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John Kiriakou - The Convenient Terrorist

  by Joseph Hickman

(about 124 pages)
30,928
total words
5th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
22.21%
vividness
2nd PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
6.78%
passive voice
16th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
3.01%
all adverbs
56th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.30%
ly-adverbs
80th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.70%
non-ly-adverbs
25th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library

clippings from this book

We’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands of different authors, training our linguistic models to recognize the most vivid words in the English language… the words that create the most intense sensory experiences: colors, textures, sounds, flavors, and aromas.

Based on our analysis, we’ve scanned through the pages of this book to find the two pages at the extremes, both the most-passive and the most-vivid pages, so that you can compare them side-by-side and see the difference:

MOST PASSIVE PAGE
MOST VIVID PAGE
towers. What did you think was going to happen? Did you think we wouldn’t come after you?” Abu Zubaydah turned away in his bed. He was weeping quietly now. “I didn’t want to attack America. I wanted to kill Jews.” Kiriakou ignored the remark and its absurd implications. “I’m going to give you some advice,” Kiriakou said. “I’m the nicest person you’re going to meet in this entire experience. My colleagues aren’t as nice as I am. Your life is at a crossroads. The rest of it can be relatively easy, or it can be terrible. That’ll be up to you. Whatever you do, I urge you to cooperate.” Abu Zubaydah turned back toward Kiriakou. “You seem like a nice man. But you’re the enemy. I’ll never cooperate. Besides … I’m going to die.” “On the contrary,” Kiriakou told him. “You’re going to get the best medical care the United States has to offer. You’re going to get the best doctors in the world.” Kiriakou’s words were proved true. A few hours later, the targeteer called. A private jet was on its way. CIA Director George Tenet had asked a top trauma surgeon from Johns Hopkins University Hospital to fly from Baltimore to Pakistan. He would lead Abu Zubaydah’s medical team and accompany the patient to an “onward location.” It would be a few hours until the plane touched down. As they waited for the American surgeon, Abu Zubaydah became equal parts garrulous and nervous. He told Kiriakou that he had a similar fate. The bodyguard jumped last. He took an AK-47 shot to the center of his femur, shattering his leg. But Abu Zubaydah was the priority. After ascertaining his identity, Kiriakou, Amir, and two Pakistanis lifted him and threw him in the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck that the Pakistanis had commandeered and sped to the nearest hospital. By then it was 2:30 a. m. The hospital was the worst Kiriakou had ever seen. All its windows and doors were wide open. Swarms of mosquitos fed on the open sores and wounds of its patients. In places, cats and dogs wandered the halls. The floors were slick with both grime and bodily fluids. The beasts fed on it. At one point, Kiriakou saw medical personnel trying to keep hypodermic needles sterile by jamming them into a bar of Irish Spring soap. When somebody needed a shot, a nurse or doctor would remove one of the needles, rinse it off with unpotable tap water, fill the syringe, and administer the injection. The physician would then rinse the needle off again and jam it back into the bar of soap. The medical staff, of course, were not expecting an international emergency in the middle of the night. What they got was more than a dozen people, half of whom were obviously Americans dressed as Pakistanis wearing bulletproof vests, and two severely wounded Arabs. Abu Zubaydah was bleeding to death. Kiriakou grabbed one of the doctors by the collar

emotional story arc

Click anywhere on the chart to see the most significant emotional words — both positive & negative — from the corresponding section of the text…
This chart visualizes the the shifting emotional balance for the arc of this story, based on the emotional strength of the words in the prose, using techniques pioneered by the UVM Computational Story Lab. To create this story arc, we divided the complete manuscript text into 50 equal-sized chunks, each with 618.56 words, and then we scored each section by counting the number of strongly-emotional words, both positive and negative. The bars in the chart move downward whenever there’s conflict and sadness, and they move upward when conflicts are resolved, or when the characters are happy and content. The size of each bar represents the positive or negative word-count of that section.

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