I am having a - not a love/hate - let's call it a love/argh relationship with this book and its source thing. I am spending way too much time running down source info for some things - but at the same time I'm bumping into bits of history and books I'd not have heard of. The argh is mostly over WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS HARDER ACKROYD. Because you know that he has all that info.
Not that I know this is the case with this book - but there was another book I railed over similarly that didn't do footnotes and instead had just that source essay thing. And after searching online I found the author had been told that it was too expensive to print that many more pages just for those notes - so he had to put them all online. Sadly the notes still weren't that great (some didn't lead to sources that matched quotes), so I wasn't exactly pleased either way. But this book is 800pgs counting the index so maybe it had a similar problem?
Not that I know this is the case with this book - but there was another book I railed over similarly that didn't do footnotes and instead had just that source essay thing. And after searching online I found the author had been told that it was too expensive to print that many more pages just for those notes - so he had to put them all online. Sadly the notes still weren't that great (some didn't lead to sources that matched quotes), so I wasn't exactly pleased either way. But this book is 800pgs counting the index so maybe it had a similar problem?