London: The Tales Behind the Statues

click here for more details, find new or used items	Alison Haslam Our price £5.49 (£6.99) New from £2.95 Used from £3.24 Pages: 64 (Paperback) ISBN: 0954766806 Pub: Blithfield Publishing Pub date: 2004-07 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 309933

Reader Reviews:

Very hard to read (3/3 people found this helpful)

Commas are sprinkled about in this book in a seemingly random fashion. They are there in bizarre places and missing from appropriate ones.
It's a shame that the publisher didn't think to offer this book any basic proof-reading, or even think to read it at all, as a quick glance at any of the pages would show how hard it is to read.
If you overlook the grammer and spelling, the book has well researched (if foundation level) history. I didn't find it amusing, however, although it was written with this in mind. The author is clearly genuinely interested in the topic, and obviously wanted to write a good book, which is probably why she is a successful tour guide.

Princess Louse (3/3 people found this helpful)

This volume is too slight to cover what it proposes. It contains descriptions of 26 statues in London, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some of the information is valuable, but the writing is often hard to understand. The work is poorly proofread and there are a myriad of spelling and grammatical mistakes. The best one is "Princess Louse" for Princess Louise. Is this a Freudian slip?

Not Sure Whether to Laugh Or Cry (4/4 people found this helpful)

Alison Haslam is a tour guide in London, and this book is a collection of anecdotes and stories about various statues in the British capital, the kind of amusing stuff a guide would tell a group of tourists. Some of the material is historic, while other is of the "did you know" and "fancy that" type.

Nothing particularly wrong with this approach apart from one big problem: Alison Haslam cannot spell to save her life and, whoever published her book (the publisher is not a household name) obviously does not believe in proof-reading either. The result is comical. Not only the usual problem with "its" "it's" but also a Alison Haslam invention, the " its' ". And of course, the Palmerston couple is referred to as "the Palmerston's".

Not sure why this book was published. It is not deep history and it is not very amusing either. It may help you pass away a few hours, but the spelling mistakes and basic errors of language will infuriate most readers.

The book is dedicated to a certain "Frank" who, apparently, told the author "Alison, you can do it", and was therefore the inspiration for the work. Well, I am sorry to say, Alison, you can't do it.

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