Favorite Piece of Literature

Throughout the first semester we went through many types of literature such as essays, speeches, autobiographies, memoirs and novels.  Out of these many great pieces of literature my favorite one had to be "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift. He was writing a proposal to the English government to somehow help the Irish survive the potato famine. Countless Irish citizens were dying because they had nothing to eat, not even a piece of bread. Swift's writing had a sarcastic tone that kept me interested on what he had to say next. Even though he was sarcastic and did not literally mean all the ideas he wrote, he still got his message across. I thought the method he used to be sarcastic with such a serious problem was incredibly smart. It showed the rich English people that the situation in Ireland is so terrible and unbearable, that people have to make drastic decisions in order to keep their families alive. His ideas about eating and selling babies were absurd, but only this type of "proposal" would actually make the English take a look at the poor Irish families. I enjoyed reading this piece of literature and hope to read similar stories in the second semester.