Gérard Tyack

Great concept but the book is a draft version which has been hurriedly assembled. Why not pay a publisher to clean up the mess? Politician and journalist Selvon seems to know a lot about the history but how can he expect people read a book that has no page numbers, no index, no table of contents? In addition it omits major historical events which makes me wonder of his real motives as a writer. For example there is absolutely no mention of the Mauritian Tamil pioneer Louis Arlanda (Gnandicarayan Arlanda) who was the first non-white and non-Creole to be nominated to Parliament in 1886 by Pope Hennessy. Selvon makes the same mistakes in Volume 3 of this series.

Volume 3 is an improvement on the previous 2 volumes in that it bears page numbers for a change. However there are many mistakes which require attention (e.g. 1948 elections results mixed up with those of 1953). The party of each candidate is missing for crucial years prior to 1967. There's no glossary of abbreviations. Pages 148 to 151 contain typesetting errors. There is no table of contents at the front. There is no index of names at the back which any reader would expect. Besides there is no header and footer, so it's a wild guess trying to work out which year you're dealing with, forcing the reader to sift painfully for the beginning of each election year, or worse to write the years on the pages! In the next edition at least a statement of which party or coalition won each election would also build up on this otherwise unique reference book. There's no citations and references except for one of the early pages which adds to the sense that this is a working draft which was not proof-read.