Review: Workingman's Ink by Dave Shiflett

Title: Workingman's Ink
Author: Dave Shiflett
Format: Ebook
Publisher: Self-published
Publish Date: April 3, 2012
Source: I received a copy from the author; however, this did not affect my review.

Why You're Reading This Book:

• You're a short story fan.

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "A collection of journalism originally published by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Review, The American Spectator, The Los Angeles Times and other places. Subjects include alcohol hysteria, celebrities (Elvis, Fred Astaire, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, King Farouk and many others), military deployment, remembering a family slave, trial lawyers, gambling, scapegoating, sex, marriage among the very rich, deer hunting, the demise of country music, bluegrass and old time music festivals, Apollo 11 and the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl."

My Two Cents:

This book is a collection of a bunch of different writing from Dave Shiflett. It covers a little bit of everything from funny stories to stories about celebrities to political commentary. There's really a little bit of something for everyone in this book. I definitely liked some of the stories better than others. The one about Shiflett saying goodbye to his son as he left for war and the ones about the celebrities (especially the one about Liz Taylor) were probably my favorite. Some of the stories were just not really down my alley.

I think one of the things that could have helped a little bit is if there was some more connection between all of the stories. It would have been cool if the stories were divided up into categories or something like that. I think that it would have made the book flow a little bit better. I also read this book on my Kindle and the way that the book was formatted didn't really help the flow. It would have been nice to have more of a separation between the stories. It was sort of jarring to read one story about one kind of subject matter and then to read something about a completely different subject.

Shiflett is a pretty good writer. I think this would be a great book for someone who has a wide variety of interests and likes articles like you would find in a newspaper or magazine - fairly quick and to the point.