Kevin Brockmeier is An American writer of fantasy and literary fiction. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on December 6, 1972 and is a graduate from Southwest Missouri state university. Brockmeier has won 3 O.Henry prizes, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short story fiction, several. And He also won the Booker Worthen Literary Prize and the Porter Fund Literary Prize. Kevin Brockmeier is a very successful author and is known for his short stories.…
Erik Larson is a nonfiction author with a number of bestsellers including The Devil In The White City. He lives in Seattle with his wife and three daughters. In The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson tells stories of two men accomplishing different lifestyles in Chicago. The book takes place around the time of the World’s Fair and is written in a third person omniscient point of view. While one man is trying to prove Chicago’s ability of not being a failure to the country, the other man brings a whole new meaning of failure to the city of Chicago.…
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s book was fantastic. All Souls was a moving, exciting, and revealing book about the life of an average South Boston family growing up in the white, Irish Catholic Old Colony housing projects. There is a huge focus on the crimes, drugs, and violence that occurred within MacDonald’s neighborhood around the time of the Boston busing riots. MacDonald tells us about his brothers and sisters. Many of whom were victimized by crime, drugs, murder, and suicide. He also goes into detail about his strong willed mother who somehow found a way to raise ten kids, while at the same time dealing with abusive relationships, and living in the neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. All Souls has a large…
In 1977, Bequest of Alice K. Bache authorized The Mask. Alice K. Bache was a 1903-1977 collector throughout New York, NY, Washington, CT, and New Orleans, LA who preserved ancient art that of Cycladic, Pre-Columbian, Mexican, Asian and Peruvian works. She also began endowing her art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of art in 1967. As a part of her recent donation, she granted The Mask in which is now perched there.…
In Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, Rosalyn Schanzer discusses the disastrous event which happened in Salem known as the Salem witch trials. Many afflicted girls blamed innocent townspeople, accusing them of being witches. Trials were held in a Salem court and many accused townspeople were later hanged in Salem. This catastrophe occurred in Salem for many reasons, including the concentrated population, the central location, and the belief system of those who lived there.…
A stunning adventure involving Nazis, nukes, fighting, failure, and everyday heroes, from the author of the award-winning The Nazi Hunters. Neal Bascomb delivers another nail-biting work of nonfiction for young adults in this incredible true story of spies and survival. The invasion begins at night, with German cruisers slipping to harbor. Then planes roar over the mountains, and soon the Nazis occupy all of Norway. They station soldiers throughout the country. They institute martial rule. And at Vemork, an industrial fortress high above a dizzying gorge, they gain access to an essential ingredient for the weapon that could end the war: Hitler’s very own nuclear bomb.…
In the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie betrayed himself, his religion, customs, values, and even his father, if only in his own mind. Betrayal was a major aspect of life for Jews in the Holocaust, especially Elie. Elie felt betrayed by the Germans for treating Jews like they weren’t humans and taking away the Jew’s self-worth. Elie also felt betrayed by his own god, who allowed Elie and his fellow Jews to be treated the way they were by the Germans. Betrayal started the sequence of poor events in Elie’s life and affected him during the Holocaust and from then on.…
Gein was born in 1906 to his mother Augusta and his father George. He also had a younger brother named Henry. The family lived and worked on a farm just outside Plainfield, Wisconsin. “Gein’s mother was a very dominant, overbearing woman who took control over the boys.” She would often let the boys know what their chores were on the farm, quote the bible, and lecture her two sons on the evils of the world. Her main focus seemed to be that of warning against sins such as sex and women. Not too much was known about Gein’s father George, except that he was an alcoholic.…
Elie Wiesel’s novel, The Night,describes Eliezer’s journey of being part of the Holocaust. Through the novel, he faced many hardships and had to try and survive through the whole book. This was the reason he used, The Night, as the title of the book because the title conveys the deep darkness he went through at the camps. The night symbolizes the darkness that was mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. Eliezer faced many tough times and chose the title, The Night, for a reason.…
Armin Greder’s The Island is a picture book that explores the negative concepts of ‘belonging’ through instances of alienation and judgement. The text presents symbols and metaphors that can be applied to universal social issues, particularly the migrant experience. Although the tone of the text is ultimately pessimistic, there are suggestions of Christian ideals such as sharing, caring for the less fortunate and having a clear conscious. The text also not only discusses an outsider’s perspective of not belonging, but also the negative aspects of belonging to a group or community.…
In Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, the biblical story of Abraham is retold with four different viewpoints, to narrow on the religious and the ethical. The Religious is that stage of life when the individual is found to be in “an absolute relation with the absolute”, and the ethical being the “expression of the universal, where all actions are done publicly and for the common good.“ Kierkegaard writes that Abraham killing Isaac is ethically wrong, but religiously right. But the point that Kierkegaard is driving home is the distinction between faith and resignation. Faith is what it takes to “leap into the absurd, something that cannot be rationally explained, transcending the intelligible.” Resignation is the sacrifice of something dear and the following reconciliation with that loss. Kierkegaard cites the example of Agamemnon who must reconcile himself to the loss of his beloved daughter, Iphigenia. Back to the Abraham story, it would have been resignation if Abraham merely had tried to kill Isaac on the basis of the infallibility of God’s wish. But Abraham made the leap of faith to believe that God would not commit something unethical, and hence, spare Isaac.…
The meaning Thomas Cahill attributes to the title of the book he wrote: The Desire of the Everlasting Hills isn’t what I expected. Having taken this phrase from Jacob’s blessing for Joseph, Cahill elaborates his thoughts “Is not the desire of the everlasting hills that they be saved from their everlastingness, that something new happen, that the everlasting cycle of human cruelty, of man’s inhumanity to man, be brought to an end?”(8) I would imagine that the Everlasting Hills could also represent Heaven and the desire for them representative of the desperate need to experience never-ending perfect second life. Beyond the meaning of the title, Cahill’s foremost concern is to ask and thoroughly examine the question: Does the life and death of…
The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark offers a sociological view of the growth of Christianity during the first four centuries A.D. The book provides a new perspective on how Christianity won the West. According to Stark, early church historians and the New Testament itself claimed that Christianity grew in number despite an unsuccessful plight to the Jewish population of Rome. Stark rejects many of conventional claims such as this one, and claims that Christianity grew rapidly because of miraculous demonstrations that drew large numbers of converts. Mr. Stark uses a quantitative approach to explain his theories on how Christians could have gained so many converts without miraculous methods.…
John Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress are both books that share the relationship of choices and consequences. Milton’s Paradise Lost is about the beginning of the world (Genesis), the creation of man, and the fall. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is about the spiritual journey of a man named Christian, who is scared of being condemned to death and leaves his city to try and find a place where he will live joyfully with God.…
In Neil Bissoondath’s “I’m Not Racist But…” the narrator intends to bring awareness to his readers on the connection between stereotyping and racism and condemns such acts against one another, while in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness, the protagonist informs his audience on the consequences of African colonization. Bissoondath’s work is oriented to educate the reader in the different types of racial acts leading to hatred, abuse or enforcement of power toward any given group of people. He condemns their use whether ignorantly or intentionally. Conrad’s work however, informs the reader of how the goals of the European settlers in Africa, such as ….., led them to exploit the Africans and their raw materials for the purpose of earning profits.…