Style
The writing style reflects the author's intent to use the text for a lecture series. The narration addresses the audience while guiding it through explanations of the issues and anecdotal illustrations. Lewis' charismatic, eloquent, and energetic oration style is reflected in the writing. The tone has been described as loud and persuasive. One reviewer called it "vintage Lewis – incisive criticism leavened with high-blown rhetoric". The book focuses more upon real-world human experiences, rather than numbers and statistics, in discussing the effect of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and the world's response. Lewis' eyewitness accounts are candid and vivid. For example, he recounts tours of hospitals and schools as he explains the dire straits of national health and education sectors, and he describes meetings with diplomats and staff from the UN, World Bank, and IMF as he explains their effect on foreign aid policies. The book is written from an idealistic perspective and, despite the anger and underlying sense of guilt, Lewis remains optimistic. While he was a professional diplomat, his memoir-style reflections on specific people, such as Michel Camdessus, Carol Bellamy, and Thabo Mbeki were called undiplomatic. Despite the book's undiplomatic style, Lewis retained his post as a UN Special Envoy until the term completed in December 2006.
Read more about this topic: Race Against Time: Searching For Hope In AIDS-Ravaged Africa
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We think it is the richest prose style we know of.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)