Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Imagine the Wall Street Journal printing a review that slams Cohan as dishonest? You can read Dorothy Rabinowitz!! [...] Now imagine a prosecutor who failed to protect his staff from sexual harassment, who played favorites in his dominion of traffic court, who once shouted to an attorney loud enough to be heard down the hall: he didn't care if his client didn't do it; now that he was indicted maybe he would say who did. Imagine that. Now imagine that that was the same prosecutor Cohan feels sorry for and wishes us to believe he was "honorable" and only made a few mistakes. This book is a waste of time and an indictment in itself that the American publishing houses no longer vet the material and fall down in the editing process. Only recently could a THANKED person be allowed to write a review for a major paper. So disappointing. The worst part of this book is that it uses innuendo to try to restore the idea that "something happened" when it was declared that no crime was committed that night, not the false accusations and not the slime-wad accusation Cohan tries to insinuate that something happened that no one would be proud of. He mistakenly tries to apply the boorish actions of some persons who attended to tarnish the reputations of those indicted who were declared innocent. He insinuates that there is a nefarious unexplained accusation of DNA from one player supposedly found on the fingernail of the false accuser, when the false accuser's DNA wasn't even found! He claims to be dispassionate but rudely cuts off any line of questioning in his public appearances. Years ago a book was published called "A New Kind of Science" that failed to impress because little if anything in the book was new. True, the author gave old ideas new names, but anyone who knew the field, knew that the ideas themselves were not new. I got the same sense from this book (and even more from the constant repetition in the public appearances of the author). He wants credit for having been the first to uncover this fact, or this rumor, or this opinion, or even this medical report. But ALL of it had been reported before, WITH CITATIONS AND REFERENCES, neither of which are in this book. Stuart and Johnson have done a good job in detailing the failures of the book. It would be worth a book to examine the fraud of the book promotion process as well. This is the first book that caused me to wonder if and how positive "editorial reviews" are manufactured. Here is just one example of common phraseology that makes the whole of the positive review pool suspect: Even in this list you can find the expression "Cohan paints" to be used by one of the recent, invited reviews (yes, Cohan has been asking his friends and those he knows in the business to help him by writing reviews here). I did a google search on "Cohan paints" because it seemed so strange, and sure enough, over and over and over for several years, "Cohan paints" is in most of the so called trade or editorial reviews. This is "linguistic DNA" leaving more than trace amounts suggesting common authorship. Here is another: How often have you seen the description "gripping" or even its silly cousin "grippingly"? Do your own search, make up your own mind. The good-old-boy network is trying to save Cohan's tarnished reputation.