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The Have Gun: Will Travel Companion
Books: Travel: Bethel: Item 1
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The Have Gun: Will Travel Companionby Martin Grams
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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful: The Bad Outweighs the Good..., December 16, 2000 Reviewer:Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - What a disaster! First, the good things: there is a complete and accurate log of the CBS radio broadcasts of HAVE GUN, starring the late, great John Dehner; and, there is a complete and accurate log of the CBS TV programs, starring the late, great Richard Boone. These are the only really usable logs in print anywhere. Now for the bad news. At least one of the authors is so totally, completely illiterate that he cannot even transcribe proper names correctly. Virtually every sentence contains a garbled word or phrase. In many cases it is nearly completely impossible to decipher what is being talked about. Even the many fragmentary interviews have this problem, since the interviewer clearly did not recognize the words being used by the person interviewed, and puts in either a ludicrous phonetic spelling, or substitutes an entirely different word with no connection to the one spoken by the interviewee. Where a coherent narrative (i.e., sentence 2 having some connection to sentence 1, sentence 3 having some connection to sentence 2, etc.) is required, the book falls down even further. Consider the several pages devoted to a complex set of lawsuits brought against CBS by an obscure children's birthday party performer who claimed the whole idea for the TV show had been stolen from his birthday party persona. To say that this discussion is completely, totally and utterly incoherent is to put it mildly. There is not a single sentence in the several pages where I had the vaguest concept of what the author was trying to say. In short, this is a fan book, with all the defects that such books (which used to be mimeographed or xeroxed from an original manuscript, crudely stapled, and sold for $5 apiece at nostalgia conventions) always have. It is tragic that no one cared enough about the material to have someone who could read, write and speak english work over the text. Since the radio and TV broadcast logs are relatively free of typos (apart from some names that are spelled differently every time they appear, even in the same paragraph), it is clear someone did care enough about these to give them a once-over with a blue pencil. What the luckless performers and crewmembers interviewed here, who now see their words minced into gibberish when they finally see print, might think of this pathetic book, I'd like to hear. Worth buying for the logs, which take up about half the text, but don't expect anything else and you won't be disappointed.
Sally Dumar Comments
"I always had a crush on Richard Boone as a little girl. Thank you for such a great book."
Bill Holnstein responded . . .
I never knew there were so many items related to this show. Your book is a reference for Western collectors.
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