Review: Will the real Mr Peters please stand up
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 28, 2013
3.5 out of 5 StarsWhat can I say? This book suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. It's like there are three different story-lines (or personalities) all fighting for attention from this author. It is clear at once that he has decided to stick to the authors' flagship adage: write about what you know. Mr Peters has surely been a salesman, or a front man for some type of product; made multiple presentations to myriad different audiences; and has crisscrossed the country many, many times.The first "personality" is a glimpse into the life, or lifestyle, of a salesman who travels to major cities and convention centers, attending trade-shows, en masse: Atlanta, San Diego, New York, Chicago, etc. This is a field of work that has been mostly ignored by literature, and the layers are really quite interesting: deciding which type of booth you want at which show, jockeying for prime space, schmoozing the event planners, and being able to fill in for an absent presenter at a moment's notice. It contains great advice as to how to navigate airports, to go a few blocks over to find a free taxi; how to live completely off expense accounts, and sleep just about anywhere. Great stuff.A day in the life of a traveling salesman: it's the fodder of dirty jokes told behind high school bleachers. But in Peters' book the traveling salesman is dragged into the light. It is through his lens that we understand that the man (or woman) is adrift in a sea of strangers, shaking millions of hands, smiling into hundreds of thousands of faces; hoping for a connection, an anchor of sanity, a bridge between time-zones. Very well done.The second theme of the book is the rallying cry to "Network, Net. Work. NETWORK!" This is remarkable only in the fact that it has been woven into a fabrication, or an amalgamation, of people this author must surely have met in his travels. One tip, for example, is that when you add new "friends" into your cellphone contact list, you create little "cheat" memos: "John Hall*DoNotLetGo2HI."This is an interesting thread in the novel because, honestly, self-help "How to Network" books... no, self-help books in general, take maybe 500 words of advice and inflate it to 50,000 words, add a splashy cover, and Presto! "Give me $15.95."Last, and definitely the least "personality" in this book, is a mundane love story, the likes of which have only ever been written by a mundane man in a mundane town, who has never, even once, felt the rusty, jabbing knife of jealousy; the burning, screaming heat of desire; or the gasping, drowning death of love washed up on the deadly rocks of infidelity. A clue here, Mr Peters: killing off the past does not a future make.Altogether a solid debut novel. My only advice going forward would be to, yes, write about what you know; but even more, write about what you dream, what you feel... What frightens you? What is that one perfect snapshot of childhood, when you knew, you just knew, that it couldn't get any better, or any worse? Where is your skeleton buried, Mr Peters? And how did it get there?The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.