Form
The book is structured into 26 chapters, each of which forms a complete story, with no characters shared between chapters. At first glance, this looks like a collection of short stories, but the individual stories clearly exist only to form a bigger picture. This impression is reinforced by the linear placement of the stories at key events in the overall timeline.
Each chapter bears the name of a human group or profession on whose contribution to the overall storyline the chapter is focused, such as "The Cartographers", "The Artists", "The Priests".
Furthermore, most of the chapters are prefaced by excerpts from two history textbooks (one written by a human, one by aliens) corresponding to the events described in the chapter. Compared with the "first hand" information the reader gains in the chapters, both sources show a substantial bias in their interpretation of the events.
Read more about this topic: Birthright: The Book Of Man
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Conscience is the moralized form of self-absorption.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)