Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Miner's Daughter and Southern Exposure

The Miner's Daughter, by Gretchen Moran Laskas, is the story of Willa Lowell, a teenager in a coal
mining camp town in West Virginia during the Great Depression. The various conflicts in her life (she loves to read and write, but lives in a world without books or opportunities for further education; she's fighting to keep her family together and financially afloat amidst great hardship; even good fortune is not without its blemishes) play out in a story that's somewhat simple, but still pleasingly told. It pulled me in, and I read it quickly.

Grade: C+


And then there's Southern Exposure, by Barbara P. Thomas-Slayter. Subtitled "International Development and the Global South in the Twenty-First Century," I did read it for a course (Third World Issues), but it's not excessively textbookish. If you want to better understand how the forces of globalization are affecting ordinary people in impoverished countries, it's an excellent overview of development issues.

Grade: A

P.S. Just so ya know, I'm linking book titles to their Good Reads pages from now on so you can go there to read the description/summary if you want. (The links in the side "Latest Book Reviews" box also lead to my reviews on the Good Reads site.) Plot summaries aren't really my thing, haha.

No comments:

Post a Comment