Unenjoyably Good ( )

The content is not at all what the title (or cover blurb, which hooked me on amazon) led me to hope for. Further, the writing itself swings between incomprehensible grammatical disaster and torporific pseudo-academic prose that made this torture to wade through. It took about six hours in the ER with nothing else to occupy me to get through and past the Gorgo chapter, but I shouldn’t have bothered with that monumental effort since nothing that came after (or much that came before) was really an improvement. Fans of Godzilla and his ilk may find something of value here, but I made a very poor choice when I purchased this one. Seek it in a library before buying or just avoid it altogether. My copy will be going into the very rare category of books I won’t keep and would never read twice unless subjected to the kind of treatment they gave Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange (always the personal measure in my family for how far we would go to avoid something). In short, I’d estimate that fewer than half of the pages have anything whatsoever to say about “actual” dinosaurs/prehistoric lifeforms as they are depicted, marketed to, or experienced within historical or contemporary cultures (through film, television, literature, news media, product marketing, toys, games, design, education or myriad other avenues that remained almost entirely unexplored by this author). Instead, the bulk of the material dwells on “dinosauroids” and gill men and “humaniform-reptiloid creatures” and the like, with much of it being used to drive the author’s thesis that the fear of nuclear contamination or annihilation (in a variety of not solely nuclear forms) is being expressed through filmic and other representations of the above named creature types and their stories. Although there were a few early chapters trying to discuss the discovery and presentation to the public of dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, and a later discussion of dinosaur extinction, overall the author’s very loose interpretation of “dinosaurs” within a rather narrow interpretation of “popular culture” (largely focusing on comic books and science fiction films and stories) should have prompted a different title for the work; maybe someone will have the wisdom to change that in any future editions to better market this to its intended audience. ( )