Not Remembered, Never Forgotten

"On a compelling journey searching for his family of origin, Bob Hafetz explores the emotional ride that adoptees take while searching for their birth families. His ability to express his feelings make this profound book a primer for everyone who wants to understand underlying issues for adoptees. A beautiful book that you will not want to put down."


Not Remembered Never Forgotten is in desperate need of a stringent line-edit. The text is far too often vague, confusing or reliant on opinion or assumption rather than research or hard fact; a couple of sentences are so poorly-written they are nonsensical; and in one particular case it's stated that people only adopt because they can't have biological children, which simply isn't the case. A strong edit would resolve all of these problems and produce a tighter, more coherent book with greatly-improved pacing and flow.

Then there are the careless errors: there is a punctuation error in the subtitle; a spelling mistake in the quote which is used to introduce the book; and several typos which really should have been corrected before this book was published. It's a shame because despite all of the problems I've listed this is a reasonably well-written book which isn't nearly as bad as many of the others I've reviewed here. I read as far as the tenth page, and I was disappointed not to have to read further.

The Outsider's Guide To Orthodox Judaism

The Outsider's guide To Orthodox Judaism

"The Outsider's Guide gave me the information and insight I needed to better understand my Orthodox Jewish colleagues."

"This book is the perfect gift for any non-Orthodox friend or coworker. It'll help clear up many misconceptions about Orthodox practice and beliefs."

"Clear, concise, informative, and easy to read."

"After reading The Outsider's Guide, I don't feel like such an outsider any more!"


What we have here is a book which is just right for self-publication: it occupies a nice little niche in the market which its author, Rabbi Arnie Singer, is perfectly placed to exploit.

It is not without its problems: the punctuation is somewhat erratic; there are several inconsistencies in formatting and style which are typical of self-published books; and I frequently found myself frustrated by the brevity of the text because despite this book's rather dry title, it's a good read. It provides a lot of information in a very small space and while the depth and detail that I'd have preferred is lacking, I can understand why the author chose this route—he was writing a handbook, not a history. I read twenty-five pages out of one hundred and fifteen to find my fifteen problems but I will be reading more and would suggest that you do too: this is a very informative, useful little book for anyone to have on their shelves.

al-Qaeda Strikes Again

Bill Binkley:

Has taken his first excursion into fiction with this fast-paced and exciting book about international terrorists.

al-Qaeda Strikes Again

The inexplicable suicide of a female passenger at JFK International Airport and a secret list discovered by authorities in Pakistan set the stage for a diabolical and deadly a-Qaeda plot involving simultaneous and catastrophic acts of terrorism across the United States. In a race against time, the only question is whether Terrorism Task Force Leader, Wayne Kirby, and his Rambo-like girlfriend, Rennie Jordan, will live long enough to unravel the details, find the terrorists and put a stop to their deadly jihad.



A few months after OJ Simpson's murder trial a flood of novels about celebrities who had got away with something appeared on editors’ desks. The ones I saw offered nothing new and were, on the whole, barely-disguised retellings of OJ's tale.

A similar influx of derivative works arrived after 9/11, only this time they had a far more sinister edge. Stories in which the bad guys were bad guys simply because they were Muslims, or Foreign, littered the slush-piles. Most paid little attention to developing a believable plot or creating compelling characters: simply showing (or more usually, telling) that a character was somehow Other was considered enough to establish him or her as a potential terrorist. It is a deeply racist approach, and one which the author of al-Qaeda Strikes Again relies upon to tell his story.

The book begins with a woman flying into America and dying soon after she arrives at the airport. Right from the start she is suspected of being a terrorist despite there being no evidence of that apart from her name: Safia Makhdoom.

Luckily, this story is told so very badly that I didn't have to read much of it is to find my fifteen errors. The book contains a fair scattering of punctuation problems (hyphens are commonly used when dashes should appear; comma-splices abound), a couple of spelling mistakes, and numerous nameless characters which are indistinguishable from one another. The one exception is an "officer" (of what, I'm not quite sure) who is distinguished from his colleagues by the "epaulets" [sic] he wears. Whole weeks are lost in time-slips; characters disappear on trips which should be mysterious, considering how little reason or excuse is given for them: instead they are simply dull absences of dull characters in a book which you'd be better off avoiding.

I read five pages of this one, and suggest that you don't even consider trying it.

Politics In Compassion: Jack Schauer

Politics In Compassion Is A Rare Commodity

This study of political compassion as viewed within American political history, includes such political leaders and individuals as Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Jane Addams, among others. What does a sense of political compassion imply in terms of it being utilised for the common good as well as how it is translated into effective public policies?


Politics In Compassion: The Future Of American Politics wins the prize for the most confusing book I've read for this blog. It's full of jargon, and the unnecessarily over-complexity of the sentence structure means that it shows a horrible lack of clarity. Take, for example, this:

"… Or an individual in identifying with the pain of another human being(s) is made to suffer as well, so that he or she in identifying with the suffering of the hurting individual, that is forming a common bond, hopes to alleviate that suffering as well, an altruistic kind of compassion. However, in order for an individual to display true human compassion, they should not only do in order to feel good about themselves, or as a way of broadcasting the fact that they indeed are a good and altruistic person."

It's jumbled (I suspect that even the title is jumbled and should actually be Compassion In Politics, which would make far more sense), lacking in logic, and incredibly poorly-written: consequently, I didn't even make it to the end of the prologue. I read two pages out of one hundred and eleven, and I strongly suggest that this writer puts a lot of effort into making his work more accessible before he even considers writing anything else.