The main argument of Duong Van M Elliot’s 2000 The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family book is that the Vietnam people experienced untold suffering and trials during the time of communist rule. It also contains the myths that are found within the Vietnamese traditions presented in the English language. The text’s information adds onto the information which I already have regarding Vietnamese history. The author states that she found out that the tales in her society described the families’ continuity, traditions, and values.
These tales were the binding factors within the family ties and they made the writer to understand what experiences the Vietnamese people used to pass through. For example, Elliot explains that the Vietnamese once faced tragedy from the neighboring communist nations. The author also explains that the Vietnamese were firmly anti-communist, a principle that made the surrounding communist-inclined nations to be at loggerheads with the Vietnamese. The author explains that the general idea behind writing this book was to emphasize the history of Vietnamese people.
This fact makes the readers to sympathize with the Vietnamese based on the consequences they faced when the French and Americans attacked Vietnam. Does the author adequately describe the subject of the book? Does he/she provide a balanced viewpoint? Through the text, Elliot describes various events, experiences, and viewpoints that she deduced based on her own subjective reasoning. The book’s content are somewhat biased with regard to strictly abiding by objectivity measures. The rather detailed text thus mainly presents readers with the personal views of the writer and gives the author’s personal opinions.
The Essay on Books Or Experiences
It is not easy to compare the differences and similarities of the two: knowledge from books and knowledge from experiences. Indeed, books really help us or provide us ideas about meanings, facts, and concepts of peculiar things but we cannot count exactly on the books, we also need to be practical. All we need are experiences that really teach us how to do and practice well. The books are ...
The writer says that she is writing this book so as to demonstrate the trials and tribulations that the Vietnamese faced in this tumultuous period. In turn, the author seeks to make the reader to sympathize with the Vietnamese who faced unspeakable malice in the hands of the communist forces. 1 The book’s content has clearly given the authors purpose, the theme, as well as the thesis of the text. The ability to make sense of such elements in written works is a basic requirement in reviewing books. 1Elliott, D. V. M. (2000).
The sacred willow: Four generations in the life of a Vietnamese family.
New York: Oxford University Press. The author describes the cruelty which befell the Vietnamese in the hands of the communists. The author clearly describes what befell the Vietnamese. The author says that what she was writing was what befell the author’s forefathers. The author thus assets that what she finally wrote is an historic manual of the tragedy that befell the Vietnamese and this subject is well described in the book. The author provides an unbalanced viewpoint based on the claims she puts across through the book.
This is evident because the author gives a review of the whole life the Vietnamese people; herself together with her family in the land of Vietnam. The writer does not give a balanced viewpoint on the writing. This is evident since she gives a combination of two theoretical arguments in one writing, that is, the family chaos as well as the Vietnamese misfortunes. The author should have analyzed the two episodes in two different writings. This strategy could have given detailed report on each concept. For this deficiency, Elliot describes the subject clearly but the viewpoint was not balanced.
