Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In the essay on Patrick O'Brian to be found on its website, the W.W. Norton Company comments upon O'Brian's rare civility in dealings with his publisher. Certainly Norton has repaid him with an incivility perhaps even more rare by subjecting his great work, now that he is dead and unable to protest, to an editor who obviously neither reads nor understands English. Other reviewers here have enumerated the kinds of error that make almost every other page of The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels difficult, sometimes impossible, for a close, careful and experienced reader to decipher and will certainly leave young, less experienced readers baffled and ultimately disgusted with the works themselves. I wish only to suggest, to anyone wanting to read these novels for the first or second or hundredth time, or to give them as a gift, that he or she find another edition and avoid this one. And to suggest, also, that whoever at Norton wrote, in the O'Brian article on that website, that his publishers were sorry they would not be seeing him again, should reconsider that statement. His publishers ought to be very, very glad to be beyond the man's reach after having offered him this appalling insult.