So for the past month I have been reading half of the book This
Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Klein is a highly rewarded author who
writes for the New York Times. She has also made a number one best seller
called The Shock Doctrine .
So far this
book has given me mixed emotions. The first half has been about Naomi telling
the audience about how we have a disaster on our hands and how the only way to
change it, is to change our way of thinking. She is of course talking about
global warming and her purpose is to explain that capitalism is a driving force
that creates pollution and waste, and the only way to combat this crisis is to
change the way our economic system works, from capitalism to a more suitable
form. She hasn’t discussed her solution yet; that will come later.
Even though
this book is written mostly for people who don’t believe that we have a crisis
on our hands, like me, I find it hard to read. She expresses her purpose well
using a lot of rhetoric, but at the same time she just says facts and facts and
reiterates the same thing over and over again and it gets to become hard to
read.
For instance
she will say something like, “Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not
only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average
incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in
their views, no matter how demonstrably false” (Klein 58). She appeals to logos here, giving a good fact
with a logical argument. This is good and enforces her message, but her problem
is that she will then give another five statistics on the same thing and repeat
her point. It’s a great argument but for a reader who is reading this for fun,
I got to her point a couple facts ago and find the rest unnecessary. But that’s
the ways she writes so I got to live with it hahaha. We will see how the rest
of this book goes.
(A polar bear trapped on a sheet of ice. A picture to represent the crisis that Klein is depicting)
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