The first essay, "What Fundamentalists Need for their Salvation," by David James Duncan, struck me as a very fresh and interesting perspective: someone who calls himself an "evangelical Christian" writing an essay criticizing rightist fundamentalism. I thought his opener was very appropriate and attention getting; censorship is an issue that is more widely agreed upon than some other controversial topics (especially among college students, I would think), and the anecdote about him reading his own book in a school where it had been censored was interesting. From that point, his essay largely became a very focused and, for the most part, well-reasoned rant (an ironic statement if ever there was one). The conclusion summed it up nicely, basically saying that what the fundamentalists need is the people they are excluding. This piece was very well-written and provided an incredibly relevant perspective on the matter.
The second essay, "A Girl Among Trombonists," was less interesting to me, though I wouldn't say it was bad. The way I read it, it started off promising some exciting social struggle with the intro about her being such a trailblazer of ban geekettes, but immediately went into a drawn-out and tedious account of what they wore, how they marched, how they traveled to their competitions, and so on. The middle was very hard to get through, but I found the end a bit more colorful, in which her male bandmates used her to "practice" boob-groping. Overall I think it was her conclusive reflections that made it worth the read; this conclusion seemed to be the only part in which what she was trying to say actually came out, and I think it was driven home nicely by the last line about the female trombonist in the San Diego Symphony never having been a "girl among trombonists".
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