Marmite

It’s quite fun reading the reviews of Inglorious on Amazon.

Now there are 22 of them and they average at 4 stars out of 5 stars.  That’s pretty good.

But I can’t help noticing that if you only look at the reviews that are from verified purchasers of Inglorious (eight of them) – then they average 4.8 stars.  So people we know have bought the book rate it really rather highly. That’s nice! It’s nice for me anyway.

One reviewer has pointed out there are a lot of 5-star ratings (and there are now two 4-star ratings too) but no 3-star or 2-star ratings and then a few-1 star ratings – so it seems as though people either love it, or hate it. What fun! Of course, none of those who hate it are verified purchasers of the book (though they may have bought it from somewhere other than Amazon, stolen it , or have borrowed it from the library or friends).

Those who do hate Inglorious show rather little sign of having read the book.

Here are their full reviews:

1. What a Crock of S***. The man is a complete buffoon.
2. spiteful rubbish Absolute nonsense, save your money
3. A most inglorious read. I bought this book thinking it would be heavy on fact, low on fiction. it was anything but. Littered with unbalanced views and heavily biased supposition.
4. Don’t waste your money. Don’t waste your money. It now needs someone to author a book to contradict the “evidence” presented in this work, which is just about as one-sided as you can get!
5. Inglorious-A book that certainly is!!! Animal cruelty. To all who thinks this is a good read I wonder what you know of this sport. I’m guessing that the answer is nothing. Dont (sic) be taken in by this idiots (sic) idea of what this sport actually represents. He makes no comment on what it contributes to the upland environment in anyway shape or form. If you want to put your efforts into protecting birds then take your heads out of the sand and think about the conditions and the environments of battery chickens, intensivley (sic) reared chickens that never see the light of day and go from chick to eating size in 6 weeks. Wake up and get real and leave the management of the uplands to the people who understand it and care for it.

These are much more fun, in a way, than the positive reviews!  But thank you to the larger number of people who have posted positive reviews – it tends to make my publisher happy!

If you do have a look at the Amazon page over the next few days, just for fun, you will notice that Inglorious is the #1 best seller in the ‘target shooting’ category.  I can be fairly sure about that since it has been every day throughout August and September and so far through October too.

Anyway, you can’t really judge a book by other people’s reviews – only by reading it yourself. And many of you are – thank you!

Inglorious: conflict in the uplands by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury – for reviews see here.

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