Read-Think-b4-u-Write

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson is a bit of a staple in college classrooms, including my own.  It is a poignant story of one man's struggle to help educate the girls of Afghanistan.  A promise he made after being rescued by the villagers of Korphe following an unsuccessful bid to scale K-2, the world’s second highest mountain.  He struggled mightily in his cause; the Taliban kidnapped and held him hostage in Waziristan and blew up the schools as fast as he could build them. His book gave me hope for Afghanistan as it struggled against the Taliban and a purpose for our presence there.  I agreed with columnist, Nicholas Kristoff, when he said, “So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.”  But it appears Kristoff and everybody else has been hoodwinked. Yes, duped, and in the worst sort of way.  Not onl...

Our society values the graphically visual medium. Even more so, we value graphics coupled with sound to receive information in the same way most of us navigate the world. Our news and entertainment is almost exclusively received via the television. It can be said that by diminishing textual mediums we have cheapened the word. When studying authors like Poe do you think graphic novels like Nevermore do justice to the word pictures we create as we read his texts? Why? Or do you think our imaginations can do far more justice to the terror Poe attempts to invoke on his readers? Why?