Veronika

Dear Mr. Aronson, First, I wanted to say job well done. I feel that you did a good job in grasping all the thoughts on race and summarizing them into a book. I thought Race was an interesting and enjoyable read, and also very informative. To be truthful, I had never really thought about race in the way that your book describes it and after reading it, I took some time to think about the prejudices that have formed in my mind over the years and what I can do to stop them from becoming automatic. Now, I try hard not to form judgments about people based on their physical appearances or to categorize them into groups.

I’m sure that finding all this information and documenting your sources was quite exasperating. However, I had a problem with some of your opinions, as they led to indirect attitudes towards characters described in Race. I thought that there were a few parts in this book that were unnecessary to include because they skewed the information and could have changed the feelings or thoughts of the reader. Race, being a nonfiction book, could have contained less personal opinions. For example, it is obvious from reading Race that you truly dislike Germans. At one point in your book you found it necessary to take time and honor the Jews who died in the concentration camps during the Holocaust and also express your hatred towards Germans (pp 208-209). When you wrote negatively about Germans, it sometimes opinionated the facts and could have even changed the readers feelings towards either the Germans or Jews, possibly causing bad thoughts to form in their mind. This contradicts your thought about not judging people based on their race or physical appearance, but instead on their characteristics.

I really liked the way you connected some of your chapters. Overall, you did an excellent job in organizing your points. Your writing was fluent, with one thought following into the next. An example of this is your transition from Chapter 13 to Chapter 14. The last two sentences of Chapter 13 talk about the “other path…(that)led directly to the giant green lady, whose lamp glowed beside the golden door of the New York Harbor” (pg.185). The introduction to Chapter 14 then talks about how New York City and the Statue of Liberty gave so much hope to immigrants and completely amazed them. In this sense, the reader connected the two chapters with the giant green lady leading to the Statue of Liberty and the golden door referring to the location where most immigrants entered America.

In conclusion, Race was a well written book that informed me about human race theory and how our prejudices evolved throughout time. I feel that __Race__ is a book I will remember for a long time.

Sincerely, Veronika Sowers