Click - My First Book Review

I recently got turned on to a great site called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, and it is fantastic! On the site, a blogger can peruse posts containing synopses of new/pre-release books. If she sees a book she likes, she can check within the item's post to make sure the book has not been claimed. If it has not yet been claimed by another blogger, she can claim it...for FREE! The only catch is that she has to read it and post a review. This deal is not too shabby for a bibliophile, who wants to build her collection with new and interesting titles.

Upholding my end of the bargain

Here is the lowdown on the first book I chose:

Title: Click: Unexpected Insights for Business and Life
Author: Bill Tancer
Publisher: Hyperion

Why I Chose this Book: The synopsis I read described a book whose focus resembled another book I read and loved: Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

My Review

The cover of Click, is covered with praise for its author, Bill Tancer. Encountering the book for the first time, a reader may expect that he or she is going to embark upon an odyssey of reading enlightenment. In fact, that is what I thought when I claimed the book. It is endorsed by Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics and contains chapter upon chapter dedicated to enlightening the reader on the Net and the way it is used today.

The book opens with a teaser of a first chapter--an obvious attempt to hook the reader with a peek at the tawdry underbelly of the Internet. However, chapter One, entitled PPC--Porn, Pills, and Casinos, is just that: a tease. There is very little delivered in the way of interesting, insightful material. The potential is there, but it does not appear that Tancer has taken care to arrange the information in a way that is helpful to the reader. The prose jumps all over the place and doesn't appear to coalesce into a recognizable whole by the chapter's end. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book follows in the same fashion.

Tancer returns to the idea that actions speak louder than words and that this is why analyzing our online habits is important. He ends his book with the pithy summary, "Simply stated, if you want to understand the new connected world and how we choose to live in it, look no further than our Internet behavior; after all, we are what we click."

I do think the book could have been interesting. The premise was intriguing, and its comparison to Freakonomics bespoke a work with new insight into human behavior. Perhaps with further editing, the book could become what the author had intended.

My grade: C-