Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss is not your ordinary grammar book. Yes, it does contain examples of how to properly use a comma, a colon, and a semi-colon as well as how to properly use an apostrophe. But, if that's really all the reader is looking for, then I would advise buying another book that's more akin to a handbook.
What Lynne Truss does in this text is provide a wonderful historical perspective for how our punctuation marks came to be and how their usage was formed and has changed historically. In addition, Truss laments the state to which punctuation, and thus, writing skills have sunk over the last few decades. She offers us both this historical perspective on punctuation as well as her lament with great humor and aplomb.
Overall, I would give the book a 4 out of 5 stars. It doesn't quite reach the 5 star mark for me because I think that she fails to look at the internet and email as anything but a negative communication tool. Truss, especially in her last chapter, takes the Internet to task and comments that she agrees with Truman Capote who implicates that what is done online is merely typing, not writing. In so doing, she separates the cognitive act of writing from the act of pressing keys on a keyboard as if what qualifies as writing can only be done with pen or pencil. And in so doing, she fails to acknowledge the hundreds of studies in the field of Computers and Writing (a sub-discipline of English and Composition or Rhetoric and Composition) that examine writing via computer and the profound pedagogical advances in computer-mediated communication.
While I appreciate Truss' call for us, as sticklers of punctuation and grammar, to "fight like tigers to preserve our punctuation", I think that she carries her derision of Internet based communications too far.
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