Reviews for Blood substitutes

The average rating for Blood substitutes based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-23 00:00:00 Damiana De Pinto Writing: Ugh. The author tries really hard to make this academic and literary by including "big" words and fancy terms when others would work just as well. The word "ennui" is used about 8 bazillion times throughout the book. It's also a pet peeve of mine for an author to write as if he's using a thesaurus. In just one example, Beran describes "sanguinary violence" when he very well could have said "bloody violence" or just "violence". When you're describing the French Revolution, we can pretty much assume that it was bloody. Forcing readers to a dictionary doesn't make an author seem smarter, it just aggravates the reader. And look, I'm not advocating that readers never have vocabulary challenges. But my problem is with authors who use those words repeatedly and unnecessarily. If your big word is the best word for the passage, then use it and I'll gladly look its meaning up in a dictionary. But don't write as though you're using a thesaurus to find all of your adjectives. No problems with the research itself, everything is documented appropriately, it's just written in a stuffy manner. Entertainment Value: None. This book actually probably would have been best used as a back up for having forgotten my Ambien, because I couldn't make it through more than 5 or 10 pages without passing out. Through the first 100 pages, Jefferson actually doesn't do very much at all. He goes to Europe, a part I was particularly anxious to hear about from his point of view, but instead of seeing his political interactions in France, particularly with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, we get 100 pages of Jefferson taking a road trip to look at architecture and taste wines. Actually, we get more like 95 pages about the architecture and wines of the day and 5 pages of Jefferson doing anything at all. That's an exaggeration, but not by far. I will grant the author that it is interesting to note how the architectural styles of the period, particularly the ruins being uncovered, influenced Jefferson's decisions in building his home, but that can be said in a sentence. What really really bothered me is that we get no sense of Jefferson's "demons" at all. We see some vague references to a family history of mental illness, we see Jefferson being melancholy at times, but the descriptions of his depression and how they impacted him politically are really barely present at all. Overall, I learned more about Thomas Jefferson as a person and as a president from reading a biography of John Adams and I learned it in a much more entertaining way. I was also really disappointed that I still know nothing about Jefferson's motivations for some of the more slimy things he did. In short, I do not recommend giving this one a try, unless maybe you're dealing with some terrible insomnia. I know there has got to be a better Jefferson biography out there, but for now I'm moving on to James Madison.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-24 00:00:00 Joseph Noble I didn't read this whole book, so my review might not be worth much. But did Michael Knox Beran really refer to "the great Tidewater plantations" as "enchanted zones of tranquility and order?" I had no idea slavery was still remembered so fondly by conservative intellectuals! But the more I read Beran's work, the more it becomes clear he's just an all-around curmudgeon . . . or a creep. You should hear what he has to say about Eleanor Roosevelt!