My first thought is that the person who was thanked for editorial ability really shouldn't have been because they... simply didn't catch things that would improve readability in at least a section of about ten pages (e.g., using 'lead' as the past tense instead of 'led' because of homophones, dropped articles which disrupt the flow of reading, weirdly used commas that create strange lists when it's not supposed to be one, missing plurals...). I would not have thanked him because he did not do his job well and appears to have randomly skipped large sections, as if he read three pages and was like "Yeah, these three pages had minimal problems" and made that assumption for later sections.

ANYWAY, the poor editing aside (which really is a me-issue in terms of flow because of how I learned to read with dyslexia), it doesn't detract from the story. The story is succeeding in making me want to learn more about Mao (the person) because... holy shit. The things being discussed are just... unsurprising, but I've never looked into them.

To be fair, the book's acknowledgement says that it is 'for those who suffered under Mao'.