Alan BrookeCritiques

"London, City of the Dead"...Are you excited by the title? You must be. I fell victim to it and wasted hours of my life reading this book. I try to read everything I can find about London and the cover of the book was calling to me. Yes, well, I should have sealed my ears with wax like Odysseus on his ship...How can someone choose to write about one of the most intriguing, haunting cities of the Earth in connection to Death, monuments, cemeteries, strange cases of mortality, ghosts, murder and mayhem and turn it all into an endless feast of snooze and boredom? I don't know, this must be a true achievement.....

This book reminded me of the textbooks we used in university. The writing was uninspired, blant, awful. There were typos, paragraphs where they shouldn't have been and my overall feeling was that it was in desperate need of an editor. I couldn't bring myself to read the last three chapters, I've had enough. Reading about places I have visited and seeing them treated in such a distant, cold way made me furious.

If you enjoy dry, cold writing, give it a try. However, there are many books on the subject
that are much more interesting and written with spirit and panache. This one, though...Even Wikipedia articles are more exciting....Even the dead have more life in them...