It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer: And Hundreds of Other Facts from the World of Writing (Totally Riveting Utterly Entertaining Trivia) [Paperback]

Erin Barrett (Author), Jack Mingo (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 193 pages
• Publisher: Conari Pr (August 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573247227
• ISBN-13: 978-1573247221
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,443,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Trivia About Writers and Writing, September 13, 2011

By 

Judah (Terre Haute In USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer: And Hundreds of Other Facts from the World of Writing (Totally Riveting Utterly Entertaining Trivia) (Paperback)

Did not find this 'Totally Riveting and Utterly Entertaining'. It's really minor details about the lives of famous writers and writing contests, and not much else. The 'Everyone's a Critic Section' where famous authors trash other famous authors was the best part of this volume, but it's only from p56-71 (Half free-for-all, half bash Shakespeare). Here are some examples:

p59 "Why don't you write books people can read?" --Nora Joyce, to her husband James
p61 "Mark Twain was a hack writer who would have been considered 4th rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the supercilious and lazy." -- William Faulkner

p66 "Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose works please only in London and Canada." --Voltaire
p67 "I have tried to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me." --Charles Dickens
p69 "Shakespeare's stories are rude, immoral, vulgar, and senseless." -- Leo Tolstoy


Most of the book reads like this, and isn't so great:
p12 In 1854 Washington Irving was appointed US ambassador to Spain.
p42 Edgar Allen Poe married his 13-year-old cousin.
p118 Arthur C. Clarke played the 'man on the park bench' in the movie "2010".
p183 Jack London killed himself (perhaps accidentally) with an overdose of morphine at age forty.