Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel by Alice Walker

How hard is Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel to read?

Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel scores 25 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 30 out of 100

A short testimony by a poet and public intellectual, written for a general readership. Its language should be plain and direct, closer to the accessible register of The Diary of a Young Girl than to the ornate prose of Lolita.

Sentence structure: 32 out of 100

The book is a brief personal witness account, so its sentences should be direct and speech-like. It sits near the contemporary accessible prose of Beach Read.

Abstraction: 42 out of 100

The book is anchored in concrete encounters with people in Kigali, eastern Congo and Gaza. Walker adds a moral argument about speechlessness in the face of atrocity, which lifts it above pure reportage.

Information density: 30 out of 100

At roughly 20,000 words it is a slim volume built around a few journeys and the stories of people Walker met. It carries less information per page than a policy study or history.

How Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel is regarded

Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel holds a literary regard score of 37 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Alice Walker