I would be remiss if I didn't link to this Janet Maslin's review of Newt Gingrich's latest historical potboiler:

On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from "Pearl Harbor."

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like "to withdraw backward was impossible," sounds like "wretching noises" to accompany vomiting, or constructions like "incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted." Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book's war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. "One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought," the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, "not to realize they were sallying forth to war." Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot's intelligence — or, presumably, the reader's.

...

Elsewhere in Hawaii, among the fighting forces, things are typically editor-proof. In a case for James's decoding skills, the book says: "The boys had money in their pockets to burn and fresh in from the West Coast the obligatory photos with hula girls, sentimental silk pillows for moms and girlfriends, and ridiculous-printed shirts had sold like crazy."

Everytime I go into a bookstore, I am amazed by the sheer volume of crap piled within 50 feet of entrance. I'm not saying that I'm capable of writing a readable book, but is it too much to ask that those who write books do so?