Book review

User Generated

Verar09

Writing

Description

A book review is a clear, concise piece of writing that is an exercise in giving opinion without using "I," summarizing a text without giving spoilers, choosing the best quotes to illustrate your claims, and thinking critically about a text.

The Task

The Inlander has commissioned you to write a 350 word book review of Tara Westover's Educated. You will need to provide general information about the book's worth while specifically addressing the book's strengths and weaknesses. You need to communicate this concisely and entertainingly. Your paper needs to be written for the Inlander's readership and structured according to the following guidelines:

  • Paragraph 1: One to two sentences identifying the book's genre and subject matter and hinting at its overall worth.
  • Paragraph 2: This is the bulk of your word count. The first half of the paragraph provides a summary of the book without giving away spoilers. The second half of the paragraph critically engages with the substance of the book (this is where your judgment of the material comes in).
  • Paragraph 3: One or two sentences passing final judgment on the book.

Things to Note:

  • Only the author's last name is used - Westover.
  • You do not use the first person - "I."
  • When you use quotes to back up your claims, you need to include the page number in parentheses.
  • Consider how the book reviews you read for Discussion post 8B discuss Westover's memoir and use these as a guide for how to insert your own opinion without directly stating - I think.

Examples:

Example 1:

The future of the republic depends on humility, empathy, and respect for pluralism.

Sasse, Nebraska’s junior senator, lives in the same small town in which he grew up, which still evokes the “hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night” feeling that gives him a strong sense of rootedness and community. In his impassioned critique of contemporary America, he acknowledges that the world of his childhood has changed for most people. Today’s culture has become mobile, where people move from place to place and job to job: We “just don’t have community cohesion like we used to.” Although the author denies that he is nostalgic for the world in which he grew up, he extols the 1950s, when “work, faith, recreation, and family were bound up together”; I Love Lucy was a shared touchstone; and a close-knit community of families helped raise one another’s children. Americans today, he argues, are in a dismal state: lonely, fractious, and adrift. “We are in a period of unprecedented upheaval,” he writes. “Community is collapsing, anxiety is building, and we’re distracting ourselves with artificial hatreds.” Those hatreds are fomented by what he calls “polititainment,” niche media outlets, social media, and websites—on the right and the left—that confirm biases rather than allow people to become well-informed. Sasse singles out Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who hammers the message, “liberals are evil, you are a victim, and you should be furious,” and he also criticizes the quashing of free speech on college campuses by those who object to “dissenters from campus majoritarian orthodoxy.” Drawing on the ideas of the Founding Fathers, the author maintains that foremost among American values is the affirmation of “the dignity of our fellows.” The “terrible 2016 election,” he asserts, “was just a painful symptom of the bigger disease—which is our growing disinterest in the meaning of America.” Sasse offers a generalized, overriding recommendation for healing: identifying and nurturing common bonds.

A sensible and thoughtful yet hardly groundbreaking political analysis.

(Kirkus Reviews)

Example 2:

Alternating between two centuries, Kingsolver examines the personal and social shocks that ensue when people’s assumptions about the world and their place in it are challenged.

The magazine Willa Knox worked for went broke, and so did the college where her husband, Iano, had tenure, destroying the market value of their Virginia home, which stood on college land. They should be grateful to have inherited a house in Vineland, New Jersey, just a half-hour commute from Iano’s new, non-tenured one-year gig, except it’s falling apart, and they have been abruptly saddled with son Zeke’s infant after his girlfriend commits suicide. In the same town during Ulysses Grant’s presidency, science teacher Thatcher Greenwood is also grappling with a house he can’t afford to repair as well as a headmaster hostile to his wish to discuss Darwin’s theory of evolution with his students and a young wife interested only in social climbing. While Willa strives to understand how her comfortable middle-class life could have vanished overnight, her 26-year-old daughter, Tig, matter-of-factly sees both her mother’s disbelief and her Greek-immigrant grandfather Nick’s racist diatribes and hearty approval of presidential candidate Donald Trump as symptoms of a dying culture of entitlement and unbridled consumption. Lest this all sound schematic, Kingsolver has enfolded her political themes in two dramas of family conflict with full-bodied characters, including Mary Treat, a real-life 19th-century biologist enlisted here as the fictional friend and intellectual support of beleaguered Thatcher. Sexy, mildly feckless Iano and Thatcher’s feisty sister-in-law, Polly, are particularly well-drawn subsidiary figures, and Willa’s doubts and confusion make her the appealing center of the 21st-century story. The paired conclusions, although hardly cheerful, see hope in the indomitable human instinct for survival. Nonetheless, the words that haunt are Tig’s judgment on blinkered America: “All the rules have changed and it’s hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.”

As always, Kingsolver gives readers plenty to think about. Her warm humanism coupled with an unabashed point of view make her a fine 21st-century exponent of the honorable tradition of politically engaged fiction.

(Kirkus Reviews

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Anonymous
I was struggling with this subject, and this helped me a ton!

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