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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
...the perfect description hit me, gossip!....
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I was very much disturbed by the liberties he took and the way he assumed to know the inner thoughts of each of the players. This was dramatization run wild. It's one thing for a writer of fiction to tell a story from a position of omniscience, but reporters and biographers need to be more careful.
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
...The third major problem, for me at least, was McKenna's referring to many of the characters sometimes as female and sometimes as male....
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Given that this was an account of people who themselves appeared at times to be confused as to their sexual identities, I had no problem with it. In addition, it may have been the author's desire to show that sexual identities are not set in carbon.
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
...So anyway with that out of the way this was an entertaining book presenting an aspect of the culture of Victorian England one does not find in the history books....
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That it does. And while it may fail as biography because it assumes too much (even with the extensive footnotes), it certainly succeeds as literature in that it paints a vivid picture of a world which no longer exists.
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
...I also learned about the term mary-ann.  WTSharpe... |
I trust everyone caught that.
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
...Oh, I rated this with three stars for the reasons I mentioned. I am curious though as I have never paid any heed to the thread rating system. For me the rating results don't seem to display. Also why would it allow me to submit a rating result more than once?
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I didn't realize it did. We'll be going to a new OS in the not-too-distant future, and perhaps the new software will allow for a better rating system.