Rating: 
Summary: Mistitled and unneccesary, though not terrible
Review: Two things must be understood about the people behind theonering.net before buying a book from them: #1 The success of their site is not because of their own work or ingenuity, but because of their partnership with New Line Cinema. #2 Most of the staff serving the site are techies pretending to be writers.And thus they made the biggest mistake an author could make: they screwed up the title of the book. This collection is not about J.R.R. Tolkien, nor is it a guide at all. It is a collection of thoughts about the fictional world Tolkien created. Sadly, theonering.net is only popular because of its links to great information; not because of any information it presents itself. And so there's not much reason to read the thoughts of its staff. In fact, if someone is interested, he or she can read the same sort of thoughts for free all over the internet with little searching. "The People's Guide" is not a bad book. It's just an unneccesary book. It's a chance for the techies to cash in on the popularity of the movies, and it's a chance for them to call themselves authors. My advice for consumers is to spend the money on real authors.
Rating: 
Summary: a modest defense of this book
Review: Well, I feel compelled to defend this book. Yes, it is a collection of writing from a highly popular fan website, written by "amateurs" (by which I assume is meant someone who is not a university professor with stacks of publications to his/her credit). The book's title is the key here, the "People's Guide", not the "Academician's Guide". I may be old-fashioned, but I really prefer holding a book in my hands to reading from a computer screen. I like to underline key passages, put tabs on pages, return often to something that caught my curiosity. As a collection, the book is a mixed bag. Some writers are better than others, some chapters are frivolous, some are humorous and some are as good as anything you're likely to find in a scholarly journal. That's what makes this book so interesting, it's the voices of all the website creators, who are the people. I put myself in the same category, Tolkien fans who are educated, literate and don't have a university appointment but do have a lot of ideas. So I admire their bravery for putting their thoughts on paper and on the Internet, for others to tear down or hold up. Also, I want to express kudos to Cold Spring Press for a very elegant attractively designed volume. The publisher obviously put more than the ordinary effort into the production of this very nice trade paperback.
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