I really didn’t think that I would like listening to Ishmael Beah speak about his #1 National Bestseller, A Long Way Gone, but I was proven wrong. I enjoyed every minute of it. I guess I just stereotyped how it would be uninteresting and put me to sleep. I would assume that more students felt the same way. Beah caught my attention from the moment he walked on stage. He gave off a vibe of confidence that filled the room. I was instantly infatuated with his presents. One of my favorite things was that he could make some jokes about his hard life that he lived. It would have been difficult to have enjoyed what he had to say if he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. Overall I love everything about it and would go again if I had the chance.
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I also liked his use of humor. I'm guessing it helped that he was a college student himself not that long ago and realized that a speaker can't hold the attention of a huge, college-age audience (or any audience, really) by being serious all the time.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if he thought about this when writing his book too. If he had told his story chronologically, without the reflections and moving back and forth in time, it might have been too hard or too repetitive to hold our attention. By changing his narrative up -- throwing us back and forth in time and adding new perspectives in -- he holds our attention better.