E.E. "Doc" Smith (Starmont Reader's Guide) [Paperback]

Joe Sanders (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2008 | ISBN-10: 091673272X | ISBN-13: 978-0916732721

A study of Smith's life and work as well as the impact that his fiction has had upon literary culture.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Borgo Press (August 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091673272X
• ISBN-13: 978-0916732721
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,277,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Remarkably unscholarly, December 15, 2006

By 

Flash Sheridan (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: E.E. "Doc" Smith (Starmont Reader's Guide) (Paperback)

This is a remarkably unscholarly work, especially since it was written by an English professor on sabbatical (p. 6). His biography of Smith starts out coherently, but in the middle, veers off into a discussion of the well-rounded life (p. 9), and never really recovers. Instead of providing useful facts, Sanders wastes much of the book on plot summaries (p. 5). He deliberately avoids commenting on the inaccuracy of his sources (p. 14), which would have helped later researchers to evaluate them. (In my experience, the printed sources all need to be treated with great skepticism.) Finally, he seems to have missed the most interesting question in Smith scholarship, the (in my opinion, clumsy) ret-conning of the Lensman series to accommodate _Triplanetary_ (p. 5, 35, 40).