Enemy of Entropy

Archive for 15 April 2008

Review: Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher

15 April 2008, 8:20 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Reading, Writing.

Writing to Change the World
I haven’t actu­ally fin­ished Mary Pipher’s Writ­ing to Change the World yet, so it’s prob­a­bly weird for me to be doing a review. It’s a really meaty lit­tle book, though, and I haven’t fin­ished it because I keep going back to re-​​read sec­tions or copy some of the quotes scat­tered through the text.

The focus of the book is on per­sua­sive writ­ing. I like the fact that Pipher acknowl­edges the power of sto­ries and fic­tion to inspire change.

I’ve got to return it to the library (it’s way late, because I didn’t want to let go of it), but I’m def­i­nitely going to find a copy of my own soon. As I really don’t buy that many books, pre­fer­ring to read them from the library, buy­ing a copy after I read the library’s copy is pretty high praise.

I’ve admired Pipher for years, since read­ing Reviv­ing Ophe­lia and The Shel­ter of Each Other, but some­thing I learned today raises her even higher in my esteem. Last year, she returned an award she received from the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion to protest the APA’s con­tin­u­ing sup­port of tor­ture by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. The arti­cle includes her let­ter to the APA, and I encour­age you to read it.

 

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