2 posts tagged “book review”
Now that I'm reading more, i decided to alternate my reading selections between content and style.
My content are to help me learn something about a topic. The last content read was The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers. My current content read is Under the Banner of Heaven.
In between the two was my read for style. These selections are of notably good writers either in nonfiction or fiction or even books on how to write better. (Of course, the content selections may be by great writers as well).
My first style selection was a book by Susan Orlean suggested by my friend and expert advice giver. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of profiles Orlean wrote mostly for the New Yorker.
Technically, she always has a paragraph where she describes the way her protagonist looks, usually listing details. She has a gift for listing, sometimes listing activities the protagonist participates in to further paint a picture of their life.
She also uses mystery as a hook in the opening paragraph. She'll make a pronouncement that seems to make no sense like the intro to her profile of Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old boy. "If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter." Throughout the essay, these mysteries are explained.
She explains in her introduction to the book that she often spends days or weeks with a person to do her reporting. My one wish for this book is that she put this kind of detail and reflection on writing the piece at the front of each essay so that I, a person reading her for style, could understand the challenges or techniques she used to write the essay.
Overall, a great read that I finished in a week!
My content are to help me learn something about a topic. The last content read was The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers. My current content read is Under the Banner of Heaven.
In between the two was my read for style. These selections are of notably good writers either in nonfiction or fiction or even books on how to write better. (Of course, the content selections may be by great writers as well).
My first style selection was a book by Susan Orlean suggested by my friend and expert advice giver. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of profiles Orlean wrote mostly for the New Yorker.
Technically, she always has a paragraph where she describes the way her protagonist looks, usually listing details. She has a gift for listing, sometimes listing activities the protagonist participates in to further paint a picture of their life.
She also uses mystery as a hook in the opening paragraph. She'll make a pronouncement that seems to make no sense like the intro to her profile of Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old boy. "If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter." Throughout the essay, these mysteries are explained.
She explains in her introduction to the book that she often spends days or weeks with a person to do her reporting. My one wish for this book is that she put this kind of detail and reflection on writing the piece at the front of each essay so that I, a person reading her for style, could understand the challenges or techniques she used to write the essay.
Overall, a great read that I finished in a week!
I'm trying to figure out the best way for me to remember what I learn from the reading I do. I often only hold on to the larger idea of the book and forget the details that help make the argument. So here it goes online:
The Devil's Highway is a deadly stretch of desert that many migrants take to enter the US. Urrea takes us back in time to remind us that this migration northward started with the Europeans as they settled Mexico. Then he adds:
The Devil's Highway is a deadly stretch of desert that many migrants take to enter the US. Urrea takes us back in time to remind us that this migration northward started with the Europeans as they settled Mexico. Then he adds:
"The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation [the horrible desert the book covers] by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese. In the 1880s, American railroad barons needed cheap skilled labor to help 'tame our continent.' Mexico's Chinese hordes could be hired for cheap, yet they could earn more in the United Statees than in Mexico, even at cut rates. Jobs opened, word went out, the illegals came north." p. 8
