Reviews for Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering

The average rating for Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-06-19 00:00:00 Julie Wong The recent media drama over the movie adaptation of Ender's Game coming out and the people who were boycotting it because Orson Scott Card is a homophobe stirred my memory of reading this book. It has been over 25 years since I read it, and I remember very little detail except my reaction to reading it and how wrong I was about the author and the book. I was in a Southern Literature class, and the professor was a William Gilmore Simms scholar. Like all undergrads, I had an opinion as to what good literature was and no one was going to tell me otherwise, least of all a professor who was a scholar of some old racist white dude who strongly supported slavery from the mid-19th century. I dreaded reading it for weeks. Everything about it turned me off. It was huge, 1100 pages. Our copy was a small press reprint of a book that had been out of print for almost a century. I thought that was a major clue. The title was horrible. What the hell was a "Cassique," anyway? It came out in 1859. What little I had read from that era I couldn't stand. However, I at least can say that I read the books that I was assigned. I left my backpack in my car and took only the book, and went to the student center a little before noon on the Sunday before the Monday deadline by which we were supposed to have completely read the book. I cracked it open and started to read. I remember thinking it wasn't nearly as dry as I imagined it would be. While the text wasn't completely bereft of archaic 19th century words, it wasn't packed with them either. Pages were turning, and before I knew it I was actually pulled in. Against all my expectations, I was actually enjoying it. To my surprise, I kept turning pages until I was done, roughly 12 hours later. It's not a book I would recommend today. While my tastes are not extremely sophisticated, there are hundreds of books I would read before I picked this one up again. If you're a scholar of southern literature, you eventually come across Simms, but there's no other real reason to pick it up. It is a book that belongs in its time and place. The point of my review of this book is that THIS is the book where I truly learned the lesson of "don't judge a book by its cover"(or its author).

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-31 00:00:00 Mario Vela Very entertaining. An epic. Should be made into a mini series.