Reaching Broader Audiences

I've followed Howard Zinn's writing for years. His book "A People's History of the United States," is a comic book illustration of American history meant to reach an audience that is outside of the establishment. I love the idea.

When I taught composition, I always wanted to have students create video essays. I believed that this generation is more impacted by images than words, and that the combination of images and words is an incredibly powerful medium. The challenge would have been to maintain the same standard for sources and arguments required in an academic essay (i.e citations, credible sources, well-balanced arguments, etc.). My bosses never liked the idea. I wish I could have shown them this video, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire," based on an essay Zinn wrote for TomDispatch and narrated by Viggo Mortenson.



Will it reach a broader audience? It's been viewed almost 80,000 times and I bet a large number of those 80,000 people don't have a copy of the book. Plus, there are roughly 340 comments on YouTube. Some of them are worthless, but others resemble the types of discussions I tried to get my students to engage in. For example:

"How does one spread humanity? The problems that he identifies are real, but his solutions are too vague?"

Maybe it's all wishful thinking, but the video does prove that a message that combines words with images can be as powerful as a book (if not more powerful). What do you guys think?

I love a good book

I've bought this book, The God of Small Things, so many times and given it away just as I start reading it because I end up talking to someone about how good it is, they get excited about it, so I give them my copy. Then I buy a new one and start all over again. I'm only on chapter 8, halfway through the book. I usually give my copy away right about now.

This time, it's the writing style that fascinates me most. The first time I started it, the political side was the intrigue. I had just moved to Egypt, and although I'd lived in developing countries before, in Egypt it was much clearer that the impact of the developed world was devastating. I could relate with that part of the story as I was living it for the first time in my life.

But this time it's really Arundhati Roy's writing style that I love. Her details are meticulous and humorous. They don't read like pages of adjectives before nouns placed to fulfill the requirements of a composition class. Every detail has a meaning--often a hidden and derisive meaning. The plot is developed through the descriptions that often come from the voices of children (who haven't yet been jaded). And, it's spot on. She's a master of "Show me, don't tell me."

When fiction explains reality better than non-fiction ever could, that to me is excellence. And when it still grabs your attention at 3 in the morning after you've been teaching Russian students to speak English all online and don't want to read another word in any language, that is just plain awesome.