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:
“The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.”
—Frank Sinatra (b. 1915)
“In action, the English have the advantage enjoyed by free men always entitled to free discussion: of having a ready judgment on every question. We Germans, on the other hand, are always thinking. We think so much that we never form a judgment.”
—Heinrich Heine (1797–1856)
“In the county there are thirty-seven churches
and no butcher shop. This could be taken
as a matter of all form and no content.”
—Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)