“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”

Jonathan Swift
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"The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital." - Bill Maher
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"The city is crowded my friends are away and I'm on my own
It's too hot to handle so I gotta get up and go

It's a cruel ... cruel summer"

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Real-Time Review: Potter Springs

Believe it or not, the Amarillo newspaper editors make poor choices that go far beyond printing Republican talking points as gospel truth and refusing to take responsibility for opinion pieces. Sometime within the past couple of years the Amarillo Globe-Republican dropped a venerated section of the newspaper—the Books page. Apparently, the AG-R’s bean-counting publisher decided that Amarillites were illiterate anyway, and the back page of the Sunday Lifestyle section would be a good place to sneak in a few more ads.

So when Panhandle Truth Squad received a review copy of Britta Coleman’s Potter Springs, we decided that we were more than qualified to rectify yet another local newspaper omission. Hell, we’d found ourselves able to expose the political lies and journalistic errors of the Globe-Republican with one hand tied behind our keyboards. And we had a trained English teacher lying around (or is it laying around?—shazbot! Well, no one’s perfect—). And Coleman writes a column (the sometimes saccharine “Practically Parenting”) for the AG-R, so reviewing her book felt like another way to keep tabs on them.

So, anyways, we’ll be reading Potter Springs over the next few weeks and reviewing as we go. Because, this being a blog, we decided to experiment a little with this review and conduct it in real-time. That is to say, we’ll review chapter-by-chapter as we read. This is monstrously unfair to the author, but what are blogs if not monstrously unfair?

Oh, and one other thing. Judging the book by its cover, the thing looks like some kind of romance. Maybe even a Christian romance. Proceed at your own risk.

SPACEDARK