Review: Well intentioned, but not very good reading
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 6, 2013
I'm sorry to say that my view of this book is aligned with many of the other 1 to 3 star reviewers--the stories (being really short, some of them only 1 paragraph) get a bit boring after a while, because they don't have much depth.Maybe they shouldn't have much depth, since the whole book was thrown together in a week as a collection of really short viewpoints and stories from anyone who wanted to participate. As another reviewer pointed out, many of the viewpoints were from people located far from the disaster, musing or wondering about their own introspections and feelings about the event.It seems to me the book would have been stronger if at least the shortest and most irrelevant viewpoints had been tossed out, and if some of the repetitive stories of buildings swaying had been removed unless they offered a unique perspective.So as an interesting book for the general reader, I think this book falls well short of the mark, unless you are specifically looking for the distant viewpoints of mostly writers and journalists and English speaking people who were on the fringes (or further) of the disaster.But nonetheless, maybe the book did achieve its stated goal--to raise some money for relief efforts.