Blind Luck

Rating:
Summary: Interesting concept, poor execution (pardon the pun...)
Review: (NOTE TO AMAZON.COM: My name is John Small, and I am employed as news editor and columnist for the Johnston County Capital-Democrat, a weekly newspaper headquartered in Tishomingo, OK. The following version of my review of "Blind Luck" was written for Amazon.com, but an extremely abbreviated version appeared in the April 15 edition of the newspaper as part of my copyrighted "Small Talk" column. Hopefully that does not violate the terms of your ownership of the review, since the version that appears here was written for use here and does not duplicate what appeared in the newspaper.)If contemporary fiction is what you enjoy, it is difficult to get much more contemporary than Ben Cooper¹s "Blind Luck."To be 100 percent honest, I really didn't WANT to like this book. Why? Well, for one thing there¹s not a single likable character in it; the "heroes" of the tale are a group of self-indulgent, pizza-snarfing, beer-guzzling yuppies who really don't have a clue about reality. And the plot - which centers around the murder of U.S. legislators by the aforementioned yuppies - is hardly what one can reasonably consider to be "light entertainment.And speaking strictly from a technical point of view, the book is not what you¹d expect from a professional author who (as Cooper's biographical sketch so proudly proclaims him to be) is a graduate of a major university. The text has enough grammatical errors, misspellings and punctuation problems to give a first-year grade school English teacher a bad case of the bends; why Cooper can't even demonstrate the proper use of an apostrophe is beyond me.But in spite of all this (or, oddly enough, maybe because of it), "Blind Luck" - while not always enjoyable - proved to be a difficult book to pwalk away from. Cooper is not a great writer (he barely qualifies as a GOOD writer), but at least give him credit for weaving an interesting tale that is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility in post-Lewinskygate America. While Cooper tries too hard to portray these vile "heroes" in a sympathetic manner, he at least demonstrates the good sense to allow events to progress (albeit in a roundabout way) to a conclusion that is, if not logically satisfying, then at least morally so.If it serves no other purpose, "Blind Luck" at least stands as ugly testimony of just how far this great nation has fallen from what our Founding Fathers had hoped we might become. So you find that sort of thing entertaining, you'll love this book.

Rating:
Summary: lowers the bar
Review: About the best thing I can say about this book is that it gives hope to those plugging away at novels that just about anyone can get published nowadays. I'm in agreement with the majority of reviewers who complained about the novel's lack of editing and disjointed story line. In fact, the only reviewer who defended the mistakes and praised this book is from Houston where, coincidentally, the author currently resides.

Rating:
Summary: A Diamond In The Rough
Review: At the recommendation of another Amazonian, I purchased Blind Luck and have been doing my best to get through it. I found the book's premise to be refreshing and attractive, which is probably why I haven't thrown it away yet. However, this book is so poorly written and so poorly edited that I find myself paying more attention to its shortcomings than its prose. Certainly the writer could have done a better job with his characters. Last I heard, yuppies were supposed to be young urban professionals. This motley crew of beer swillers is by and large unemployed as far as I can tell. The dialog is stilted, especially for a "regional" story. The spelling and grammar is atrocious. More annoying is the blatant disregard for accuracy. (Beaumont is in Jefferson County. The "drag" in Austin is Guadalupe, not 6th Street. Too many errors to count!) Sure, I know this is fiction, but at least they could have fact checked this booger. A decent editor might have made this a worthwhile read. Right now, it's a good story told too poorly and sold too expensively. And that's my sugar-coated opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Good story, poor editing
Review: Blind Luck was an entertaining story, but the errors -- grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation, etc. -- made it a difficult read. I also found the description of the characters as "a group of yuppies" to be highly inaccurate. "Beer-guzzling, unemployed 20-somethings" would have been more accurate. The book proves that anyone with a decent imagination can get a book published, regardless of their writing skill. It also proves that any company with a word-processor could call itself a publisher, regardless of their knowledge of grammar, usage, punctuation, etc. While I understand that most books contain a few errors, it was very distressing to me that I could have used a red pen to make corrections on every other page -- at least! I found the story to be entertaining, and if the types of errors mentioned above don't bother you, you'll like it too!

Rating:
Summary: lowers the bar
Review: I was hoping for something along the lines of John Ross' _Unitended Consequences_. I bought this overpriced read along with _Term Limits_ and found them both a waste of time. If you liked UC, you wont like this. Completely non-libertarian, to boot.

Rating:
Summary: Too expensive and a plot didnt deliver the Revolution
Review: I was hoping for something along the lines of John Ross' _Unitended Consequences_. I bought this overpriced read along with _Term Limits_ and found them both a waste of time. If you liked UC, you wont like this. Completely non-libertarian, to boot.

Rating:
Summary: Why you should Hire a Proof Reader
Review: If you get by all the grammatical and spelling errors, you SHOULD if nothing else... enjoy the plot. Look I've never written a book review before, (well at least not since High School) which is most likely very evident, but after reading the so called reviews here I could not help myself. In case you did not notice every one of the "reviewers" could not get past the spelling and grammar errors. It is my opinion that after the first four or five errors the readers were so obsessed with finding more that they forgot they were reading a novel and became amateur Proof Readers hell bent on making blue marks in their books. (Blue ink is used for corrections and deletions by real Editors) The plot is actually not bad and the fact Big Business literally owns our government and controls our politicians like their own personal puppets, this makes for a refreshing read. Although it will take something at least as drastic as the Drunken Twenty-Somethings plan to change this Land-Of-The-Free back to some semblance of what our Fore Fathers had in mind, it isn't to plausible. All in all, this is a good book at worst.