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It's not a manual, it's a love letter Many of the reviews of Eats, Shoots & Leaves focus on Truss's inconsistencies, or on the English/American usage issues, missing the book's soul. Truss hasn't written a punctuation manual, she's written a love letter. Questions of usage really are secondary to the book's purpose--it's more like a phone call to a friend after a first date when you just need to talk about the object of your affections in detail. Some might find it odd to lavish such attention on colons and dashes, but to those of us that Truss has dubbed "sticklers," it comes naturally. A usage manual, it's not. (If you're looking for one, try Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence.) But it's still got a spot on my desk right alongside the photo of my family. It's an interesting, at times laugh-out-loud funny, tribute to punctuation's checkered past and precarious future, and, for those who love language, a great reminder of why we fell so hard in the first place.