Writing is still an art

"When did it become acceptable to write shit and get it published? "

This thought crossed my mind, as I was sitting in my ahem *study* reading a recent copy of The Atlantic, purchased on a whim to offer diversion from The Watchmen omnibus, and the foot-high pile of journal articles sitting by the bed.

Take this example, from a book review :

Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes

"Because It's STILL There" might well have been the working title of this comprehensive account, a vacuum-filling history (the first of its kind in five-plus decades) and an enormously engaging addition to the climbing-lit canon.

Seriously? "Because"?? It's a book review for the love of God, I learned not to start a sentence with 'because' while sitting on the rainbow rug in Ms Ginoux's second grade classroom.

What else is wrong here? Structurally, it's like the author took a perfectly good sentence, cut it up and played grammar boggle with it for a few minutes. Did you have to lead with the joke Mr. Author-pants? Could you not have written:

This enormously engaging addition to the climbing-lit canon, the first of its kind in five-plus decades might well have been titled "Because It's STILL There" so long has it taken for a comprehensive work on this subject to appear?

I mean, or is that like, not cool sounding? Trust me I am no stranger to writing sentences that go back to front in order to sound clever - ask my thesis adviser, who sends red arrows flying left to right over my insufferable and disorderly syntax.

My real issue though is "vacuum-filling". At first I read that as a doughnut filled with tiny little hoovers and thought 'why would anyone want to fill something with vacuums'? Then I remembered this sentence had been subjected to the laws of backwards day, so I re-read and understood that the work being reviewed was actually the filling of a vacuum ie; it sucked or it had been sucked? No, that can't be it, then I read the next sentence -- (the first of its kind in five-plus decades) -- and realized that the vacuum being filled was actually a gaping void, left by no history books on mountaineering in the Himalayas. OKAY now I get it - not an actual vacuum here, even though the use of the hyphen in place of the normal sentence structure around the metaphorical use of the term, had me flummoxed, it is a vacuum in space or time or literature, not a machine for sucking, natch.

But fine, if we're all about vacuums then why now are you talking about CANONS?? No seriously, sometimes there are so many available metaphors, a person can get tempted to just start stacking one metaphor on the other like a game of syndedochal Jenga - I've been there. Especially when you are writing about mountaineering, itself so often used metaphorically to reference staggering achievements, I can see why you'd want to play hopscotch over a couple of tubular metaphors, rather then just sticking to one, 'a pile of ancient rock' in your search for poetic imagery. From a book on mountains that fills a vacuum, we now get a book on mountains that is part of a canon ( btw: I know cannons and canons are not the same but still who doesn't think cannon when they read canon - librarians probably).

The crucial flaw in the sentence, aside from everything else, is that if the book is filling a vacuum in the available literature - how is there also a canon?? It's simply not possible, if there are no other works, there is no canon.

Look The Atlantic I don't know who's doing your editing these days, my suspicions run to the "autosummarize" function in MS Word 2007, but whoever/whatever it is - fix it, or give me a job, because I write better shit for free.