SOLD; by Patricia McCormick

Even before reading the book one fact is clear from looking at the cover - the writer, the publisher, et al, none of them have either visited Nepal or got over a subconscient racism they do not realise they have, ingrained deep in their psyche.

People of Nepal, fact is, are not dark. And this face on the cover is hardly distinguishable from her hair or the dark cover overhead, a really dark shade of skin that does not usually come from a suntan when skin begins as light as in Nepal.

And what is more, Nepal is poor enough that the white slavery racket sources from, rather than supplies into, Nepal. Come to think of it the terminology "white slavery" is, of course, doubly false. For one thing the racket is about luring young women under false pretenses into slavery for profit of pimps with torture and physical abuse heaped on multiple rape until they are all but dead within and often dead in fact, and the women so abused and cheated being "white" is true about a small proportion in the world; for another, no humans are white - what humans are is pale skinned when generations and millennia of living in a dark continent forces nature to make the skin light enough that the little sun one gets might in fact give sufficient vitamins and so forth for health.

This is very reminiscent of seeing a painting titled "An Arab" in one of the two top museums in Amsterdam, and when pointed out that Arabs are not dark - the painting showed a male darker than this face on cover of "SOLD" - the host said the value of the painting was in the art and it did not matter if facts were right. He was completely unaware of his level of racism (and for that matter gender attitude too) - but he was also unaware of his level of ignorance, and of lack of thought on matters not directly related to his everyday needs. Of German origin few years post war, this was not very surprising.

This book though is not that old, and hence one expects better.