Time Travel to 1973: Celebrating a Special Year
Talk Reviews of Early Reviewers Books
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1Misses_London
This should have been a fun stroll down memory lane, but this book needed an editor. It's riddled with errors - big and small. Misspellings (ex. pg. 13: "under the exact 'spot'", not 'sport'), layout errors (ex. pg. 50: "Panorama" is superimposed by "The BBC"), or just jumbled text/type-o's that were simply indecipherable (ex. bottom of pg. 50: "men who would just walk through around get into all kinds of 'adventures." What?? Note: The apostrophe before adventures isn't my type-o. It actually says that.) Even names are misspelled in places, namely David Purley referred to as "Purely". There's more -- these are all just examples.
An editor might also have made sure the book was prepped more for a 2023 audience. They could have pointed out that choosing to include a list of 15 notable people who died in a given year and of those 15 people making a mere 2 of them women is not judging the room well. The same goes for listing 35 notable people born in that year and deeming only 11 women worthy of mention. I note these lists specifically because the sexism is easily quantified, but it's evident, though less quantifiable, throughout the book. The author wrote 3/4 of a page about the 87th Wimbledon championships on pg. 61, but the women's tennis blurb was limited to a single sentence: "In the women's singles, which was at full strength, Billie Jean King defeated Chris Evert in straight sets." That is all.
More disturbing is the author's choice of words when discussing the recent overturn of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v Wade case on pg. 11. He states, "It was a shattering blow to pro-abortionists." No one refers to the pro-choice movement as "pro-abortionists" unless they're looking at it through an adversarial lens. This type of language has no place in a coffee table book, and it took me straight out of my 1973 waltz down memory lane and jarringly back to the divisive, political vitriol of the present.
Maybe other years in this series are better as I'm guessing they're not all written by the same dinosaur. I'm guessing this is generally a cheaply and shoddily thrown together series, a marketing gimmick for last-minute birthday gifts, and that the editing isn't much better in any of them.
An editor might also have made sure the book was prepped more for a 2023 audience. They could have pointed out that choosing to include a list of 15 notable people who died in a given year and of those 15 people making a mere 2 of them women is not judging the room well. The same goes for listing 35 notable people born in that year and deeming only 11 women worthy of mention. I note these lists specifically because the sexism is easily quantified, but it's evident, though less quantifiable, throughout the book. The author wrote 3/4 of a page about the 87th Wimbledon championships on pg. 61, but the women's tennis blurb was limited to a single sentence: "In the women's singles, which was at full strength, Billie Jean King defeated Chris Evert in straight sets." That is all.
More disturbing is the author's choice of words when discussing the recent overturn of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v Wade case on pg. 11. He states, "It was a shattering blow to pro-abortionists." No one refers to the pro-choice movement as "pro-abortionists" unless they're looking at it through an adversarial lens. This type of language has no place in a coffee table book, and it took me straight out of my 1973 waltz down memory lane and jarringly back to the divisive, political vitriol of the present.
Maybe other years in this series are better as I'm guessing they're not all written by the same dinosaur. I'm guessing this is generally a cheaply and shoddily thrown together series, a marketing gimmick for last-minute birthday gifts, and that the editing isn't much better in any of them.
