While I agree with the many critics who praise the elegant phrasing and often stunning metaphors, I am intensely annoyed by headlines that appear in the middle of a chapter (or at the beginning for that matter). I find this an unnecessary and distracting gimmick.
Worse, the sentence structure reads as if the author's first language were German. Is this intentional? And if so, why? This device, if it is a device, frustrates this reader.