d

Before I write this, I’ll tell you something about this. I will not be someone who uses large terms to describe obvious things that most authors have done before. I also have never liked doing critiques of authors who have their own style. Who am I to say an author is good or bad?
I continued north, feeling a growing urge to sleep, but not really from exhaustion.  The thing that contributes most to the loneliness of flying in such empty country for hours on end is the absence of smoke on the horizon.  A spiral of smoke in the daytime is like a shaft of light at night.  It may be off your course to starboard or port, it may be no more that the poor smudge of a Masai campfire whose keepers are as unaware of you as they are of tomorrow’s worries, but it is a beacon nevertheless; it is a human sign, like a footprint or a matchstick found in the sand.
But, if there was no smoke to mark the site of a hearthstone or a camp, there were at least other signs of life, not human, but scarcely less welcome for that.

Beryl Markham, author of West with the Night, is an author with a very sharp and succinct writing style. While his stories are action packed, his writing style isn’t very dynamic with its structure and leaves the same taste in your mouth each time you pick up his book. The reason I chose the excerpt I did was because it was the exact moment while reading this summer that I figured him out. The beginning of a paragraph starts with some sort of mildly interesting information made into something dramatic sounding. Then some sort of figurative language, which was put in to challenge us, is used to further express what was previously said. Then the actual story movement in the middle/end of the paragraph happens. The paragraph ends with some somber-ish note or some sort of micro cliffhanger to the next paragraph. The next paragraph is when you hear the development and figurative language used together. I noticed that Markham does bring it together with both at some points. The best way to visually describe Markham would be to imagine a checkmark to express how the action happens. Overall, I could see this author as being relatable to Hemmingway in his story development, but in the sense of his developing information, id relate him to a teacher who adds figurative language to a student’s paper as to add pizazz. Also, if you were an author, wouldn’t you want to make your character seem like less or a social mess?



There have been a thousand nights when I would rather have been you, nights when I wanted nothing more in this world that to give up and drink myself into a good night’s sleep.  But that would have surely killed her, to see it.  It would have put her in her grave.  I do not know what will happen to me when she is gone, when the responsibility I picked up after you threw it down is fully met.  I might be very, very tired then.  The truth is that I can see myself wrapped around a bottle of bad liker for good company, that there are times when the very thought of that oblivion is so, so appealing.  Luck or not, it has not always been easy being the raggedy-ass boy made good, the one the smart people like to have around, sometimes, to hear my rustic witticisms.
	I am you, in better ways.

Rick Bragg writes with a pretty stereotypical autobiography-like style. He speaks to make his stories seem slightly more dramatic than they actually are and puts himself in a more favorable light. To readers who saw the bigger picture in what was going on. Bragg could have been seen as a hypocrite for disliking the wealthy, yet being one. The biography is inflated like many other books of its same kind with small bias that readers have seen for decades. This was notable in my excerpt. He uses the reliability or empathy of his situation with his father for pity and to exaggerate his story’s impact. I would describe him as plastic.