Paul Stump, Go Ahead John

Fans of John McLaughlin have been starved of a biography of the guitarist until, it was thought, Paul Stump's "Go Ahead John". But while the book received positive reviews in the press, it appalled many JM fans who shared their disgust about the erroneous content via the One-word mailing list.

Now, it's far easier (and so much more fun) to point out other people's mistakes than to do original work yourself. And if they are honest mistakes then presumably the author would like to know about them so he won't repeat them in future. Having said that, I don't agree that the editing of the book is adequate at all. If we poor readers can spot typos, bad punctuation and bad English (as opposed to weaknesses in style) in a published book, why couldn't the editor who was being paid to do this work? Or indeed the author, who must have been the first to read what he'd written?

I agree that an imperfect JM book is better than no book at all, and I'd give credit (as I said at the beginning) to Paul Stump for producing this one. But it's still fun to spot (what you think are) mistakes in it. Indeed, it might be that a book that is thought to contain mistakes gets read more closely - which could of course be a cunning ploy on the part of the author for more attention. ;-)

Honestly speaking, if the only weakness of the book would be that some commas are missing, Southampton is misspelled as South Hampton, and similar things, I'd be still very happy with the book. In any case, I though that it is primarily the task of the editor to get the commas straight and not necessarily the one of the author. If this is true it would be better to blame the editor/publisher for those errors - and blame Stump only for the non-trivial factual errors.