Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
Well, if people don’t actually invest any time and effort into consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time and effort into creating them.
(The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You throw it in the bin and move on with your life.
That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many reviews are generated by people who read a different book, or didn't understand the one the comment at all.
Makes sense, I suppose. The reviewers of the book in question might then have read the part about chemotherapy “NFPs” and thought that the section is probably accurate and they just didn’t understand it, so they moved on. Which is alarming enough by itself.
Are you saying there are zero genuine reviews on Amazon? Or zero genuine reviews for this particular book?
I’m aware of at least one real person who occasionally writes honest reviews of technical books on Amazon: me.
So with enough reviews for a particular one, I’d expect at least some of them to be credible, yes. You can usually tell which ones are not shills or bots.
E.g. in this case, those might be the reviewers who gave a lower rating, and had specific (rather than generic) criticisms.
My surprise here stems from the fact that even they seemed to have skimmed or misread some key sections.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.