When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish...and Other Tales about the Genes in Your Body

#141
Title: When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish...and Other Tales about the Genes in Your Body
Author: Lisa Seachrist Chiu
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 2006
Genre: science
225 pages 

An interesting enough look at human genetic problems, marred by unclear writing and poor editing. This is problematic in a technical discussion. Errors range from a sometimes-random distribution of commas to actually switching elements in a protein's name (fore example, writing "MeC2P" when "MeCP2" is correct) to leaving out words. In addition to these technical flaws, the author does a poor job of transitions between paragraphs and of associating each new section of content to a chapter theme. Her apparent lack of understanding of how to organize a paragraph further complicates matters. The effect is of discontinuous segments strung together. I'm sure I could make a chromosome joke about this if I were willing to work harder. The author slides into jargon in the later chapters, where these errors are also more frequent. Thus, I recommend the earlier chapters but not the latter. This is disappointing because topics she addresses are interesting. Ultimately, however, other authors express themselves better.