Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural and Medical Issues by Rosemarie Skaine

Unedited and therefore so full of grammatical, style, and other errors ...by Anonymous

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July 25, 2009: This review is written by a 32 year veteran of campaigns against FGM and a recognized scholar in the field. I read this book some time ago but remember it as the worst edited I have ever encountered -- and with a Cornell Ph.D. in comparative literature, that means thousands. I don't know whether the fault lies with the author or publisher -- probably both. But I also remember on a single page, going through it with the red pen used for correcting freshman essays. I felt, in sum, as though I had been duped having bought a book with such truly appalling writing. To the publisher's credit, they offered me another of their books for free but I had already lost confidence in them. Now, I understand that you probably want to hear something about the relevance of content. The fact is, however, that bad writing prevented me from easily accessing the content, and the single aspect I remember years later -- original interviews with victims in Tanzania--, offended me for having had the words of people struggling with English simply transcribed from the tape recorder onto the page, without any effort at editing for clarity, wordiness, transition, or flow, thereby making the speakers sound, well, undignified if not simply stupid. My advice to all: don't buy this book.