Black Sabbath Crosses and Thorns the Tony Martin Years

great book by Edward Wilson Bagget. Tony Martin, Tony Iomni, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray and Geoff Nicholls was a great band!

A for effort. An F for lack of any editing or proper grammar. This book could have been so much better but its written by someone either with a grade 3 education or English is their second language but still no excuse for absolutely no grasp of reality when it comes to releasing a proper book. Shame shame shame😞

This is not easy to write given the paucity of writings about the Tony Martin years. I have been Sabbath fan since the early 70's and rate Tony Martin highly. I was looking forwards to reading this despite several unflattering comments. The fact is the writing in this book is so poor it is actually quite difficult to get through. Some paragraphs make no sense and the spelling is shocking. There even seem to be varying type face/fonts used on the same page. I don't know but I would suggest that the author went straight to publication with no attempt to have a critical editor cast an eye over the manuscript. I started out making a list of all the grammatical/spelling/other errors but the list just got out of hand. (I also took exception during a paragraph on Bob Daisley, to the description of Chickenshack, one of the great British blues bands, as a "minor band"). I would suggest exercising great caution before buying this book. Hugely disappointing.

I love this era of Black Sabbath and it is criminally underrated with little written about it. This book is a strange one to rate as if I was rating the quality of the writing I would give it a 1, poor grammar and some sentences that just don’t make sense. However rating the content it is a big fat 5, there is information here that I have never heard before and I, as I said at the start, love this era and have read what I can on it. The writer’s youtube site, Edtrader, is also worth a look.

Some interesting info on Sabbath's most underrated period. But the grammar is so awful that I wonder how it can even be sold. I find myself reading a paragraph over and over to try and make sense of the mess. Tony Martin is an understated singer that was capable of singing any era of Sabbath.