Rating: 
Summary: What's all the fuss?
Review: I bought this book after reading rave reviews about it. I was truly disappointed. The book makes one or two points and then repeats them over and over, probably in an attempt to fatten the book for publication. The author describes a few minor abuses of the English language but does nothing more. This book suffers in comparison to others such as Patricia O'Conner's "Woe is I", which present English abuses in a clever and better written style and which provide examples of incorrect usage and their corrected versions. These latter books teach you something about the English language. Eats and Shoots does not. If you are considering buying this book, ask a friend to talk you out of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Truss, you ain't got it. :(
Review: A book like this has needed to be written for a while. It's not a definitive guide to punctuation by any means, but it it aims to be a readble, fairly thorough romp through the little squiggles that make language intelligible.It's just such a shame that it had to be written by Lynn Truss, whose voice throughout is spiked with a false sense of bon homie and a very real smarminess. I heard her on the radio recently and she ain't funny in person at all, so why try in print? And another thing, she's pictured posing on the back flap about to add an apostrophe to an advertisement for the film 'Two Weeks Notice'. Why didn't she? I get the sense that all her talk of 'zero tolerance' and ambitions of literary militias are strictly posing as well.
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Summary: So, "I am not a grammarian" . . .
Review: Dear Ms. Truss, I had settled into my seat in the waiting area at LaGuardia Airport, looking forward to reading this amusing book that had received such good press. Can you imagine my chagrin as my eyes rested on the following sentence (in the Preface, yet!):
Preface, page xxiii - "I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up." (italics mine) I simply couldn't believe it! How could you use a plural pronoun to complement a singular subject? I became very upset and quite angry and felt that I simply could read no farther! But after an hour or so, I decided that I would try to be forgiving and tolerant and see what else you might have to say. BUT, here is another example! (Mind you, we are still at the beginning of the book at this point.) The Tractable Apostrophe, page 35 - ...a singing group called Hear'Say. The announcement of the Hear'Say name was quite a national occasion, as I recall; people actually went out in very large numbers to buy their records...(italics mine) You state on page 32 that, "I am not a grammarian." Nor am I, but shouldn't you be, if you are dealing so severely with questions of punctuation? Surely grammar has a lot to do with those "traffic signals of language". But, apparently you are a grammarian, or else you would not have commented thus: Introduction, page 4 -..."eight items or less" (because it should be "fewer")... Introduction, page 5 - "When we hear the construction 'Mr. Blair was stood' (instead of 'standing') we suck our teeth with annoyance, and when words such as 'phenomena', 'media', 'cherubim' are treated as singular ('The media says it was quite a phenomena looking at those cherubims'), some of us cannot suppress actual screams." Where were your editors? Did they not proof this book? What happened? I expect more than this from England, and feel somewhat betrayed by the slipshoddiness(?) of this publication. (A little melodramatic, perhaps, but nonetheless true.) What to do, what to do - I cannot decide whether or not to finish your book. Sigh.
Rating: 
Summary: The Biggest little comma i know
Review: is the one in the Good Book...wow, did that result in a mess through the centuries or what? At last, a book that takes commas seriously. About time, and then some.
Rating: 
Summary: EATS: Shoots & Leaves
Review: WOW! Now I understand the frustrations my previous English teachers felt trying to make me understand the importance of punctuation! This book is a humorous take on what all of us should have learned in high school but were unwilling to accept. Punctuation is everywhere, but proper punctuation is not! I do not typically read non-fiction, but I found this book informative and enjoyable.
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Summary: :{
Review: The book has all charm of political talk show radio, those festivals of self congratulation offering smug warmth to those of us ever so much smarter than the other guy. It gets pretty thin pretty quick. Ms Truss suggests that punctuation exists to make clear one meaning over alternative errors of thought. She then proceeds to display her insights with ever so many examples of typographic or educational errors. It's not a bad thought, but it gets less funny the longer it goes on. And for a small book it seems to go on long. On the way she loses any connection to the early, simple truth, and the book becomes a simple parade of her superiority to traffic signs, cartoons, fourteen year-old girls, and Shakespeare. And it's not a bad parade; she has a firm grammatical grasp and offers many truly engaging bits of punctual history. But finally I wish I had heeded my unease at buying any book equal in size to those wondering where went the cheese.
Rating:
Summary: The author of E,S & L shoots herself in the foot
Review: A classic example of book overhype. Ms. Truss may be a fine person and experienced writer but she desperately needs a much stronger editor, as this so-called British bestseller is wildly overwritten, hopelessly redundant, decidedly unhumorous after the first few pages, and generally not very illuminating to those of us who also abhor poor punctuation and grammar. Absolutely not worth the $17.50 it commands. Sorry, Lynne.
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Summary: My Own Inner Stickler Is Highly Tickled!
Review: I have hugely enjoyed this little book! My own "inner stickler" (a beautifully apt Truss characterization), groans at all sorts of ubiquitous language abuses and misuses - from menu entries such as "Liver with smothered onions" (do onions taste better when they die slow?), to radio announcements of sales on "gem joolery" (surely they meant "jewelry"?), and headlines on "capitol punishment" (Washington, DC, I hope!). Punctuation is merely one small peninsula on the coastline of the veritable continent of modern linguistic abuse! I've spent years suppressing outbursts as I scan signs, billboards, headlines, and, yes, book reviews. (Note: All the reviews but the briefest on this page - and, hopefully, my own! - contain egregious misspellings!) Truss' book refreshingly out-stickled me; it's good to know there are other language sticklers out there. But Truss is wonderfully humorous and down to earth in her presentation, avoiding, or at least leavening, pomposity and pedantry with deft wit and wonderful anecdotes. A real treat!
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Summary: Pure Pleasure--and Helpful Instruction
Review: By Bill Marsano. This charming and useful little (209 pages) book, a surprise best-seller in England, offers short, clear, effective instruction for those who have trouble with punctuation--and a great deal of fun (I laughed out loud at least four times) for those who don't
Lynne Truss sneakily addresses the former by way of the latter. She gives the punctuation-abled a lot of laughs at the expense of the punctuation-challenged, quoting signs, instructions and other items that can seem ridiculous--and even have their meanings made obscure or ridiculous--by poor punctuation. She's not mean-spirited about it, but she is pretty clear that although correct punctuation is something many people happily live without, not knowing how to handle apostrophes and commas and a handful of other simple marks is akin to lacking other basic but non-critical skills, such as tying shoelaces and telling time on a clock that has hands instead of digits.
Besides--the instructions and explanations take up only about half the book, so now you're down to only about 100 pages. And the pages are small, too. Don't tell me you can't handle this.
As for the rest, it's history and anecdote loosely wrapped in light-hearted prose. Truss is British and so is her book, so there will be a few references and locutions that give pause to Americans, but none I think are truly impenetrable. She has delightful stories about famous writers warring over punctuation: George Bernard Shaw hectoring Lawrence of Arabia, for example, and Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, at odds with James Thurber. My favorite chapter is on the semicolon, which is also my favorite punctuation mark. Truss quotes Gertrude Stein, who hated both comma (she called it "servile") and semicolon: "They [semicolons] are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature." I have to hand it to Stein: She did a beautiful job of expressing her loathing and she did it with nothing more than the bare minimum: a pair of periods.
I advise reading only one chapter a day, and for two reasons. First, Truss's prose style is occasionally too rich by half (and sometimes ungrammatical). Second, there are only seven chapters, and if you get as much pleasure out of this book as I did, you'll want to make it last.--Bill Marsano, a professional writer and editor, is a devotee of the suspensive hyphen.
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Summary: It's not just me!
Review: (Notice my use of an exclamation mark!) As a life-long stickler in regard to spelling and punctuation, I was eager to read this book as soon as I heard about it. Lynne Truss's hilarious prose, and at-times diatribe against the ignorant who abuse our system of punctuation, is well-written and peppered with humorous sketches that detail the plight of our periods, commas, semi-colons and apostrophes. Thrown in with her stories of punctuation-gone-wrong, are the straightforward rules for using the various symbols that enhance our reading and writing. Now, admittedly, some of these rules aren't straightforward and can confound even the most dedicated grammarian. Yet Truss lays out the rules with simple and laugh-out-loud examples. I found myself laughing along with her stories, because they were so familiar to me as well. Punctuation, as well as spelling, is in a sad state of affairs in our present times. I cannot read anything without a critical eye and always find numerous mistakes that should have been caught. Yet if our youth aren't taught how to correctly use punctuation in the first place, how could they know how to fix it when it's wrong? Truss sees some hope, some light at the end of the tunnel, and it lies with those of us who are sticklers for correct usage. If we arm ourselves to combat ill-usage, perhaps we can change the tide. This book is not for everyone. If you don't know when you should use a semi-colon or a colon, than you most likely won't find this book funny. Informative, but not funny. And if you don't go into a blind fury when you see a "Truck's Only" sign in a parking lot, than this is not the book for you. Or perphas it is, because you might learn something. It couldn't hurt.
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