Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Review: More Hubs that Provoke by Roy T James


Genre: Non-Fiction

Description:

This is another collection of Hubpages that deals with a wide-ranging variety of subjects. The opening Hub explores author's claim to writing, and further Hubs discuss presence of mind, the meaning of life, future of politics in general, democracy in particular and human life, in its end. How appropriate is our system of governance, and why we have chosen it, and what benefit we stand to gain from our party system, are some of the other ones. What is behind our predilection with the prohibition of alcohol, the popularity of natural things, and a proposition for a government for the future, are few more of these. In each, he offers his own take on the origin, uses, and benefits of each. He also presents his view how these phenomena as something that have more than one side, and from which we can benefit.”

Author:

After retiring from the Indian Navy in 2013, Roy T James has taken up writing, thus far writing and publishing four books in addition to this one, all non-fiction.

Appraisal:

Hubpages is a website that provides a venue where people can write short articles about whatever they want. You could view it as a blog covering an almost infinite number of subjects with an infinite number of authors contributing. Okay, maybe not infinite, but a lot of both. This book is a collection of 17 of the posts the author originally wrote for this site and while they cover multiple subjects, each aims to “provoke” in some way. In this context I've interpreted provoke as meaning to get the reader thinking in different ways, challenge what might be viewed as common sense or consensus opinion.

Given that introduction my thoughts on these 17 articles were mixed.

On the negative side I sometimes had a hard time understanding what the author was trying to say, the words not quite making sense to me. Sometimes the problem, in whole or in part, was due to missing words or grammatical errors. For example, what would you make of this sentence?

“In the early society, where neither there was the need nor the people had the intent, or the opportunities, of gainful occupation, activities of governance were welcome effort for the society.”

On the positive side, the ultimate goal of these pieces was to provoke, whether to challenge my current thinking or look at a subject from a different perspective. Most of these pieces did that. Whether I agreed, vehemently disagreed, or my thoughts fell somewhere in the middle, I was provoked.

Buy now from:    Amazon US    Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

A large number of typos, grammar problems, and other copy editing and proofreading misses for a book of this size.

Rating: *** Three Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 14-15,000 words

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