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Very strange

Review of free Kindle edition
ASIN: B0083ZRQR4
124 pages

I have long considered FLATLAND to be an overrated mostly boring book. However it is supposed to be a classic, admired and enjoyed by many people some of whom are considered to be or consider themselves to be intellectuals. So I thought, maybe it's me. Maybe a deficiency in my ability to grasp the fine qualities of the book prevents me from understanding how great it is. Or maybe my imagination is sub par. Then I read a passage about FLATLAND from THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED EDWARD ABBEY by J. Michael Orenduff. Orenduff, a former college professor with his PhD in Mathematical Logic, a former university president and chancellor is now a full-time author known mainly for writing the Pot Thief Mystery Series. He should understand FLATLAND as a mathematician and as an author. Here is what his characters say about FLATLAND:

“All work is 3-D,�� said Martin.
We stared at him.
He looked at me. “Remember that book Flatland you made me read?��
“I didn’t make you read it.��
“When a white college student visits a fourteen-year-old dropout on the rez and suggests a book, that’s the same as making me read it.��
“But you liked it, right?��
“Yeah, because it made me feel smarter than the guy who wrote it.��
“How so?�� asked Sharice.
“He says the men who live in Flatland are polygons. The fewer sides a man has, the lower he is on the social scale. So triangles are the lowest level, squares are higher, pentagons higher and so on. But he also says they can see each other and interact, which is impossible. Because if they were truly two-dimensional, they would have no sides, so there would be nothing to see.��
“You could see them from the top,�� said Susannah, “and from that vantage point, you could also see how many sides they have.��
“No. To see them from on top, you’d have to be above them. But there is no up in Flatland. And there is no down. There is only north, south, east and west. So they wouldn’t even know other men existed.��
“They would when they bumped into them,�� she said.
He shook his head and placed two pennies on the table, sliding them until they touched. “These pennies can bump into each other because they have sides. But imagine them without sides. I don’t mean just really flat. I mean no side dimension at all. The men in Flatland can’t bump into each other because they have no sides.��
“Why do you keep calling them men? Aren’t there women in Flatland?��
“Sure. The author says they are straight lines.
”She shook her head. “Sheesh. I might have guessed. The women are the lowest life-forms because they have only one dimension.��
“Right. And he makes the same sort of mistake in describing them, saying that seen from straight-on they look like a point. But you can’t see the end of a line because that would require that it have some height. Lines have only length. You could see them from below or above but not in a world that has only two dimensions.��
“He says something else about women,�� I noted. “Because of their lack of intelligence, they accidentally pierce and kill people without even knowing it. But ten minutes later they can’t remember it happening.��
Sharice stared at me. “And you made him read that?��
“For the math part. I knew he was smart enough not to believe the stuff about women.��
“He was also smart enough not to believe the stuff about math. A guy who thinks you can see something that doesn’t have sides …wait, they can’t see anything anyway. If they had eyes, they would have to be on their surface, because they have no sides. So the only direction their eyes could look would be up. But there is no up.��
“See,”I said, trying to move beyond my having forced a misogynist book on Martin, “You’re also smarter than the author.��

I agree with Mr. Orenduff and his fictional characters. That's my position and I'm sticking to it.

There are no illustrations in the free Kindle edition. However, Amazon offers the Distinguished Chiron Edition with illustrations by the author. This is supposed to be some kind of improvement of the original 1884 edition. The illustrations which I examined seem to confirm Mr. Orenduff's opinions by depicting a very flat three dimensional world instead of a two dimensional one.