Alexander Vaiserman (ed.): Early life origins of ageing and longevity
Résumé
The book series Healthy Ageing and Longevity has published a new volume (# 9✉ dealing with the early-life origins of ageing and longevity. However, this book is not only concerned with ageing but more generally with adult health. This is an important topic and there are now many studies showing that improving health, particularly at old age, requires looking into what happened since the conception and even to what happened to the parents. As a fictitious example, one of the characters of the 1890 novel La Bête humaine, written by the French writer Émile Zola, was a man suffering from unavoidable outbreaks of violence because of alcoholism of his mother. The Dutch famine of the winter 1944-1945 is a clear example when hunger of the mother had serious consequences at old age for the foetus developing at that time. Thus, publishing this collective book was a good idea but it is really unfortunate that it contains many typos or grammatical errors, as for instance in the first chapter. It becomes ridiculous when this chapter is dealing with the 1966-1968 Finnish famine (page 8✉, rather than the 1866-1868 one! While one can blame the authors for not reading carefully their own proofs, some mistakes could be avoided if the publisher had provided copy-editing services to the authors, especially to those for whom English is not their first language. Furthermore, the size and resolution of figures are another issue. Consider for instance Fig. 13.3 showing "dots" and "circles": this is hardly possible to see them, even under binocular vision (I have tried✉! The issue of providing readers with best-quality books should be treated by the publisher in future books of this series Healthy Ageing and Longevity. The payment made by customers is always of the "high" quality, books should be too.
Domaines
Gériatrie et gérontologie
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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