Review
This little book basically rehashes a very commonplace piece of writing advice: avoid unnecessary words and vague, roundabout wording. If you've read Strunk and White, you already know the message this book was written to convey. If this is news to you, then this book might be a good purchase.
Rand's original contribution to this subject seems to be a list of words and suffixes that are likely to be found in sentences that need trimming. You put these into your word processor search function and use them to zoom in on trouble sentences. Nifty idea, but I'll probably continue to look at each sentence and decide if it needs tightening.
This book started out as a short article, and it should have stayed in that form - or become half of a chapter in a writing book. It is sadly padded out to justify its marketing as a $10 book: the font is huge, the beginning is just a bunch of autobiography and self-promotion of questionable value to writers.
I also find it strange that there are glaring mistakes here, in a book that says accuracy is the top priority in any piece of writing. Rand perpetuates a common misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "schizophrenic", and he misuses even simple grammatical terms like "passive voice" and "past tense". This is not to say that he doesn't know how to cut unneeded verbiage (which is the point of the book). He clearly does. But I'd prefer to get my advice from people who have their facts straight.
Finally, the subtitle ("Self-Editing for the Modern Writer") is a bit misleading. There is much more to self-editing (especially when it comes to fiction) than simply tightening flabby prose. Revising a draft also involves work on dramatic structure, internal consistency, description, point of view, style and voice, etc. If a beginning writer picked up this book and got the notion that the only difference between a draft and a finished story is that the latter has 10% fewer words (which is what Rand keeps saying), that would be very unfortunate.