Woof. The project here is kind of flawed from the start: squeezing about a dozen books into each 25-page chapter. So each book gets about two brief pages in a double-spaced, generous margins book that cuts the word count even further—only enough for a quick gloss before we're onto the next one.

In a larger sense, it points out the limitations of having a book critic dealing with this stuff, since Lozada only makes glancing mention of facts outside of each book's purview. Even supplemented by other contemporaneous books he's read, this is still hacking out huge chunks of context that any historian or other profession would be able to bring to the game. Rather than an effort like we'd see in the New York Review of Books, where subject matter experts use a few books as the launching point for a larger discussion, too often we're limited to pointing out each book's internal contradictions —or what it does well or poorly or just differently than other books at the time. 

As a result, Lozada only makes the most centrist, milquetoast critiques of these books, leaving you with just a brief summary and observation on most. It feels pitched at busy people who want to sound competent at parties, I guess.