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May 14, 2005
How amazon.com can write an emergency book essay for you
I spend quite a bit of time at amazon.com browsing through products. I may not buy too many things there because as a New Yorker, my cheapskate instincts are being honed to a fine point. However, in terms of sheer utility, their shopping and product listing interface is second to none. Especially with books, you can learn a lot more about them at amazon.com compared to brick-and-mortar stores, where copies are shrinkwrapped.
Once upon a time, in my younger days, I had to write book reports and other essays loaded with choice bull (in many ways, not much has changed since then). The big problem with writing these pieces was that you had to have read the book. At the very least, you had to have skimmed through the book to get a general idea of the storyline and the key themes expressed in the book. Occasionally, I have been in situations, where it is 2am and I haven't cracked the spine of a book, an essay for which is due at 9am the next morning. This, my friends, is an emergency book essay (EBE) situation.
Amazon.com, in addition to laying claim on the largest selection on earth, can also help you out of an EBE situation. One of amazon.com's recent additions to a book listing is the Statisically Improbable Phrases feature. These phrases are the most distinctive phrases in a book and are available when the full text of a book is searchable. They can be quite good at highlighting some themes in the book. Armed with a list of statistically improbable phrases from the book, the editorial reviews of the book on its product page and a reasonably high BQ (bull quotient), it is possible to write an essay that sounds halfway plausible. If you use the statistically improbable phrases to search within the full text contents of the book, you may even be able to see the contexts in which they appear, and in so doing, convince the reader of the essay that you've actually read the book.
For example, let us look at the product listing for The Da Vinci Code and concoct the beginning to a bull-filled essay for this book, using only its editorial reviews and statistically improbably phrases:
The Da Vinci Code, in addition to being an intelligent and lucid thriller, is a journey through the human condition drawing on a collection of fascinating esoterica from 2,000 years of Western history. The relationship between Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveau is central to the book. Robert Langdon provides Sophie Neveau with information from his rich experience as a professor of symbology at Harvard as she proceeds on a journey to uncover the sacred feminine. The book, in its masterful, page-turner style, speaks of a mystery surrounding a royal bloodline marked by a stone cylinder carried by Langdon in his sweater pocket throughout the book. This hard stone cylinder with lettered dials stands as the complement to the soft, nurturing sacred feminine embodied by Sophie Neveau. Along the way, they encounter agents of the Opus Dei, who deny the sacred feminine and believe that the true path to salvation lies in corporal mortification. They wear sharp cilice belts to remind themselves continuously of this principle. The barbs of the cilice belt worn by the lame saints represent all that tears and disparages the seeded womb representing the sacred feminine.
Okay, I think you must have the general idea by now. If you wanted to get fancy, you could use the "So You'd Like To" and "Listmania" sections to produce impressive sounding cross-book comparisons. The above essay is just an example of the wonderful things you can do with the product pages on amazon.com. I don't claim it represents my real views on The Da Vinci Code, or that it is even an accurate representation of that book. I merely wish to bequeath my blinding insight (*cough*) to generations of bull-filled review writers, so they can get out of EBEs relatively unscathed.
Posted by Vishy at May 14, 2005 01:01 PM