Finger 24- Book Review

To end this years TOWS in a blaze of glory, I wanted to write about the upcoming election, or the latest breakthrough in biotechnolgy. However, the roation requires a response to an independent non fiction book. Due to these  restraints, I forced myself one day waiting in the Orthodontist waiting room to read the gut wrentching book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, a collection of firsthand accounts based on the Rwandan Civil war.

 In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Written by Philip Gourevitch's, the piece serves to be a haunting work about the anatomy of the war in Rwanda, providing the reader with a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath.  

"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mass killings of Rwanda. But the situation is not so simple, and in this complex and wrenching book, he explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.

The "stories" in this book's subtitle are both the author's, as he repeatedly visits this tiny country in an attempt to make sense of what has happened, and those of the people he interviews. These include a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a Schindleresque hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren, and can only answer these charges by saying, "What could I do?" 

In the end, you can't help but to ask along with the author: Why does this happen? And why don't we bother to stop it? 

Finger- 23 (Sorry I lost track)

 In this currently trending article, The Case for Hamilton as Album of the Year, Spencer Kornhaber pulls quotes from songs and compares Lin Miranda, the lead and writer of Hamilton, to other artists in order to argue for Hamilton as the album of the year by rhetorically analyzing it.

     Like any good piece of rhetorical analysis, quotes are powerful tools to persuade the audience. He writes, “it probably took a month alone to figure out the right phrase to rhyme with ‘revolutionary manumission abolitionists.’ ” By implementing quotes into his writing as shown, he allows the reader to make decisions for themselves and see first-hand how Miranda used certain techniques to create certain effects. In this way, he can show the reader the intricacies of Miranda’s writing and musical technique, proving Hamilton to be the best album of the year.

     Kornhaber also includes comparisons to other artists, including hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar and Drake. He writes, “You can find this Hamiltonian idea of hip-hop refracted through rap’s other great works this year. You hear it in the verbosity, the craft, the daringness, the desperate idealism, and the death-obsessed drive of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. You hear Hamilton’s obsession with legacy, his unwillingness to back down when challenged, his profligacy—’why do you write as if you’re running out of time?’—in Drake’s multi-mixtape 2015 output.” In this way, Kornhaber proves the validity of rap as an expressive tool in musical theater, perhaps even more effective than just singing. This is seen in the song “Farmer Refuted,” in which “Hamilton tears Samuel Seabury’s words apart by literally speaking between them—basically, it’s Miranda proving the supremacy of rap as a form of expression.” Kornhaber argues that even though Miranda’s use of rap is unconventional, it’s wholly effective in musical theater. Kornhaber’s direct quotes from Miranda’s song and comparison of Miranda’s songs and other artist’s songs allows him to successfully rhetorically analyze Hamilton all while supporting his argument that Hamilton should be lauded as the album of the year. 

Finger 22

Intelligence is a word that can seem to take on a different meaning every time it is used.  This could explain part of the problem with the education system today.  We all know what smart looks like, but we don't fully understand how to obtain it.  David Robson digests what he thinks makes a person intelligent and summarizes it down to a concise list. The title works to draw the reader in by using a word not often found in news headlines let alone on the BBC.  It alerts the reader that this will be a casual piece that will not try to make any heavy handed points that may disturb audiences and that it will probably be an entertaining read.  It also suggests that the advice is not meant to change the reader compleltly but to get them to approach situations in a different way. 

The ideas hinted at with the title of the article are further developed with the structure that follows.  The article is formatted in a list structure that is easy to digest, but does not subtract from the overall quality.  For example #2 is entitled "be ready to eat humble pie"and a picture of an actual pie is shown.  The audience knows what is coming and they can form an opinion before they read on that Robson plays off of.  He does not just rely on this reaction, however, as he links to outside information and develops his argument with multiple paragraphs for each point.  This is uncommon for internet lists and that makes it all the more effective and noticable.

 Obviously Robson's relatively short article cannot make anyone into a genius but it does provide a relaxing introduction to the idea that believing you are intelligent may be the first step.