So my book has just gotten its first real review, in Library Journal (you have to scroll down through six other reviews to get to it.) It’s by Robbie Allen of St. Johns River Community College in Palatka, Fla., and it’s pretty positive. But then you get to the final sentence:
The style here is journalistic, with personal stories that make the book entertaining, but ultimately this is a history of academic thought—complete with endnotes—and is best suited for students of finance or people interested in financial theory.
I can’t complain too much: I always saw economics and finance students as a fallback audience for the book, and I wrote and documented it in a way that I hoped would make professors feel okay about assigning it to their classes. But that phrase “complete with endnotes” gets me. Are lay readers really incapable of reading books with endnotes?