Reviews for Collection Menasseh Ben Israel

The average rating for Collection Menasseh Ben Israel based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-24 00:00:00 Michael Montijo The ALA Readers' Advisory Series are all written by different people (understandably), which makes for very uneven reading. The romance advisory was written as a defense of the genre, a calling for people to be unashamed of reading romance. Ultimately, I came out with a good understanding of the genre, and several books to read. This horror advisory reads more like several essays on subgenres. The writing is more academic than conversational, and the separation of the subgenres did not work properly. The authors discuss overlap, but did not format the book in a way to handle the overlap. Books that belong in more than one subgenre receive an annotation in one genre and a note in the other, but there is no consistency in which section gets the annotations (Either whichever comes first in reading the book, or which one is more prevalent in the book would have been acceptable to me). Some books that should have been in more than one category weren't, which would have been fine were the authors consistent with books only being in one. There was no cross-referencing within the text so it was not easy to see that a book under monsters is also under splatterpunk. (Believe me, suggesting a splatterpunk book to someone unawares is bad news.) The annotations and descriptions did not make me want to step outside of my comfort zone in my own reading, nor were they extensive enough for me to use without doing some of my own research into the books. All in all, I'm not sure that my view of horror was changed at all. Perhaps someone who has never read any horror would benefit more from this book, it is both an easy reference and a quick read straight through. This book has it's purposes for a library, they just didn't suit mine.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-23 00:00:00 Leonard Norris This is a pretty succinct overview of the horror genre and I would probably consider it useful overall. The breaking down of subgenres was great, despite some overlap and unclean breaks. It does seem to me though that the authors had a few authors they generally stuck to, and while it's true that Anne Rice might be a safe bet for vampires or another author may be good for ghost stories, I'd be a little more interested in seeing some authors that aren't recommended as frequently. I was also a little surprised to see them break down everything pre-Carrie into a singular "classics" section. Are The Castle of Otranto and Rebecca both classics? Well sure, but they're classics in rather different ways. There is a lot of 18th and 19th century horror out there that deserves its own section from the 20th century (which also deserves some specialized attention). I know they were just trying to separate "classics" from modern works, but it worked out a bit awkwardly.