Distractions

What mainly distracts from the book's overall effectiveness is the anecdotal side plots often explored. Many of them don't have a whole lot to do with the what the book is actually about. Though they are often very interesting, and a few do supplement the text well a lot of them just distract from what the passage/chapter is about. The other main distraction is the number of people talked about throughout the book, and the way they are introduced. Rather than giving them a strong introduction, many of them are just thrown out, often in one of the aforementioned anecdotes. This can result in confusion when characters that were poorly introduced earlier in the book are brought up, and one does not have a very clear idea of who they are. It's not a huge problem, and certainly does not significantly detract from the overall quality of the book.