Review: A Quick Biographical Sketch but can't recommend it
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 5, 2013
Quite frankly, I was disappointed in this book. I did not feel the content lived up to the title. It almost seemed the title was longer than the "main" part of the book! If you are interested in a biography of Tolkien, you'd probably be better served getting one of the longer versions out there.I have read other ebooks by CRE (mostly biographies) and found them very useful in getting a taste of the author's life without reading what he had for breakfast on October 12, 1942. The biography part of this book was very short, and felt like parts were repeated several times.  It  had almost no depth and felt more like a magazine article than the basis for a book.The bulk of the book as a "critical synopsis" of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with some character exploration tossed in. Having read both a number of times, I really didn't feel I learned anything from it.On the whole, the book did give me an overview of Tolkien's life (as expected) and it was short, but it was not as satisfying as the other biographies I've read by CRE.(There also seemed to be formatting errors in the version I read. The words "Might of Middle Earth" kept popping up in the middle of pages, seeming to be a subhead, but having nothing to do with what was being discussed. There were a few "mistaken" words which looked like it could have been misreadings from OCR software.)