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A review by risagross
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson
4.0
This book is thoroughly researched and clearly written. However: editing?! Perhaps the editor just skipped the pages after the uprising.
The book could stand to be significantly shorter. At least, there should have been a shorter version for non-academic plebeians like myself. Once the book gets into the legal aftermath of the uprising, it provides more detail than I’ll ever want or need — and certainly more than I can hope to retain.
The real problem I have with the editing, though, is more trivial: someone failed to catch the author’s abundant use of “myriad.” In one section, those things were so plentiful that I considered tallying them, but then I realized I’d have to revisit a fair amount of legal minutiae in order to do so. Not worth it.
Bottom line: this is a very good book in desperate need of editing. But I give it four stars for the research alone. Good thing I’m not rating on “ability to use a thesaurus.”
The book could stand to be significantly shorter. At least, there should have been a shorter version for non-academic plebeians like myself. Once the book gets into the legal aftermath of the uprising, it provides more detail than I’ll ever want or need — and certainly more than I can hope to retain.
The real problem I have with the editing, though, is more trivial: someone failed to catch the author’s abundant use of “myriad.” In one section, those things were so plentiful that I considered tallying them, but then I realized I’d have to revisit a fair amount of legal minutiae in order to do so. Not worth it.
Bottom line: this is a very good book in desperate need of editing. But I give it four stars for the research alone. Good thing I’m not rating on “ability to use a thesaurus.”