Intensely Focused

This was a very uneven book. The book has 3 authors, and my understanding from the book is that essays were written by one of the three authors and they then conferred and revised.

Each essay gives a bit of background on the character that is the subject of the essay and then generally lists the places the person has appeared (various books, plays, movies, etc). Unfortunately, that's often as far as the analysis goes. There's no real attempt to explain how a given person influenced history or society, it seems to be enough that he/she was written about or appeared in many movies. It's unfortunate, because I think the book really suffers from the lack of analysis. I understand that choosing the "101 most influential people" was a subjective process but that's not an excuse. I don't even need to be persuaded that the people in question were "the most influential," I just wanted to know how they were influential. To the author's credit, they do give a list of a couple of books for further reading so if I wanted to I could track down all the books and do the research myself. There was at least one author who did try and offer more than just a list of works, and that was appreciated but it would have been nice to have that in all essays, not just some of them.

Sometimes the tone of an essay really didn't sit well with me. There was one author that took a lighter tone (such as having an essay "written by the dog" which I found frustrating. I consider myself a feminist but at times I felt like one or more authors was making a hard sell about the treatment of women.

I think the best parts of the book were the interludes, which were often funny and creative.