Thoughtless for the Day

Before we move on to the hilarity that is one star reviews of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (scroll down to "Key Phrases" and weep), Slate has a trio of articles today that are truly worth reading:

"The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It's a rare human being who can refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month won't harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month?"

- from Why You Shouldn't Hit Your Kids

"Good analogies-not extravagant metaphors-are essential for treatment of tough concepts. Fortunately, there are plenty of good models."

- from Atomic Prose

"Moving as the ensemble is, the overall effect is also oddly unresolved, almost nihilistic.".

- fromThe Pentagon Memorial

I would like to sanction a zero star rating, January 28, 1999

By A Customer

Or maybe -5. This book should have never saw print, much less read and loved by generations of Anerican readers. That goes to show how stupid Americans can be. Nor should it be regarded as the novel that inspired all other American novels. Nor should anybody be impressed by the seven or eight dialects employed within the novel's structure, which the fool author made up to fool us into believing people actually talked like that. The story is a couple of people floating down a river, with a number of utterly unsuccessful scenes meant to enhance and define a theme so obvious its not even worth mentioning. Then there is the structure of scenes themselves. Each uniformly the same in length and what occurs except the last where in the scene drags on and on and on and on. Then to top it all off at the end Hucleberry Fin regresses. This is worthless. Anybody who likes this novel is stupid. They have no linguistic intelligence or even logical intelligence. And yes you all should read Dean Koontz who is a better writer than Samuel Clemens ever dreamed of being. He will be our Shakespeare, never Mark Twain. I will come back from the dead to stop that from occuring. This is the worst, well known, book ever written so far as I know in this language

[You heard it here first, kids. Dean Koonts, author of In Odd We Trust, will be our Shakespeare]

Dragged out and boring!, March 1, 2000

By Tessa (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

I really didn't like this book. Maybe it's because you need an imagination to read it, and mine isn't always there. It just seemed too unrealistic, and I just hated it.

Mark Twain can't write a good book., February 19, 1998

By A Customer

Whatever you do do not read this book. It's long, it's really hard to read, and the story just flat out sucks. A lot of people say that this book is packed with meaning, BUT IT'S NOT. Mark Twain wrote a stupid story about a boy and a slave floating down the mississsippi. THAT SOUNDS REALLY INTERESTING!! Yea right. This book is a big waste of time, it should be out-lawed from our schools, because Twain likes to use the "N" word a lot. This book in my opinion, should get the "Turkey of the Century" award. A big book B-B-Q, should be devoted to all the copies in print.

This is the dumbest book I've ever picked up, October 2, 2000

By A Customer

This book is so poorly written, and out of context, it's not even funny. Samuel Clemens should be smacked, and every copy of this stupid book should be burned.