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The Summary Analysis:
You will read a NYTimes opinion piece, “Gang of 40,” by Nicholas B. Kristof and write a short essay summarizing, with utter neutrality, the piece’s argument;
Length: 1/3rd of the original’s 786-word length;
Style: MLA;
Points: 15:
7 for grammar, usage, syntax and punctuation; especially, but not limited to, using Professor Joseph Williams’s 3 axioms
·
use characters as grammatical subjects in all your clauses (independent or subordinate);
· closely link those subjects to action verbs in the active voice;
· build paragraphs from clauses strung together with consistent grammatical subjects;
You will also earn points (or fail to earn points) for:
· pronoun use (that your pronouns have clear, unambiguous referents as covered in class and posted on Blackboard);
· punctuation (where punctuation miss-use or omission inhibits the reader’s understanding);
· spelling (again, where misspellings inhibit understanding, or indicate overall sloppiness (rather than an occasional and innocent typographical error));
· register (that your word-choice avoids slang or language not befitting an academic setting).
8 for having a well-informed, thesis-driven, accurate, neutral, comprehensive and independent summary; a summary with:
· limited quotes from the original;
· a summary that, as the assignment indicates, contains short paragraphs equivalent in the number, the scope and the pith and substance of the original’s sections;
· a summary rendered in the same order as the original.
Niloc Retseh
Professor Hester
ENG 102-0XX
Spring 2013 — Summary Paper
Changing Lives, One Book at a Time
In his 05 November 2011 article in The New York Times, “His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives,” Nicholas Kristof tells the story of how John Wood has opened 12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools around the world. According to Kristof, Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has stocked those libraries and schools with over 10 million books. Kristof states that Room to Read
opens six new schools a day, or, Kristof points out, six times as many as the number of outlets McDonald’s opens.
Kristof writes that since Wood quit Microsoft and founded Room To Read in 2000, Wood has also self-published 591 children’s titles in a variety of remote and diverse languages. Kristof quotes Wood that some languages don’t have children’s books. Thus, Room To Read has ferreted out children’s authors in languages such as Xhosa, Chhattisgari and others. Kristof informs us that Wood is currently seeking “’…the Dr Suess of Cambodia.’”
Further, Wood, Kristof emphasizes, has changed the lives of 13,500 otherwise impoverished girls by keeping them in school. Kristof relates how he met one such girl, Le Thi My Duyen. Floods had forced her family to live “…in a shabby tent on a dike,” Kristof reports, and those floods had also forced Duyen to drop out of school. According to Kristof, Room to Read paid for Duyen to not only go back to school but to live in the dormitory and avoid a four-hour daily bicycle-and-boat commute, all at a cost of a mere $250 per year. This tiny amount, Kristof points out, dwarfs in comparison to the billions and billions we spend on missiles and troops for our foreign interventions and, as Kristof quotes Wood, that tiny amount“…can change a girl’s life forever….”
Kristof argues that Wood succeeds because of his hard-headed, business-like approach. Kristof explains that Wood utilizes his marketing background at Microsoft to spread the word to 53 Room To Read chapters around the globe. From these 53 chapters, Kristof proclaims, Wood attacks illiteracy “as if it were Netscape,” aiming for 100,000 libraries and relegating illiteracy to “…the scrapheap of history,” all within 20 years.
Gang of 40
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In the 1970s, in its days of hard-line Communist isolation, China was ruled by the extremist “Gang of Four.” Drivers then were sometimes encouraged to proceed at red lights because red was the revolutionary color signifying advance — resulting in a chaos that was emblematic of the times.
In the United States, we always do things in a grand way, so it’s a tribute to American exceptionalism that we have far outperformed China in the field of extremist ideologues. We don’t have some pathetic little foursome, but an unrivaled “Gang of 40.”
That’s my name for the 40 hard-line Republican House members who have forced the shutdown of the federal government and are now flirting with a debt default that could spin the world into recession. In their purported effort to save America money, they’re costing us taxpayers billions of dollars.
Obviously, there are differences — our Gang of 40 disdain Mao suits — but there is a similar sense in which an entire nation is held hostage by a small group of unrepresentative figures who don’t have much of a clue about economics or about where they’re taking the country.
The Gang of 40’s government shutdown has been bad enough, cutting off
death benefits to families of service members
and ending federal
support for rape crisis centers
. It’s doubly painful that all this is happening while the House and Senate gyms remain open.
(Bravo to the Washington restaurant that is offering a 10 percent discount to some federal workers, while posting a 10 percent surcharge to members of Congress. Maybe members of the Gang of 40 should also be compelled to wash dishes?)
What’s most troubling about the mess is the way the extremists downplay the risks of running into the debt limit. Astonishingly, Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida veterinarian,
says that missing the debt ceiling deadline
“would bring stability to world markets.”
Or there’s Senator Rand Paul,
who said that not raising the debt limit could be reframed
as “a pretty reasonable idea.” Even Senator Tom Coburn says it wouldn’t be so bad to miss the debt-limit deadline and face a “
managed catastrophe
.”
There’s now a right-wing echo chamber, shaped by Fox News Channel and Web sites like RedState, that repeats such nonsense until it acquires a patina of plausibility — and thus makes a catastrophe more difficult to avoid.
A Pew Research Center poll this month found
that 54 percent of Republicans believe that the United States can miss the debt-limit deadline without major problems.
What makes our trajectory dangerous is that the hard-liners are getting positive feedback.
The most reliable Republican voters
are about twice as likely to say that Congressional Republicans have compromised too much as to say that they haven’t compromised enough.
Hang on to your hat. We may be in for a wild ride.
I’ve often been curious about the wretched political leadership in America in the 1840s and 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War: How could American politicians have been so stubborn as they inched toward cataclysm? Watching today’s obstreperousness, I’m gaining a better insight.
Two features strike me about this moment — and both are echoes of the mistakes in the run-up to the Civil War. One is the obliviousness of central players, especially the Gang of 40, to the risks ahead.
The second is the way politicians seek leverage by brazenly threatening deliberate harm to the nation unless they get their way. The House Republican hard-liners lost their battle against Obamacare in the democratic process, just as President Obama lost his battle for an assault-weapons ban. But instead of accepting their loss as Obama did, members of the Gang of 40 took hostages. Unless Obamacare is defunded, they’ll cause billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.
The G.O.P. claims to be the party particularly concerned by budget deficits. Yet its tantrum caused a government shutdown that
cost the country $1.6 billion last week alone
.
As for the debt limit, the costs of missing that deadline could be infinitely greater. Already,
interest rates are spiking for one-month Treasury bills
to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank,
calculates that the 2011 debt-ceiling confrontation
will, over a decade, cost American taxpayers an extra $18.9 billion.
And that was the price tag for a crisis in which the debt-limit deadline was eventually met. If this deadline is missed, the costs in higher interest rates in the years ahead will be billions more.
Members of the Gang of 40 are unwilling to pay for early childhood education, but they’re O.K. with paying untold billions for a government shutdown and debt-limit crisis? That’s not governance, but extremism.
