- Christensen, Mark. Build the Perfect Beast. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. ISBN 0-312-26873-4.
- Here's the concept: a bunch of Southern California morons
set out to reinvent the automobile in the 1990's. This would be
far more amusing were it not written by one of them, who
remains, after all the misadventures recounted in the text, fully
as clueless as at the get-go, and enormously less irritating had his
editor at St. Martin's Press—a usually respectable house—construed
their mandate to extend beyond running the manuscript through
a spelling checker. Three and four letter words are misspelled;
technical terms are rendered phonetically (“Nacca-duct”, p. 314;
“tinsel strength”, p. 369), factual howlers of all kinds litter
the pages, and even the spelling of principal characters varies from
page to page—on page 6 one person's name is spelled two different
ways within five lines. This may be the only book ever
issued by a major publisher which manages to misspell “Popsicle” in
two entirely different ways (pp. 234, 350). When you fork out
US$26.95 for a book, you deserve something better than a first draft
manuscript between hard covers. I've fact-checked many a manuscript
with fewer errors than this book.
January 2003 