Proofreaders, beware! This book will drive you out of your mind.

The book is just what it says: Capsule biographies (from a paragraph or two to three or four pages in a few exceptional cases) of noteworthy New Yorkers. As far as I can tell, the selection of people is good, and the entries are generally appropriate in scope to the importance of the people involved.

But I don't think I have ever seen a book as badly typeset. Almost every page is littered with errors, from the trivial (quotes curled the wrong way, mis-spellings) to the deeply worrying (a person can hardly have died before being born, can he?). When there are so many small, easily detected errors, it's hard to trust it on things where you can't detect the errors. My wild guess is that this was OCR'd from a typewritten original, and no one read the result. Much as I'd like to rely on it, I find I'm afraid to trust it except where I can verify what it says from some other source. ( )