2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sailing around the eastern United States around 1900, May 31, 2000
This review is from: A Year in a Yawl (Paperback)
This is a fastenating story, but not especially well written. Four young men (almost invariably referred to as 'boys' throughout the text) build a sailing vessel which they pilot down the Mississippi (through ice), around the Gulf of Mexico, up the Altantic seaboard, and back along the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Along the way they have adventures and mishaps, which are all told in an impatient 'there wasn't a moment to lose' manner. I think this would have been a better book if it had a little less histronics.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Typo's galore., July 18, 2011
This 110 year old book contains a good story. Unfortunately the print on demand technology used optical character readers (OCR's) to render the text. It was full of misspellings and some paragraphs were gibberish. Made it hard to read and incomplete.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Buy This Edition!, September 20, 2010
Don't buy this edition of this book! A note on the back of the title page should be your first warning: "We have recreated this book from the original using Optical Character Recognition software to keep the cost of the book as low as possible. Therefore, could you please forgive any spelling mistakes, missing or extraneous characters that may have resulted from smudged or worn pages? When in doubt, please consult the original scanned book which may be available from our website." If you need more warnings go to their website: [...].
This book appears to have been scanned/copied from a pdf copy readily available on Google.books.com to the point of even omitting the text from pages 2 and 3 which were not copied into the Google file. The text in the book goes directly from what was the bottom of page 1 in the original hardbound edition to page 4. Additionally, there are typos galore such as "steaining-box" for "steaming-box" (page 2 of paperback 'recreation'), "TVell" for "Well" (page 3), "Yep|sure|you" for "Yep -- sure -- you knew" (page 3), and the question mark at the end of the following sentence is spaced so that it appears separately at the beginning of the following line. Seems to me even a primitive spell checker would have caught "steaining" and "TVell".
Other major problems include omitting the illustrations (photographs), and omitting the table of contents with its chapter titles, e.g. "I. The Launching of the Scheme", and replacing it with "1 Section 1" with no title. And it gets worse: Take for example, "Chapter VII Sailing with Frozen Rigging" quoted from page 44 of the paperback, followed by a page 45 that just stops mid-sentence about a third of the way down the page. Page 46 is then blank, and Section 7 heads the top of page 47, continuing the rest of the sentence (which is the end of the fifth paragraph of the chapter) from page 45. Page 106 of the original hardback, which is full text, is interpreted by the OCR software as as colon and the letters "fi" -- here we've lost another page of text, and the page in the original is not smudged or worn. Problems like this continue to the very end of the 'recreated' book which includes the advertisements from the original hardback followed by the page which holds the information from the Stanford University Libraries, from which the book was originally copied -- all the way down to the "DATE DUE" slip which is mis-interpreted by the OCR system as "RATE DUE".
I wanted to read this book because it came from an earlier period (late nineteenth / early twentieth century) and told the story of sailing the "great loop" around the eastern United States. I'm still hoping to read that story, but it won't be from this edition of the book.
Slightly mis-quoting Dorothy Parker, "This is not an edition to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
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