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Book Review Of The Fever By Abigail Zuger

590 Words3 Pages

Two writers wrote reviews of the 2010 book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, by Sonia Shah. Each reviewer wrote quite differently and in fact had dissimilar opinions on the book. Though they may be quite different from one another, they both contain powerful rhetoric. The review written by Abigail Zuger begins with multiple rhetorical questions to draw the audience into her review and so that they will become interested and read the entire review. In the first line Zuger notes, “Human history marches to the beat of what?” (Zuger). This exquisite sentence intrigues the reader so that they wonder what this review is about. A couple other rhetorical questions are presented following this line. The line “A big band?” …show more content…

(Zuger). Soon after, the reviewer states, “...it is the syncopated whine-slap, whine-slap of man and mosquito duking it out over the eons” (Zuger). This sentence is extremely rhetorically significant. First off, there is repetition with the words “whine-slap” to create a stronger emphasis on why Zuger believes that this book was very persuasive. In addition, including the word “eons” in this sentence allows it to be hyperbolic since “eons” is for an extremely long time and may go on forever. This dramaticized word is also used again in the following paragraph when Zuger states, “Over the eons malaria has arguably helped kill more people than any other force on earth.” (Zuger). In this sentence an oxymoron is also put into place with the two words “helped kill”. While help has a positive connotation, kill has a negative one and are completely opposite. Overall, Abigail Zuger wrote a relatively positive review and states,

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