Practice, write & improve, b2 first (fce) review: writing guide.
We will use the example FCE review topic below:
You see this announcement in your college English-language magazine.
Book reviews wanted Have you read a book in which the main character behaved in a surprising way?
Write us a review of the book, explaining what the main character did and why it was surprising. Tell us whether or not you would recommend this book to other people.
The best reviews will be published in the magazine.
Write your review (140-190 words)
The first thing you need to do is to underline a description part -in other words, just find what needs to be described.
Secondly, find a discussion part – in other words, try to find the specific points you need to comment on in your text.
Finally, find the target reader so you know exactly who you are writing for and who is going to read your review.
You see this announcement in your college English-language magazine. (our readers)
Book reviews wanted Have you read a book in which the main character behaved in a surprising way? (to describe)
Write us a review of the book, explaining what the main character did and why it was surprising. ( to comment)
Now we have all three elements we need to write a great review:
You need to describe: Book in which the main character behaved in a surprising way
You need to answer/discuss:
Who is the target reader: college English-language magazine.
We know now that the target readers are students, teachers and probably parents so the writing style should be neutral or informal.
We don’t need to be too formal because after all some of the readers are students, but we also don’t want to be too informal as some of the readers are teachers and parents.
Now we can start building our structure and writing a review.
The review should start with the title, and there are few simple ways to write it:
Title (book): Dark Souls by Stephen King (by) Title (restaurant): Taco Bell in London – a review (a review)
We will use this title in our guide : TITLE : Time Machine by Adam Smith
Tip : Nothing prevents you from writing something more unique but it has to point to what you are going to review.
The other function of your introduction is to engage the reader . You can do it by asking a question.
Make your introduction at least 2 sentences long.
INTRODUCTION: What would you do if you could travel back in time? Most people would probably meet their great-great-grandparents or watch how the amazing pyramids in Giza were built, but Tom Lee, the main character of the novel Time Machine by Adam Smith finds himself in a completely unexpected situation and he has to make a very difficult decision that will change history as we know it.
– question
– details about the book and main character
The body paragraphs are the main parts of your review so they should be the longest and carry most of the information. Also, here you describe the points you’ve found in (Step 1)
You can use idioms , and phrasal verbs – neutral/informal language is appropriate for your target reader – students and teachers.
See the example below, in which we dedicated one paragraph to one point.
[Who is the main character and what did he do? – describe]
Tom, a teacher in a little town in Rotherham, finds a mysterious time portal in the back of a ragged diner which takes him back to the year 1935. He soon realises that every time he goes through the portal he gets to the exact same point in the past. Eventually, he makes the unexpected decision to stop Michael James Newton from brutally killing President John F. Kennedy on 22.11.1963.
[Why it was surprising? – comment]
It seems to me that Tom could choose many other and more personal things to do, but he decides to try and change history to a degree that he cannot predict . In my opinion , that came definitely unexpected an d if I were in his position I probably wouldn’t even consider a task this far-reaching.
– own opinion
– descriptive/interesting vocabulary
– relevant details about the main character and book
TIP: What if you don’t read books? Don’t waste your time looking for a to match your review. it doesn’t have to be real! And yes that may sound difficult: you have to invent a book and then write a review about your invented book! So instead take a you like, take a you like and transform them into books. That’s simple! |
Finally, we need to make a recommendation because after all, that’s the only reason why anyone would read a review they want to know what the reviewer thinks about the book , film or restaurant .
A good final paragraph of a review does exactly two things
CONCLUSION: I definitely recommend “Time Machine” to everyone who has already read some of Adam Smith’s novels as well as to those who like stories with twists and turns around every corner plus you get some modern history on top of that. For me, it was absolutely worth reading and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
Full review.
Time Machine by Adam Smith
What would you do if you could travel back in time? Most people would probably meet their great-great-grandparents or watch how the amazing pyramids in Giza were built, but Tom Lee, the main character of the novel Time Machine by Adam Smith finds himself in a completely unexpected situation and he has to make a very difficult decision that will change history as we know it.
Tom, a teacher in a little town in Rotherham, finds a mysterious time portal in the back of a ragged diner which takes him back to the year 1935. He soon realises that every time he goes through the portal he gets to the exact same point in the past. Eventually, he makes the unexpected decision to stop Michael James Newton from brutally killing President John F. Kennedy on 22.11.1963.
It seems to me that Tom could choose many other and more personal things to do, but he decides to try and change history to a degree that he cannot predict. In my opinion, that came definitely unexpected and if I were in his position I probably wouldn’t even consider a task this far-reaching.
I definitely recommend “Time Machine” to everyone who has already read some of Adam Smith’s novels as well as to those who like stories with twists and turns around every corner plus you get some modern history on top of that. For me, it was absolutely worth reading and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
B2 first (fce) review: model answers, model answer 1.
You have seen this notice in your school library:
REVIEWS NEEDED We want to buy some new books for the library. Have you read a good book in English recently? Write us a review of a book you enjoyed, explaining why you liked it and why you think it would be a good choice for the school library.
We will use your reviews to help us decide which books to buy
THE THIEVES OF OSTIA
„The thieves of Ostia‟ by Caroline Lawrence is the first in a series of books entitled„The Roman Mysteries‟ and I think it‟s an absolute must for the school library.
The book is set in the Roman port of Ostia nearly two thousand years ago. It tells the story of Flavia and her three friends, and their attempts to discover who has been killing the dogs of Ostia and why. It‟s full of mystery and excitement, and the plot has many twists and turns, which make you want to keep reading.
The book is aimed at ten – to twelve – year – old native English speakers, but it is very popular with older children and would be ideal for teenagers studying English. What‟s more, it gives a fascinating insight into life in Roman times, so readers learn about history as well as improve their language skills.
After finishing „The Thieves of Ostia‟, students will want to borrow further books from the series. By buying it, then, the library would be doing a lot to encourage students to read more in English
You have found the following advertisement online:
RESTAURANT REVIEWS WANTED!
Have you been to a great restaurant lately? If so, send us an honest review of the restaurant explaining what you liked and disliked of the place as well as its location, staff and how it looks on the inside.
We will publish the first 20 decent reviews we get!
Foster’s Hollywood
Being a huge fan of traditional American fast food and restaurant styles, it’s no wonder that my favourite restaurant in Granada is Foster’s Hollywood.
Located smack in the middle of the city, this fast-food chain serves a wide variety of mouthwatering, American dishes at a reasonable price. These range from typical Tex-Mex nachos or French fries to more elaborate meals like traditional, homemade Bourbon steak. And if you’re hungry, it’s the perfect place to go, as their servings are absolutely huge!
Another cool thing about this place is its magnificent decor. If you’re a film buff, you will quickly fall in love with this place, since all the walls are covered in famous movie posters! Apart from that, it’s got a spacious dining hall, super friendly staff and an outdoor terrace which is absolutely fantastic on summer nights!
The only negative thing I can say is that it is right next to a gym, which sometimes makes me feel guilty for eating so much!
Nevertheless, Foster’s Hollywood offers delicious meals in an unbeatable atmosphere, so you should definitely give it a try. I promise you won’t regret it!
Example topic 1.
Your teacher has asked you to write a review for a book you have read recently. The best reviews will go in the school magazine. Review the book giving your opinion and say whether or not you would recommend it.
Your teacher has asked you to write a review for a film you have seen recently on DVD or at the cinema.The best reviews will go in the school magazine. Review the book giving your opinion and saying whether ornot you would recommend it.
At school, you are building a tourist website in English. Your teacher has asked you to write a review of arestaurant you have eaten at in your town. Review the restaurant giving your opinion and saying whetheror not you would recommend it.
After writing your text, you can check it yourself using the writing checklist below.
How to do that? Simply check your text/email by answering the questions one by one:
Communicative Achievement
Organisation
B2 first (fce) review: tips.
The grammar and vocabulary that you need unfortunately depend heavily on the type of question you get.
One thing you can do though is to make sure your grammar and vocabulary are related to the tasks . So for example, if you are writing a review about a film make sure your vocabulary is related to films.
So include words like “s cripts, director, cast, plot, setting, special effects, and stunts”
If you want to mention who directed the film or who played the part of a certain character then make sure you use the passive “The film was directed by Y”. “The the protagonist was played by X”.
If you are talking about an experience and you need to describe the experience then make sure you use narrative tenses because obviously this experience happened in the past.
This means you need to use the past simple, the past continuous and the past perfect. For example “I checked into the hotel at 10 am. I had been travelling all night and was feeling exhausted. The hotel staff were very welcoming and made me feel at home”.
We will finish it with some useful vocabulary mostly used to organize information. Although it is taking a shortcut, if you learn several expressions for each paragraph in each type of text that could be on your exam, you will certainly be able to create a very consistent and well-organized text.
This show stars… The play is directed by… The film is about… It‟s set in………. The story is based on (a book…) It‟s about….. There are many memorable characters including …. The main theme of the film is…..
On the plus side,… On the down side,… On the one hand,… On the other hand,…
Overall, I‟d recommend… All in all, the film was… I wouldn‟t hesitate to recommend… I wouldn‟t encourage anyone to … I would recommend this film to anyone. Although I enjoyed it, I would not recommend it for…. It‟s one of the best (shows) I’ve ever seen. Although I am not normally keen on (musicals),I am glad that I decided to go. The (film) lifts you out of your everyday life
Who will read the review.
Your review will be read by readers of a magazine.
The review is intended to give information to the reader which will help them decide whether to attend the event themselves.
Use a style similar to an article that is likely to interest the reader.
Give essential information about the story, cast, band members, etc. Say what you like and didn‟t like about the performances. Make a recommendation to the reader about whether or not they should go.
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Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.
The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.
Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )
A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.
“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”
Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )
I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.
“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice, on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”
Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )
Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any Sehgal review and stop there.
“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”
Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )
Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in the Romantic canon.
“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”
Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )
Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.
“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”
Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )
Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.
“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”
Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )
Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.
“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”
Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )
I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)
“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”
Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )
How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.
“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”
Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )
Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)
“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”
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The Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth’s latest novel to be translated into English, “If Only,” follows a decade-long affair between two married writers.
By Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is the author, most recently, of “Affinities: On Art and Fascination.” He is working on “Ambivalence,” a memoir about aesthetic education.
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
IF ONLY , by Vigdis Hjorth. Translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Youthful heartbreak notwithstanding, I suppose it must be possible to get through life without ever having confronted love or desire as truly capsizing events — as mental, moral or practical ruin. Some of us manage to consign such interludes to the list of a life’s wrong turns: the “bad place” in which you found yourself, the lure of a “narcissist,” the deranging effects of misplaced longing.
One task of literature is to help us grow out of whatever consoling pieties or therapeutic nostrums our cultural moment supplies, and consider instead the larger forces (libidinal, existential, historical) that move through our pitiful affairs and inflated passions. “Madame Bovary,” “Anna Karenina,” Proust’s “Swann in Love” section: One strain of the modern novel is born in the tragicomic perplex of mad love. Which state often has a tight narrative arc, ending in death, wisdom or the desert of mere experience.
In the Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only,” a more harrowing time scale unfolds. What if, this novel asks, your amour fou turns into a way of life, a decade-long intractable addiction? Hjorth’s protagonist, Ida Heier, is a 30-year-old radio playwright in Oslo when she gets involved with Arnold Bush: 10 years older, also a writer, and a celebrated translator of the plays and poems of Bertolt Brecht. Ida and Arnold are both married to other people when they meet at a seminar and first sleep together.
Like most adulterers, they are slaves to logistics; much of the novel’s action consists of hotel bookings, airport assignations, train rides, letters and missed landline calls. (“If Only” was first published in Norway in 2001 and seems to begin in the early 1990s, when secrecy was easier, communication slower.) Roland Barthes once wrote, “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.” Ida waits for Arnold — to become available, get divorced, take her writing seriously, stop sleeping with his students. In the shorter term she waits in Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen and Agadir, Morocco, for a series of drunken trysts it seems she cannot refuse.
“If Only” is the fourth of Hjorth’s novels to be translated into English, all by Charlotte Barslund. Her fiction mixes overt political themes — “ Long Live the Post Horn! ” was about one woman’s campaign to save the Norwegian mail service from privatized competition — with intimate subject matter. “ Will and Testament ” caused controversy in Norway with its seemingly autofictional treatment of family secrets, including sexual abuse.
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‘The Embarkation of William III, Prince of Orange, at Helvoetsluis,’ showing William’s fleet departing for England during the ‘Glorious Revolution’; painting after an etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, circa 1688–1699
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Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present
Fareed Zakaria is a captain of the punditry industry. A longtime host of his own CNN show on international and domestic politics, a columnist at The Washington Post , and the author of best-selling books on current affairs, he seems to have been everywhere and read everything. Born in India of Muslim parents, educated at Yale and Harvard, and now hobnobbing with heads of state, he maintains just enough emotional distance from the United States to look at our internal divisions and external entanglements with a relatively cool eye. In Age of Revolutions Zakaria goes all the way back to the Netherlands in the 1500s to try to understand our contemporary situation, with its populist backlash, uncertainties about globalization, eye-popping changes in digital technology, and upending of the international political order as a result of the rise of China and the revanchism of Russia. Even without the historical background, this would be a daunting subject.
The disruptions in politics, economics, and technology make this a revolutionary time, Zakaria maintains, so examples from past revolutions should help illuminate our path. He aims to answer three main questions: “What makes a period revolutionary? Are there other predictable consequences of a revolutionary era? And how does it all end?” These questions sound straightforward, but examined more closely, they reveal questionable assumptions. Zakaria contends that we live in a revolutionary period, but we cannot be certain of this because we do not know what its trajectory will be. That Steve Bannon thinks we live in revolutionary times is hardly conclusive evidence.
If it is difficult to tell whether a period is revolutionary, then it is even more challenging to seek the “predictable consequences” of revolution. Zakaria offers his own version of earlier European revolutions, extracting their predictable consequences in the hope that they will help foretell how our present era of revolution will end. Many self-proclaimed revolutionaries looked back at earlier examples hoping to derive lessons from them: in the 1920s, for example, leading Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky worried that the Russian Revolution had entered its Thermidorean phase. Thermidor was the name of the month in the French revolutionary calendar for 1794 when Maximilien Robespierre and his followers fell from power and were executed, after which their radical innovations were rolled back, the economy was made more market-oriented, and the propertied classes were able to regain their influence.
Zakaria looks back for entirely different reasons. Rather than fearing the deterioration of revolutionary spirit, he singles out exemplary “liberal” revolutions that kept in check the most extreme revolutionary impulses. These revolutions embraced globalization, benefited from technological and financial innovations, shored up representative forms of government, and encouraged religious tolerance and diversity, all of which he wants to bolster in the present. He begins with the Dutch war for independence from Spain that began in 1566, because in the course of it the Dutch set up a republic and offered religious toleration. They also gained an advantage over their economic competitors by developing the best oceangoing ships and launching new forms of investment that were open to all, including a stock exchange and a Bank of Amsterdam that functioned much like a central bank.
Zakaria then moves on to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689, because “England had the right political ingredients for a liberalizing, modernizing revolution.” The parliamentary factions united to throw out King James II, who wanted to emulate French-style authoritarianism and restore Catholicism, and they invited to the throne James’s solidly Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, the Protestant head of the Dutch Republic. The couple agreed to make England a constitutional monarchy and promptly assented to a Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, which granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. The English learned from the Dutch and leapt ahead of them, acquiring a taste for Chinese tea, building a naval arsenal with taxes on the consumption of global products, and establishing the Bank of England in 1694 to fund the state and stimulate investment. Meanwhile the Dutch rested on their laurels and lost their edge by the end of the seventeenth century.
Zakaria then seizes upon the French Revolution of 1789 as a counterexample to these liberal revolutions. In his recounting, it was extremist, violent, and based on “identity politics,” in this case a polarization between patriots and traitors. It failed because it was “imposed by political leaders, rather than growing naturally out of broad social, economic and technological changes,” as the Dutch and English ones had. The liberal constitutionalism of those like the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American War of Independence, gave way to the radical populism of Robespierre, whose repressive policies repelled even his allies. He and his followers thus paved the way for the nationalist authoritarianism of Napoleon Bonaparte. Taken as a whole, the French Revolution added up to “an unnecessary bloody detour from a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.”
This gets to the heart of the problem with Zakaria’s three main questions. He does not like radical revolutions because they do not take “a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.” Yet his Dutch and English examples are revolutionary only in the most minimal sense. The Dutch revolted to preserve their Calvinist way of life, and to achieve this they fought their Catholic Spanish overlords in what they themselves called, once it was over, the Eighty Years’ War—not exactly a brief cataclysmic event. They established a republic because a loose federation was the only way to get the various Dutch provinces to cooperate, and they allowed the private, not public, worship of any religion because some provinces still included many Catholics, Catholicism having been almost everyone’s religious identity before the Reformation of the early 1500s. (This toleration did, however, open the way in the 1590s and afterward for Jews fleeing persecution by the Spanish and Portuguese.) Democracy was out of the question; the oligarchy of rich merchants, manufacturers, and landholders dominated political decision-making until well into the 1800s.
The English “revolution” of 1688–1689 is even more questionable. It took a relatively nonviolent form because the English had had a radical revolution a generation before. In the civil wars of 1642–1660, King Charles I was defeated in battle, put on trial, and executed, and the monarchy was replaced by something resembling a republic of which Oliver Cromwell became the authoritarian Lord Protector—more authoritarian than Robespierre could ever hope to be. Events in 1688–1689 worked out differently because neither faction in Parliament wanted a repetition of those upheavals. The more relevant French comparison, then, would be with the Revolution of 1830, when, as in 1688–1689, one king was promptly replaced with another, constitutional government was assured, and religious toleration (first granted in 1789–1791) was reaffirmed. “Get rich” became the motto of the post-1830 regime. Might it be that violent revolution is sometimes necessary to prepare the ground for a steady, reformist route toward democracy?
Zakaria’s examples of previous political revolutions pale in comparison, however, with his “mother of all revolutions”: the industrial revolution that began in Britain, made the United States into a world power, and upended lives around the globe. Although he recognizes the downsides of industrialization, such as the exploitation of workers, including women and children, and environmental degradation, his view of its effects is resolutely positive. Its “ultimate consequence” was “to let humanity break free from the limits of biology” by devising machines to replace animal and human labor. Workers were eventually better off, and people yearned to move to the cities from the countryside to enjoy the benefits of new opportunities, despite crowded housing, unimaginably long workdays, and rampant infectious diseases.
In this account, as in Zakaria’s retelling of the Dutch, English, and French revolutions, slavery and colonialism hardly figure. The Dutch used their oceangoing technologies to outstrip their erstwhile Spanish masters in the transatlantic slave trade, though they soon found themselves eclipsed by the British in this, too. The Dutch seized colonial outposts from the Portuguese all over Asia and took control of what is now Indonesia, where they introduced coffee and had it grown by forced labor for consumption in Europe. Freedom at home did not translate to the colonies. The Dutch never had much of an abolitionist movement, in contrast to Britain, and only ended slavery in their colonies in 1863.
Similarly, the revolution of 1688–1689 coincided with a vast expansion of the British slave trade. Moreover, although it gained greater powers for Parliament and religious toleration for dissident Protestants in England, it only intensified the oppression of Catholics in Ireland. William personally commanded an army to defeat James and his Irish Catholic supporters, and in the ensuing reaction Irish Catholics were excluded not just from Parliament but from owning weapons, becoming lawyers or teachers, buying land, and sending their children abroad for education.
The connection between slavery, colonialism, and the industrial revolution remains a hotly debated topic. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British were all avid colonizers and enthusiastic participants in the slave trade, yet only the British went on to invent steam-driven machinery that used coal to power both factories and the new means of transport, railroads. Zakaria makes much of the singularity of Britain, but he overlooks its dependence on US cotton and minimizes its distortion of the economy of India to suit its aims. The leaders of the Confederacy had every reason to hope that the British might support their secession from the United States, since in 1860 Britain imported 80 percent of its cotton from the southern slave states. With seeds purloined from China, the British set up tea plantations in Assam in northeastern India to counter Chinese dominance in the trade. They also sold Indian opium to the Chinese to improve the British balance of payments, and when the Chinese resisted, Britain waged two opium wars, in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. At the same time they destroyed the domestic manufacture of cotton textiles in India with a system of tariffs favoring British manufacture. “Free trade” as the linchpin of globalization was free for some, not all.
Zakaria has an enviable ability to condense huge amounts of information and seize upon the most salient points, so it is regrettable that he often wears rose-tinted glasses when sifting through the evidence. “With the onset of industrial production and mechanized transport,” he maintains, “trade became more profitable than war.” He might have argued instead that industrialization made war much deadlier. If globalization “demonstrably improved the material living conditions of practically everyone in the world,” it did so at great cost to those who lost their jobs to outsourcing or found themselves virtual slave laborers in new factories. To be fair, however, Zakaria is most positive about free trade, industrialization, and globalization and less sanguine about the digital revolution, the changes in the global balance of power, and the rise of the new populism. The digital revolution has given us convenience and efficiency at the cost of “civic engagement, intimacy, and authenticity,” he concludes. In fact, he blames the digital revolution rather than globalization for most of our woes: it has fostered atomization, job losses, social resentment, and extremism.
Yet the real culprit, Zakaria claims, is identity politics, which he traces back to the Netherlands, whose people thought of themselves as Protestant and Dutch rather than distant subjects of a domineering Catholic empire. Technological and economic changes combine with identity politics, he argues, to create volatile new political alignments. In the good revolutions—the Dutch, the English, and the industrial revolutions—progress advances apace without too much disruption because identity politics give way to more pragmatic solutions such as religious toleration and the gradual inclusion of male workers in electoral politics. In the bad revolutions—the French Revolution, the rise of China and attempted revival of Russia, and the global populist surge—identity politics turn destructive. In France, self-proclaimed patriots silenced dissenters by guillotining them if necessary. Napoleon used nationalism to cement his power at home, but his wars of conquest inflamed national feeling throughout Europe, which poisoned international relations for decades. Vladimir Putin, then, is just the latest in a long line of populist nationalists who rail against alien (in this case, Western, secular, antipatriarchal, antimasculinist) influences in order to inflate their standing at home and justify their actions abroad. In the current populist surge, however, the polarization does not just pit the nation against outsiders; it divides the nation itself into irreconcilable parts.
In Zakaria’s usage, “identity politics” is a baggy term covering too many disparate manifestations. Black campaigns for civil rights and against police brutality, women’s demands for equality, and the LGBTQ movement are lumped together with sixteenth-century Dutch Protestants, eighteenth-century French patriots, anti-Catholic sentiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, anti-immigrant crusades across the globe, and even China’s policy of favoring the Han ethnic majority. In other words, identity politics power both parts of Zakaria’s subtitle: progress and backlash. They can be a sign of social progress or an expression of backlash against that progress.
For Zakaria, progress always begins with economic and technological change. The “first identity revolution,” the Protestant Reformation, was made possible by the invention of the printing press. The post–World War II economic boom, “brought about by globalization and technological progress,” made possible “the most radical identity revolutions of the twentieth century.” In doing so, it also fostered a potentially unmanageable dialectic: “Formerly marginalized groups perceive the change as liberating and reach for newfound dignity; those at the top fear losing the status they already have.” Zakaria adroitly traces the ensuing “vicious cycle of political polarization” in the United States, but the parallels with Europe do not work as well. There immigration, particularly of Muslims, is the crucial issue, much more consequential than US culture-war conflicts such as the fight over abortion rights, the banning of books, or the labeling of public restrooms. In Europe, Muslim immigration can be cast, he admits, as undermining women’s and gay rights and secularism and not just as a threat to Christian or white ethnic identities. Immigration is an issue in the United States, too, but never because it threatens women’s or gay rights.
Although Zakaria recognizes the gains made by the various campaigns for rights since the 1960s, he comes close to blaming the magnitude of those changes for the backlash that followed. American civil rights legislation passes at the beginning of one paragraph, but by the end of it “race riots became commonplace.” Four students are killed in an anti–Vietnam War protest in another, and the following paragraph focuses on the rise of crime in the 1970s.
Similarly, the backlash against immigration seems predictable. The percentage of foreign-born people in the United States “nearly tripled to over 13 percent” between 1970 and 2016, an important fact that leaves out the equally important one that the percentage of foreign-born Americans was even higher in 1890, at nearly 15 percent. Zakaria wants readers to understand the fears felt by those who express fury about the effects of immigration, but he does not offer a solution. What we need, he says, is “an immigration regime that is seen by all as rules-based and fair.” This is easier said than done.
Zakaria’s focus on identity politics ultimately leads him astray. We should not be “seduced” by identity politics, he concludes, which are “fundamentally illiberal, viewing people as categories rather than individuals.” Yet he shows that sometimes people must come together to insist that their “category” needs to be taken seriously, granted rights long refused, and afforded dignity that has been denied. His own analysis points toward the necessity of understanding the identities of those who have felt denigrated in their turn by the changes that have taken place.
A dose of identity politics might have been useful in Zakaria’s consideration of his two big geopolitical threats of our time, Russia and China. Having made a strong argument for greater understanding of those who feel that globalization, modernization, and immigration are existential threats, he reverts to a categorical, us-versus-them analysis of international politics. The United States still exercises great influence in global politics, but it now navigates in a multipower world, and to achieve its aims, it must also concede status to its competitors. Zakaria may be right that Russia “faces a future of technological decay, economic stagnation, and diplomatic weakness as it increasingly becomes a vassal state of China,” but he could also be wrong, and in either case, recognition that Russia has reasons to feel aggrieved about NATO expansion might better prepare the way for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine.
China gets a more respectful scrutiny, if only because of its powerful economy and military, and Zakaria hopes that the US “can find a way to live in peaceful albeit energetic competition” with it. If he had had more to say about climate change and pandemics and the increasingly urgent problems they pose for everyone on the planet, he might have found more grounds for cooperation, not just between the United States and China but more generally in the world. For someone so invested in international conversation, it is surprising that most of the solutions Zakaria proposes are geared to a US audience. They are often thoughtful ones: universal national service to create a new sense of community; free preschool, subsidized childcare, and paid parental leave to strengthen family life; market regulation and a modicum of wealth redistribution; and a renewed emphasis on the free exchange of ideas in colleges and universities. These may be meant to indicate a steady, reformist route, but in the current circumstances, they sound almost revolutionary.
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115 Book review English ESL worksheets pdf & doc. SORT BY. Most popular. TIME PERIOD. All-time. jasminekhan. Book Review. It's an interesting . 7047 uses. Ipenmar. Book review. Students could be gi. 2735 uses. Graz86. ... Book Review Matching. A simple written com. 1340 uses. ndcwanhy. Nanny McPhee book re.
It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking. Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry's Freefall, a crime novel: In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it's a more subtle process, and that's OK too.
Tell students that for home work this week they are going to write a review of a book which had a profound affect on them when they were growing up. It could be a children's book or a book they read when they were a teenager. A review is always in part 2 of the writing paper so the word limit is 220 - 260 words. Their review should include ...
Welcome to ESL Printables, the website where English Language teachers exchange resources: worksheets, lesson plans, activities, etc. Our collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If you want to download you have to send your own contributions. Book reviews worksheets
It's an interesting worksheet with an explicit graphic organizer showing different parts of a book review. There is a sample book review given in the handout to help and facilitate the students to write their own book reviews. I hope teachers would find find it helpful.
Provide brief descriptions of the setting, the point of view (who tells the story), the main character (s) and other major characters. If there is a distinct mood or tone, mention that as well, for example gloom and doom, joyful, calm, tense, mysterious, etc. Give a short, objective plot summary. Provide the major events and the book's climax ...
Find out how to easily write a book review for the B2 First Exam. Free exercise available: https://www.esleschool.com/first-certificate-english-fce-practice/...
Book Review. helps to encourage students read books and write about them.
Wonder is the story of a ten-year-old boy who lives with his parents and sister in New York. August, or Auggie, is an ordinary boy in many ways. He rides a bike and likes playing with his Xbox. But Auggie has deformities of the face and looks very different from other children. At the start of the book, he tells us 'My name is August.
Book review - gap fill. Simple gap fill (10 blanks) with words given based on Wikipedia entries for the Harry Potter series. The following ESL / EFL resources are available for Book review (writing): 1 online gap fill exercise (s),
6. Overall Commentary: Offer a general commentary on the film or book. State whether you recommend it to others and why. 7. Conclusion: Sum up your review with a concise conclusion. Reiterate key points and leave the reader with a clear understanding of your overall assessment. 3.
Level 3. In my opinion Pokémon is the best book and movie in the world and I love it and It's awesome. Pokémon was created by Satoshi Tajiri .My favorite character is Ash from Palet town . He is training to be the best of Pokémon going from the Kanto Region to the Galel Region . The Pokémon world is the most fascinating place in the world.
The real value of crafting a well-written book review for a student does not lie in their ability to impact book sales. Understanding how to produce a well-written book review helps students to: Engage critically with a text. Critically evaluate a text. Respond personally to a range of different writing genres.
book review. Our Secondary Plus English course will teach you the skills to build your confidence and help you reach your full potential. This online level test will give you an approximate indication of your English proficiency level. You can use the result to help you find online courses or learning content on our website that is appropriate ...
Step 1: Planning Your Book Review - The Art of Getting Started. You've decided to take the plunge and share your thoughts on a book that has captivated (or perhaps disappointed) you. Before you start book reviewing, let's take a step back and plan your approach.
English ESL Worksheets. book review. book review
Step 2: Title The review should start with the title, and there are few simple ways to write it: imagine you're reviewing a book you can write: [Title] by [Author]; if you were reviewing a restaurant you could write: [name of the restaurant] - a review; Title (book): Dark Souls by Stephen King (by) Title (restaurant): Taco Bell in London - a review (a review)
I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.". Best of 2020 Book Marks book reviews. Adam Morgan. Adam Morgan is a culture journalist and critic whose work appears in Esquire, Inverse, and elsewhere.
12/03/2019. Country code: IL. Country: Israel. School subject: English as a Second Language (ESL) (1061958) Main content: Reading comprehension (2013243) From worksheet author: A book review worksheet to fill in after reading a book. Other contents: kinds of stories-describing characters and events.
ID: 184363. 13/05/2020. Country code: PL. Country: Poland. School subject: English as a Second Language (ESL) (1061958) Main content: Book review. Writing on a blog. (1096648) From worksheet author: The students have to match the beginnings with the ends of the book review.
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
1. When it comes to uproarious observations on the British class system, P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" stories remain unrivaled. Bertie Wooster is an amiable and well-intentioned ...
Level: 2nd BGU. Language: English (en) ID: 990370. 11/05/2021. Country code: EC. Country: Ecuador. School subject: English as a Second Language (ESL) (1061958) Main content: Book review (2003911) It has the grammar of a book review.
English ESL Worksheets. Grammar Topics. Adjectives. A BOOK REVIEW. ... a short guide for 13 year old students to become comfortable with the language they need to talk about and write a book review. Donate a coffee. Log in / Register. English ESL Worksheets. Grammar Topics. Adjectives. A BOOK REVIEW. annaparrella. 8069. 118. 76. 0. 1/1 ...
In 1399, 13-year-old Henry of Monmouth was knighted twice. The first ceremony was a muddy affair at the fringe of an Irish forest, a reward from Richard II after the English army's successful ...
The English learned from the Dutch and leapt ahead of them, acquiring a taste for Chinese tea, building a naval arsenal with taxes on the consumption of global products, and establishing the Bank of England in 1694 to fund the state and stimulate investment. ... Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Email ...