TOW #12: IRB post

In the the first half of the book The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Thom Hatch, a consultant and commentator for The History Channel as well as PBS, presents the astounding backstory of two of the most notorious criminals out west during the frontier.  While Hatch has succeeded in the past with writing books based on the history of the wild west, The Last Outlaws goes to a place in which none other of Hatch's books have gone before: telling the stories of the two most dangerous bandits within the time period.  Being that this book is so essential to Hatch's collection of western literature, Hatch uses rhetoric in able to make his book more of just accounts from the past, but rather a living and breathing thriller itself.    Through the usage of imagery, Hatch is able to emphasize these extraordinary events that took place within the lives of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.  In a description of one of the pair first criminal acts, “Butch grabbed the satchel and two bags of loot and made a mad dash for Elzy and the horses” (Hatch 152).  This descriptive imagery successfully recreates the event taking place and establishes an intriguing experience for an audience consisting of history jocks and western enthusiasts alike.  The diction that appears along with this imagery helps the audience to picture exactly how the bandits may have acted years ago when the events took place.  Because the usage of diction and imagery worked successfully well together in this series of extraordinary events, I believe that Hatch succeeds in capturing the history of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the first half of his book.  If it were not for this usage of rhetoric, The Last Outlaws would simply be an accountable description of the past.