I purchased this book in hopes, I suppose, of finding more about DNA testing than is available at this time.
This book appears to be for people to read who are contemplating having their parentage tested. Or for people who have decided to have a paternity test and need to understand the process of testing by use of DNA evidence. It has that very limited scope. Which is legitimate, of course, but the title of the book might have made that more clear. There is an Appendix (II): 'DNA testing resources for your family.' It amounts to three advertisements from GeneTree Inc., 1-800-Paternity, and eneGene/ Genetic Services LLC. I can't tell if these companies have underwritten the publication of the book or not. In this appendix the following phrases are included: 'Paternity Testing, GeneCard Identification, Grand-parentage, Y-chromosome, Mitochondrial DNA, Siblingship Analysis, DNA Banking Services, Worldwide Drawsites, Motherless & Fatherless Testing, Family Studies, Court Qualified DNA Experts. Author contact information is given in the front of the book.
I'm sorry to report that this book, which came with a kit of swabs and some envelopes, is one of the worst that I have ever encountered. Note that even the title is ungrammatic - when the question mark is included. It is from all standpoints that I criticize this book. The layout, the writing, the editing, most of the illustrations, are poor. A few illustrations are of some value in themselves and the printing quality is not bad. That is, there is no smearing of the ink or breaks in the images. Many words are run together. There are at least three places in this book where at the bottom of a page, a sentence is broken off and never picked up and completed. I can't tell whether a phrase or a page is missing. If I were Sherlock Holmes I would say that this book was written in an Eastern European language and then translated into unsatisfactory English by a person who's first language was not English. There are 160 pages of large print. Besides the authors there are three contributing authors: Ed Grotjan, Robert Allen and James P. Reape and a text editor: Emily Balestrini. There is a bibliography and a glossary. I'm not in a position to judge the bibliography. But some of the poor grammar continues in the glossary. The last chapter is by Dr. Allen and I find none of my negative notes there. On nearly every other page I find some kind of question or problem.
Besides all of the production and structural problems of this hastely produced book, the content is really garbled. The mixture of technical jargon with over repeated layman's introductions makes for a difficult reading. There seems to be no development in the book. Perhaps it was much longer and has been condensed and truncated to the point of non-intelligence. Perhaps the editor was not allowed to be more brutal in her work. Much needed to be explained in more detail and much redundancy needed to be removed.
Another disturbing thing is the use of the term 'racial.' I am not adverse to the idea that there may be 'races.' This is a delicate subject. But in this book, race is never defined and yet is referred to often in the article by Grotjan. For instance: "For most calculations, the frequency of a particular allele is taken from accumulated data corresponding to a specific racial group (the reason that race will usually be noted at the time of specimen collection)." p 87. Now either we have races or we don't. And if we do, then how do we define them? For instance are people who are 3/4 'Caucasian' and 1/8 'African' and 1/8 'Amerind' defined as African, or what?
I cannot recommend this book.
ISBN-13:
978-0966402728
ISBN-10:
0966402723
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