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Bottom of The Barrel Book Reviews-Confessions of a Recovering Preppie
An anonymous reader writes "Michael de Mare's, Confessions of a Recovering Preppie, has
been sitting on my desk a long time, for good reason. They say you
can't always judge a book by it's cover but in this case, the
unintentionally embarrassing front is perfect. Confessions is a painfully
ordinary collection of college stories. Michael seems to have a
different definition for the word preppie than the good people at
Webster or I do. Even though the author specializes in cryptography,
he seems unable to decipher any social situation, himself or the code
to writing a book worth reading. Click below to see how confusing it
gets.
Confessions of a Recovering Preppie
author
Michael de Mare
pages
304
publisher
BookSurge Publishing
rating
0/10
reviewer
Samzenpus
ISBN
1419663275
summary
Stuff happens in college but not to the author
Michael de Mare is to literature what Jeffery Dahmer is to fine
dining. At least someone finally stopped Dahmer. To complain about any
one part of this Titanic failure is like complaining that you don't
like the tilt of your room, as the ship sinks beneath the waves. The
back of the book promises, "In this compelling book, he lays bare
the instructive stories of romantic adventures, intense studies,
fascinating friend-ships, highly ambitious goals, and the wit and
wisdom that can only come from the mind of those who are capable of
fathoming the black arts of advanced cryptography and computer
science." What we get is a book that has no theme to speak of. It
reads like a logbook more than a novel. I have managed to group
Confessions into three parts. Each part consists of the few
common ideas that reappear many times in the book. It also includes
the scant instances when Michael has an idea or something noteworthy
happens.
The first part lets us in on a few basic facts about Michael and his day to day activities. He hates rap. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. In this section Michael becomes aware that his friend likes to drink at parties until he is drunk. He informs us that this is called binge drinking and worries that it might affect his friend's grades. (His friend's grades are slightly better than his in the end.) Then he discovers that college kids pirate music. One of my favorite parts of the book can be found here. Michael tells a story about his second cousin who tried to get him seriously hurt on two separate occasions. The first time, Michael was tricked into riding an unbroken horse. The second, was an incident which involved milking an extremely unfriendly cow. This story allows the reader to understand that the feelings of dread and the overwhelming desire to make Michael de Mare stop are a perfectly normal reaction. It is a feeling that is shared by his family and most likely, anyone who talks to him.
Just when you are wondering what purpose the 300 pages of Confessions serve, the author takes a trip to Montreal. When a customs official is making her way through the train, asking if anyone has anything to declare, we find out the FBI is following Michael. Two FBI agents tell the official loudly that they have guns and that they are following Michael because he works for the NSA. At no point prior was the NSA mentioned and it is never addressed again. I re-read this part several times to make sure that it wasn't a dream sequence or a jump to future events. At this point, I was sure that this book was the best way Michael had of telling his friends and family that he was or planned on being, a spy.
Part two follows a common pattern. Michael hates rap. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. He learns that men, in particular, college-aged men, are easily manipulated by pretty girls. He doesn't see his stoner suite mate for a couple days so he reports him missing. (The stoner was visiting home.) This section contains what is easily my favorite part of the book. It also demonstrates how hard it is to read Confessions. Here, Michael is talking to a girl he may have some interest in but is so uncomfortable around, that you're not quite sure.
"Hi Shawna! How are you doing?"
"My circumstances are not good."
"Your circumstances?"
"Yes. They are not good."
Now I was concerned about Shawna's circumstances. They were, as Shawna had pointed out, not good. I didn't know which circumstances she was referring to, but I was sure that they were circumstances that she considered important. For this reason I hoped Shawna's circumstances would improve."
Then it dawned on me. Michael de Mare specializes in cryptography. This whole thing is an elaborate code! The de Mare code! If I could crack this book I could find out where the descendants of Jesus live and who the Illuminati would allow to win the Super Bowl next year. Unfortunately the best anagram of Michael de Mare I could come up with was, A charm I'd eel me. So I tried writing down every other word, then every third. I cut the pages into strips and wrapped them around sticks of different widths. I made a baking soda solution and brushed it over the pages. Finally I exposed it to a UV lamp and then heat from a light bulb. Nothing I did seemed to reveal a new story that someone might want to read, so I continued with the last 100 pages.
The end of the book provides the usual. Mike hates rap music. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. Michael doesn't see his binge drinking friend for a few days and somehow resists the urge to report him missing to the police. He explains how the world would have broke out into World War III if George Bush hadn't been elected president. He defends his thesis, graduates and is accepted into a PHD program. The book then ends as quickly and as uninterestingly as it started. I entertained the notion that this was actually a Walmart viral marketing campaign for a few moments. "Walmart, we got everything Michael de Mare needs and most things that normal people need too." Probably not the message the suits in marketing would want to send. Now I'm convinced that Confessions of a Recovering Preppie is actually part of Michael's work at the NSA. This book is part of an "enhanced interrogation" program. Right now a man in a nicely pressed suit and sunglasses is reading Mr. de Mare's device of unusual punishment, for the second time, to a prisoner who begs to just be water-boarded like usual. Confessions of a Recovering Preppie is not the bottom of the barrel it is in a hole five feet below the barrel.
The first part lets us in on a few basic facts about Michael and his day to day activities. He hates rap. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. In this section Michael becomes aware that his friend likes to drink at parties until he is drunk. He informs us that this is called binge drinking and worries that it might affect his friend's grades. (His friend's grades are slightly better than his in the end.) Then he discovers that college kids pirate music. One of my favorite parts of the book can be found here. Michael tells a story about his second cousin who tried to get him seriously hurt on two separate occasions. The first time, Michael was tricked into riding an unbroken horse. The second, was an incident which involved milking an extremely unfriendly cow. This story allows the reader to understand that the feelings of dread and the overwhelming desire to make Michael de Mare stop are a perfectly normal reaction. It is a feeling that is shared by his family and most likely, anyone who talks to him.
Just when you are wondering what purpose the 300 pages of Confessions serve, the author takes a trip to Montreal. When a customs official is making her way through the train, asking if anyone has anything to declare, we find out the FBI is following Michael. Two FBI agents tell the official loudly that they have guns and that they are following Michael because he works for the NSA. At no point prior was the NSA mentioned and it is never addressed again. I re-read this part several times to make sure that it wasn't a dream sequence or a jump to future events. At this point, I was sure that this book was the best way Michael had of telling his friends and family that he was or planned on being, a spy.
Part two follows a common pattern. Michael hates rap. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. He learns that men, in particular, college-aged men, are easily manipulated by pretty girls. He doesn't see his stoner suite mate for a couple days so he reports him missing. (The stoner was visiting home.) This section contains what is easily my favorite part of the book. It also demonstrates how hard it is to read Confessions. Here, Michael is talking to a girl he may have some interest in but is so uncomfortable around, that you're not quite sure.
"Hi Shawna! How are you doing?"
"My circumstances are not good."
"Your circumstances?"
"Yes. They are not good."
Now I was concerned about Shawna's circumstances. They were, as Shawna had pointed out, not good. I didn't know which circumstances she was referring to, but I was sure that they were circumstances that she considered important. For this reason I hoped Shawna's circumstances would improve."
Then it dawned on me. Michael de Mare specializes in cryptography. This whole thing is an elaborate code! The de Mare code! If I could crack this book I could find out where the descendants of Jesus live and who the Illuminati would allow to win the Super Bowl next year. Unfortunately the best anagram of Michael de Mare I could come up with was, A charm I'd eel me. So I tried writing down every other word, then every third. I cut the pages into strips and wrapped them around sticks of different widths. I made a baking soda solution and brushed it over the pages. Finally I exposed it to a UV lamp and then heat from a light bulb. Nothing I did seemed to reveal a new story that someone might want to read, so I continued with the last 100 pages.
The end of the book provides the usual. Mike hates rap music. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them. He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and shopping at Walmart. Michael doesn't see his binge drinking friend for a few days and somehow resists the urge to report him missing to the police. He explains how the world would have broke out into World War III if George Bush hadn't been elected president. He defends his thesis, graduates and is accepted into a PHD program. The book then ends as quickly and as uninterestingly as it started. I entertained the notion that this was actually a Walmart viral marketing campaign for a few moments. "Walmart, we got everything Michael de Mare needs and most things that normal people need too." Probably not the message the suits in marketing would want to send. Now I'm convinced that Confessions of a Recovering Preppie is actually part of Michael's work at the NSA. This book is part of an "enhanced interrogation" program. Right now a man in a nicely pressed suit and sunglasses is reading Mr. de Mare's device of unusual punishment, for the second time, to a prisoner who begs to just be water-boarded like usual. Confessions of a Recovering Preppie is not the bottom of the barrel it is in a hole five feet below the barrel.
Hmmm...could it be another Atlanta Nights?
The book seems to read like the mindless, self-indulgent chattiness usually only found in Ellen DeGeneres' comedy routines but the joke's on whoever buys the book!
Please. No more. These reviews are, truly, the bottom of the barrel.
The editing is worse.
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
I'm all for occasional humor (hell, I used to be an admin on Fark) -- but I'm thinking that if Slashdot is going to be running as much crap as they have with 'idle', crappy book reviews, and criticizing their reader e-mail, that they need to drop the "Stuff that Matters" tag line.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
At the time of writing, this book has a 5 star rating at Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Recovering-Preppie-Michael-Mare/dp/1419663275
Unless someone has a VERY good ghost writer or something extraordinary happened to that individual, a biography is necessarily going to be terrible. Why? Because the average life is rather boring (which is why "Reality Television" is generally very highly edited).
http://www.allen-poole.com/
Indian students cheat?
ALL students cheat! Perhaps he meant that Indian students that cheat are caught more frequently?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Start a religion based on it. It worked for L Ron Hu88ard.
He admire Camel? Mice heed alarm? Am media lecher?
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Please stop putting links to "idle" on the front page.
The publisher, Book Surge, is Amazon's self-publishing/publish on demand branch. Likely, no one other than the author ever read this book prior to printing and it's likely that /.'s review copy was author-provided as well.
Scathing words. Why is the reviewer anonymous?
The reviewer is Samzenpus.
Why are you anonymous, your words are utterly inconsequential?
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
The first part lets us in on a few basic facts about Michael and his day to day activities. He hates rap. Indian students cheat. Walking makes Michael's legs hurt. He is scared of his stoner suite mate. CS students are the smartest students on campus. Michael is the smartest among them.
Get this man a slashdot id!
BookSurge is an Amazon-owned vanity press. Since when does anybody, including Slashdot, waste time reviewing self-published books? Even in the "Idle" section this is stupid.
Maybe this is a thinly veiled review by the author to get a few people to buy this thing to experience its awfulness.
SirWired
/. gets books to review and some of them are awful. Nothing wrong with putting that on the front page. So please stop can people stop whinging about idle on the front page.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
even more strangely, three of the four reviewers never reviewed anything but this book, and the fourth had only three reviews, one of which was about shoes. Oh .. and it was writen by an someone with an indian name ... cheat?!
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Michael seems to have a different definition for the word preppie than the good people at Webster or I do.
You and me both. When I went to high school (early 80s), preppies were the kids who were taking college prep classes - hence "preppie". They were the ones who studied, dressed neatly, participated in sports, band, chorus, etc... and generally got good grades. They were usually from middle class families whose parents understood the value of an education. Everyone in that group wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer specialists, or any other white collar professional career you can think of. Preppies were usually decent kids. Yeah, there were some rich kids who had the nice cars and coasted through life, but they were the rich kids and weren't part of the preppie crowd. They were the ones who got in Ivy League schools because they were legacies or what ever.
It was NOT someone who tried to get away with conning other kids and teachers, doing little work, and just coasting through life.
Is it just me, or has it seemed lately that everytime I've thought, "damn, slashdot is going down the shitter", I look up at who approved the story, and it's been the name samzenpus, nearly every single time?
Given that knowledge, I think it's obvious what should be done.
Reviewing a popular book and commenting in this way would be useful and funny to all of us, since popular books and authors already get a lot of positive press, and the negative comments can be viewed as a roast in most cases.
However, in the case of a truly bad book, these effects of a bad review are reversed. For example, if the purpose of this review was to get people to laugh at a bad author, it's unfortunate that the humor has to come at his expense because the book apparently truly is bad. There are bad books and authors, and producing negative comments about a bad book seems to me like writing a dissertation on how annoying it is that annoying people are in fact, really annoying.
Additionally, if the purpose of this review was to get people to not read the book, again I believe this review probably got this guy more press in one day than he ever would have received in his lifetime. Now he will likely sell many copies of the book he never would have sold, so there again I'm not sure about the purpose of the review.
The moral: This comment is or isn't funny to the /. audience for the same reason that the review is or isn't funny to the /. audience.
stuff |
Listen Editors, listen Taco, please listen hard...
I KNOW what the url to DIGG is. If I wanted braindead lolcat crap I'd go there.
You are seriously destroying the integrity of Slashdot with Idle, the reader's mail garbage, and now this book review drivel.
Is it driving up your hits? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is also making you more money. Are you so greedy that you are willing to cheapen yourselves in this way? Why not just get into the spam industry if that's the case?
There is no value in this. It detracts from otherwise good content. You can see perfectly well that there are already many complaining. Do you not care about this site any more?
Enough is enough
/. gets books to review and some of them are awful.
So does every newspaper, magazine, blog, and publisher.
I can count the number of times I've seen any of the above publish a review of a book from their slushpile on the fingers of one hand.
I can count the number of times I've seen any of the above do it twice on the fingers of one foot.
I can vaguely recall seeing one that was worth reading, once, but it was probably by someone like Harlan Ellison.
Tell you what, get someone at Ellison's level to do the next review like this. Or... don't do it.
I had to undo the change so I could post this message here, but for those complaining, it's easy enough to get rid of idle: Click "Customize" in the top bar. Then click "Sections". Then for "Idle" choose the circle-slash option. Click "Save" at the bottom. *Poof* - no more (atrocious) "Idle".
Think of "Idle" as a "Roach Motel". Do you really want these "Idle" writers involved in the main articles? Better that they are stuck here. Now I'm going back to that setting....
--- What?
Is Slashdot trying to get more of the Something Awful audience?
If the books are so awful, just toss them. Don't subject us to these crap reviews. It's almost as bad as having Jon Katz back..
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.
Soon to get modded down as offtopic or troll, but why exactly is it that CS students think they're the smartest? What is it about knowing how to use a computer that makes for elitism? It's not like many CS students go on to cancer research with their computer skills. A few yes, but most of those were double majors in biology or were biology students taking a few computer classes.
There were several *rave* reviews on Amazon's websites for this book, and since the reviewers used Amazon's 'RealName' system to identify themselves, they *must* be actual people, right?
Wrong. By entering a credit card into your account with a valid number but fake name, you can get a 'RealName' that says anything (I just tried it). I strongly believe that the author has written these reviews himself:
"Michael de Mare's deadpan humor makes it a quick, entertaining read. One example of his style: his friend "Lincoln" decides he wants to run for an undergraduate political office. The author thinks to himself: "I wonder what would be the first thing he'd do if elected - maybe free the slaves?" - By Valeda Zaage
I mean, seriously? And that name? That has got to have some hidden meaning.
Slashdot has jumped the shark with Idle leaving beta. It lost too much of it's original appeal when goofy humour lost it's spontaneity and "Stuff that Matters" began to apply to only a portion of the main content.
Of course, this is just my opinion with no reasonable backup.
Wasn't the last one of these in idle? I took idle off my front page because of the last one. Did slashdot decide it was so important for us to see these Bottom of the Barrel Reviews that they pulled it into the books section?
Dear /.,
I'm sorry I complained about the white-on-teal scheme originally used for body text in this department. That scheme made it impossible for me to read these reviews.
Please restore that scheme as quickly as possible.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The book might disappoint. But the review has made me laugh more than anything else all day...
Think Deeply.
For those who don't know the reference.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
And it was not reviewed by rappers. Oh the bias!
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
I have filtered both Idle and samzenpus off of my front page since just idle wouldn't have filtered this crap, but samzenpus is responsible for I think every infraction of it. Please Slashdot, get some sense and don't present this face to the outside world. Remember that the first time you visit, you don't have an account. Remember that Slashdot isn't digg, reddit, fark, or anything else, its Slashdot.
As every idle story posted gets tagged: pleasestop!
My Babylon
...but yes, the review did crack me up! I actually followed this up with a search on Amazon, and reading their excerpt, it confirmed how abjectly terrible this book must be. Strangely enough, four out of six billion people found this book entertaining and worthy of five stars, which puzzles me to no end. This is more like a blog that became a book, and makes me wary of trying to publish such a thing myself. I suppose that's a good thing though, for my sake. If his pedantic and repetitive prose (just from the excerpt at least) doesn't convince you to stay away, his idiotic fucking face on the front and back covers should say it all, heh.
Why do the pleasestop tags keep getting nuked?
-Bucky
Netcraft confirms it!
(Disclaimer: I'm Indian, so please don't mod me troll for poking fun.)
It was the last "bottom of the barrel" review that made me put the Idle section into "always collapsed" mode on my homepage, but now idle content is showing up in other sections. Is there no end?
09
...check out Robert Bingham's short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value,
http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1
or his novel, Lightning on the Sun
http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Slaughter-Value-Robert-Bingham/dp/038548867X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219692771&sr=8-1.
He was from that world, and knew what he was talking about.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Slashdot is now somethingawful.
I am a slashdot lurker. I am not a geek. I read this site for the humorous comments. I laughed because I imagined that any hard core slashdot guys' biography would sound like this one. I just thought it was supposed to be a joke in that way...like all the other inside jokes here. All the "this stuff makes slashdot irrelevant" posts just make it funnier.
Where is the white-on-teal text to prevent me from reading this cr*p?
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
What if instead of ...
>He likes Chicken Parmesan, Bill O'Reilly, and
>shopping at Walmart.
We could say ...
He likes Tofu Feta, Al Franken, and shopping at Whole Foods.
What then?
I got lucky on a page which showed an amazing command of very simple sentences.
I suspect that this bad review will get him more sales today than he's had in total since the day he put it on Amazon.
If you liked this book and want to read more, don't forget to check out de Mare's blog.
[o]_O
You are seriously destroying the integrity of Slashdot with Idle, the reader's mail garbage, and now this book review drivel.
You missed the Jon Katz years, didn't you?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The back cover of his book.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Are we placing bets on if this "anonymous" is samzenpus trying to foist off another of his crappy book reviews?
Sorry, but they're awful - probably far worse than the books (which have, after all, survived some sort of actual editorial process) that're being skewered. Please stop. Don't even put them on idle. Just... stop. Thanks.
You can try again when you've levelled up a couple times.
For reminding me to remove 'Idle' from my sections list.
First time I've needed to do it. You might be interested to know for future reference. Consider this an exit interview.
Reasons: These book reviews, and that horrible green header.
Bye and good luck. And my sympathies for having to read the slush pile.
(Yeah, I know this is filed in Books, not Idle. But the last one was correctly filed and was just as bad. Don't make me delist Books too, okay?)
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"Even though the author specializes in cryptography, he seems unable to decipher any social situation...."
When was the last time you met a Cryptography CS student that could decipher social situations or wasn't awkward around girls?