An alert reader (Anand Desai) sent me this tongue-in-cheek book review of the Internal Revenue Code from amazon.com:

This is an overly turgid work that suffers from constant rewrites; there have been nearly one-hundred editions issued, each slightly different from the last. There are times when the entire book seems self-contradictory. For some reason, for example, the authors feel compelled to follow the elegant and simple statement that "gross income means all income from whatever sources derived" with endless, often monotonous exceptions.

Significant parts of this work are relevant only to those with special interests, while other parts are likely to be universally appreciated (or depreciated, as the case may be). While often eminently practical, there are times when the authors become incredibly vague (they never seem to define "ordinary and necessary", for example, yet insist on using the phrase an inordinant number of times) and other times when they become downright mystical (for example, they spend some time, particularly in the accompanying regulations, talking about "disregarded entities").

Still, despite its flaws, I’d recommend that everyone read this book.