Before reading-

The Power of Half by Father-daughter duo Kevin and Hannah Salwen seems to be a heartfelt, feel good kind of story. The cover is engaging and tastefully done while the title brings up interest due to its vagueness. Born in 1959, Kevin Salwen grew up in Brooklyn, New York with a Jewish background. After high school he attended Northwestern University in Chicago, and then went on pursue a career at The Wall Street Journal. He used his years of journalism experience to document a monumental journey that his family took on the right path. Although I've yet to read the book, I presume that his story will both be personal and informative all while trying to get a greater message across to the readers.

During reading one third- …show more content…
The story picked up as it went along, but I found it to be somewhat tedious to begin with. The storyline itself is exceptional and the novel has a remarkably heartfelt undertone, which is hard not to appreciate. Salwen masterfully uses descriptive language throughout the entirety of the novel. A wonderful example of this can be found on page 12 when Salwen quotes, " 'Life becomes a long-distance race that you cannot afford to quit, but also one that you can never win, because there is always someone ahead, always more to get.' Joan and I simply call it the 'treadmill'. " This sentence includes multiple literary devices such as metaphor and analogy. In the beginning of the statement the author is quoting another novelist about life being a never-ending race. This particular excerpt is a prime example and a quite commonly used analogy to represent the competitive and rough path that life leads you down sometimes. After quoting author and businessman Charles Handy, Kevin Salwen mentions that he and his wife, Joan, refer to life as treadmill. The use of a treadmill to describe life is …show more content…
After finishing the uplifting and encouraging novel by Kevin and Hannah Salwen, it changed my outlook on not only the book but also the message its trying get across. Seeing one family give up so much to help communities of the less fortunate was inspiring to say the least. The authors made this book effective for me personally in countless ways. They let the theme grow during the course of the non-fiction narrative so the readers felt as though they had learned from what they read without it being " pushed down their throats" or preached so to speak. The rewards and consequences of the family's decisions being explained during the story helped me to realize that doing the right thing isn't always an easy and short process, and many times it'd be much easier to sit back and shove the problem under your mattress. The Salwens learned the same thing and in the end impacted innumerable lives, starting a chain reaction along the