Sunday, July 27, 2008

A story about "Angelina Jolie's: Notes from My Travels"

by Angelina Jolie

I’ve just finished reading “Mission to Africa,” the first section of Angelina Jolie’s Notes from My Travels.

In the Introduction, she writes “I don’t know how this will be as a book, how readers will find it. I am not a writer.” You can tell that; her writing style is fairly simplistic, and this is not a standard travel journal. But she still does a good job at telling her stories from her unique perspective.

Jolie seems to be much more of a “feeling” person, not so much a “thinking” person. I don’t mean this in a bad way. There’s not a lot of introspection here about how she came to be interested in humanitarian issues. There’s very little historical detail or context provided. She’s telling you what she sees and feels, in a very raw and unprocessed way. She’s really very good at conveying her feelings and her horror at events going on in the world, and her empathy for the people suffering through them. The book seems to reveal as much about her as a person as it does about the situations she observes. So far, it’s an interesting view. I hope the book finds a wide audience.

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