3 Questions on Author

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/books/review-american-war-omar-el-akkad.html

1. Why does the author of the passage find it necessary to include the reviewed book's author's past as a reporter who mainly focused on civil unrest, the War on Terror, and controversial torture methods so early on in the review? Does this help persuade the reader to consider the review as credible?

The reason the review's author includes the author's past with the subjects involved in the reviewed book is to simply inform the reader why and how the book's author is able to write such descriptive and alarming dialogue on the images of torture, civil unrest, drone strikes, and perpetual collective fear in order to receive the critic's reaction. It establishes the author's credibility early while also establishing the critic's credibility by showing just how much research the critic has done into the background of the author and where the author is coming from when approaching these subjects. This adds a slight amount of persuasion to the passage to convince the reader that the critique is, in fact, credible. However, it is relatively negligible as it is expected for critics to look into the background of the books they review. Effectively, all this does alone is prevent the passage from being written off as uncredible and misleading.

2. What does the critic include paragraph 4 in the passage? What does this do to the reader of the critique?

The critic includes paragraph 4 to give the flaws of the book to the reader, establishing that all though their opinion of the book is positive there are still areas where it falls short because of the basic fact that no book is entirely perfect. The author further emphasizes this by stating after the fact that these faults in writing pale in comparison to the overall world the author has created in the book. This furthers the critic's credibility to the reader since she is able to show the negatives of the book in an otherwise positive review.

3. Why does the critic include specific plot points in the review if they are trying to convince readers to read the book? Is giving parts of a book away sometimes beneficial in persuading others to read it?

The critic includes these important plot points in her review to give the reader an idea of the character's relationships in the book itself rather than fruitlessly try to explain exactly how every relationship in the book works. This allows for the reader to help draw their own conclusions on the environment of the book and just how they feel they would like reading about such an environment. Giving specific pieces of a book to readers can be beneficial in persuading readers to read a specific book when put into the right circumstances and when the critic knows to be brief about such a thing. The wording the critic uses in revealing such a point in the book is very generalized and also states that the background of the relationship between the characters is obvious (i.e. likely to come about either early in the book or can be easily expected in the environment of the book's story). However, if this kind of plot revealing gets too descriptive of the actual ending points in a book it would more than likely spoil any joy in reading it.