2008-01-25 awful, just awful!

I forget why I decided to read this book but what a dreadful decision it was.

At times it seemed as if Kunkel was so desperate to impress that he went straight for the theasaurus so he could throw in a few words that no one would ever use just to appear extremely intelligent. Sorry buddy but that doesn't quite work.

This desire to impress can be seen in the way he writes - reading this book was truly excruciating. He simply could not come out and just say whatever he wanted to say. Instead he had to dress up every idea in a ridiculously pretentious way that meant it just did not work. There were a few good ideas in the book, mainly interesting little observations on modern urban life for generation X, but these were all lost in his awful prose.

As for the story itself - terrible. Is socialism really something so alien to Americans that Kunkel thinks he is the first young American to have encountered this brave new political ideology? And the pains he goes to to point out he favours democratic socialism - is he scared of a McCarthyesque witch hunt or something? Utter garbage.