment about Soviet Russia or why we should even bother to teach the masses to read, as they'll waste their literacy on crappy books. Despite the bile, it gave a human touch to an otherwise monotonous read.