Rate this book

¿Cómo Se Sale De Aquí? (2010)

by Randi Hutter Epstein(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Turner

review 1: I'm reluctantly, reluctantly giving this a whole two stars because I think Dr. Epstein meant well. But this book was one big object lesson in the dire need, even in the age of self-publishing and automatic spell-checking, for editors.The need for a copy editor was the most pronounced problem; there were so many glaring syntax errors that could easily have been caught if a human being had gone over the text. But I think a content editor could have served this book even better - the style changes, from dryly formal to blog-post casual, gave me mental whiplash from sentence to sentence. And certainly a content editor could have helped Epstein organize her thoughts and structure the book properly, as the whole overarching pseudo-chronological arc was just a terrible idea.About... more that: don't bill your book as a history of childbirth from the (fictional) dawn of humanity to the present day if it is, in fact, a history of childbirth practices in Western Europe and America from the Middle Ages to the present. Apart from the weird are-these-supposed-to-be-funny lighthearted paragraphs about the "garden of Eden", all the content focused on the aforementioned geographical and historical span, and there's nothing wrong with that per se, but the title and introduction gave the impression that this was supposed to be a broad-spectrum view of how human beings have viewed pregnancy and childbirth throughout history, which was misleading.Also, if Epstein had had a clearer structure in mind for the book, maybe she could have come up with a clearer point of view, as it was very hard to tell what, if anything, she thought of most of the views and events she was chronicling. And I don't mean that she was being objective, I mean that it was difficult to tell what the point of most of the anecdotes was, and why they were being related.The references - in half-page footnotes and relentless citations - reminded me of a student with a term paper due that had a minimum source requirement, and served primarily to make me aware that there were many good books available on all the topics covered, and therefore to leave me wondering why I wasn't reading those books instead of this one.Wow, I am in a really bad mood about this book. But it's just that I'm so disappointed; it seemed like the sort of thing I'd really love, given the subject matter, and I was just so disappointed by how superficial, and how poorly organized, it was.
review 2: Fascinating material, but I found her writing style a bit obnoxious, especially in the first half of the book. She raises questions worth pondering in the latter chapters dealing with sperm banks, freezing eggs/ovaries, etc. However, her attempt at a lighthearted and somewhat mocking tone in the early chapters on historical practices grated. Though I'm sure some of this has to do with available source materials, her history seemed uneven and her selection of topics to cover in detail a bit random. less

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