2006-08-18 Interesting material, badly put together

I think this book is well worth reading - as the previous reviewer noted there are a lot of fascinating stories and information in here, and to give the author he has dug up same real gems. But at the same time I was disappointed because with such rich material to work with the book could have been so much better.

It really cries out for a good editor. The thematic structure could work perfectly well and in some cases does (e.g. the chapter on the history of the Chinese in the East End) but at other times it seems random and repetitive.

For example, Jack the Ripper. Obviously you can't have a book about the East End without Jack the Ripper. But rather than cover it in a chapter on murder - a seemingly obvious place - we get 15 pages on it in a chapter on mystics and religion just because there has been speculation that some of the murders may have followed Masonic ritual. And we then got a lot of the detail repeated a little later on in a chapter on the Jews in the East End because there was also speculation that the Ripper might be Jewish.

I also found the imbalance between different subjects slightly odd and occasionally rather frustrating. For example, there is more space devoted to describing the route followed by Falk the 18th century alchemist on his daily walk than there is to the Black Death, which is dismissed in three paragraphs. In total we get eight pages on Falk, who is presumably one of the author's pet topics but is of at best limited interest to the rest of us.

In addition there are quite a lot of silly mistakes that could and should have been picked up (e.g. a statement that World War 2 started in 1940).

To sum up: it is worth reading anyway, but it is not half as good as it could have been given the subject matter.