[Maurice Kelly]

sweetapj at bellsouth.net wrote:
> 
> I find the book jumps around a lot in terms of a 
 > timeline, but perhaps as I get farther in I'll see
 > some kind of pattern.

Nah, you won't. :-)

Actually it does pretty much follow the Oils from start to finish 
(ignoring the first chapter on politics.) The author digresses a lot 
when it is appropriate to do so, so if something interesting happened 
at a particular point in the history, he'll expand upon it, tie to it 
to other events in their career, and eventually return to the 
chronological history.

I find it to be more like having a conversation with the author than 
reading an ordinary biography. In every conversation you get a little 
distracted from the focus, head of somewhere else for a while, and 
then go "Where was I again? Oh yes..." It's a bit like a Billy 
Connolly show.

For me the book was amazing. It was reasonably well written, though if 
there is one downfall, I'd say that it was a book written by a 
friend/fan for fans. At times I felt that I would have a hard job 
following things if I hadn't some idea about most of the history 
anyway. Still it's hard for someone so close to something to describe 
that thing to someone unfamiliar.

That probably didn't make much sense.

At the minute though I'm now reading Willie's Bar And Grill, and I'm 
enjoying it even more. Interstingly I thing Willie's would be much 
easier for a non-fan to pick up and read.

One thing that bugs me - in Beds Are Burning (I think) but the author 
didn't seem too sure about what Powderworks was. I got the impression 
it was a web site as opposed to a mailing list. But then, I'm a tech 
nerd, and I'm very intolerant of people getting technical stuff wrong :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Maurice Kelly