Yesterday my blog’s top search was “true son of heaven david marshall.” That night David Marshall commented on my book review of his book titled True Son of Heaven. I read that book some time ago and I was critical of its content. Marshall has said many things in his comments that I am going to slowly digest through. I’m not perfect and can err in my assessment. Again this is going to be a process but thus far I still think the gist of my review is correct. In this post I want to focus only on his opening paragraph of his first comment:
I find your critique of my book petty and off-the-mark. You complain about typos, but your review itself is chock full of grammatical errors. You claim True Son of Heaven “does not even fulfill the expectation of an undergraduate essay.” Yet in fact, I expanded my argument in this book into a doctoral dissertation, which passed review easily. (As, indeed, did the thesis papers in my MA program, critiqued by eminent scholars who know the topics I was writing on well.)
Let me share with you what was in my original review that he was responding to:
The first problem is rather minor but everything else that follows concerns with the content of the book. This book has bad editing. The book has three sections but the numbering of the section is off; for instance, part one is labeled as part two, and part two is labeled as part three, etc. In the first chapter the endnotes are missing. I think the editors were asleep on the wheel and honestly I think if they did a better job scrutinizing the content of the book, I think the book wouldn’t have been published in the first place because I think it does not even fulfill the expectation of an undergraduate essay.
Again in this post I only want to focus on his first opening paragraph and not have any red-herring. Lord willing in future posts I want to revisit my review and examine his comments against the review more carefully. I want to move from the obvious to the more weightier matter over time.
Here’s my response:
The Domain for Truth 