This week I read about how a football team in Texas is all the hype in town. The players have worked hard all summer and it's finally time for the season. The author introduced many of the players and the positions they play. The best player in the town is Boobie Miles, who has show off his skills in preseason and many teams are worried about playing the Permian Panthers. The Panthers are ready to go into the season at this point in the book.…
“I’d swear Donovan Curtis wasn’t gifted at all”- Oz Words can not describe the love for Donovan Curtis in the book Ungifted by Gordon Korman. Ungifted means not having any exceptional talents. Or you could say Donovan Curtis and his teachers would think ungifted. The cover reminds you of kids just being kids and having fun so I picked the book right up.…
Gerald Posner’s Killing the Dream begins with a detailed description of Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days and the detailed movements of his killer. The author arranges his book into three pivotal sections: The Assassination, The Assassin, and the Search for the Truth. He begins the book with a detailed account of the events that caused King to even be in Memphis, the chaos surrounding the Memphis Sanitation Strike. The Memphis Sanitation strike began on February 12, 1968, because of poor treatment, dangerous working conditions, and the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, 1300 black sanitation workers walked off the job. At the time of Cole and Walker’s deaths, city rules forbade black employees from seeking shelter anywhere else but the…
The Best Game Ever, by Mark Bowden, was a great book that talks about the 1958 NFL Championship game that helped transform the NFL into what it is today. It has exceeded all my expectations of the book and truly shows the impact this game had on the NFL. This was the first ever football game that was a national event, this was the first ever professional football teams viewed by millions. It would also be the first sudden death overtime game ever played in the NFL, Making the game that much more exciting. In 1958 Johnny Unitas, the Colt’s star quarterback and league’s Most Valuable Player award winner, was making $17,500 for the year, five years later Joe Namath would be earning $427,000 for the year, and this stat truly shows the impact this game had on the NFL. The game even had an impact on the author, he and every other kid in the world wanted Johnny Unitas’ high top cleats growing up, everyone wanted to be him. This was the beginning of athletes becoming celebrities in society. I was surprised to see that football wasn’t very popular back then, before this game football was a joke compared to our country’s pastime, baseball. Football is now easily the country’s most popular sport, organizations would grow to be more lucrative and be worth more than many small countries. I did expect the book to talk more about the actual game though, most of the book just talks about the teams and all the players on the team’s lives and what happened leading up to the game. Very little of the book is the actual game, there is also a good amount of the book talking about what happened to the players after the game, unfortunately, half of the players from that great 1958 Colt’s team are no longer around today. The players who are fortunate enough to still be alive today talk very fondly of the team and say it was the time of their lives. The author wrote the book to show others the transformation of the league and how it affected the nation, including himself. The…
2. What does football culture contribute to the towns in the text? Does it have a positive or a negative impact on the characters?…
Captivating audiences and myself from the first episode, Friday Night Lights, has a complex and dramatic plot line. Dillon, a small Texas town, rallies around the high school football team on their journey to the state football championship, but the voyage is not without love, drama, and learning experiences. The characters within the program have diverse dispositions, representing the wide variety of personalities within Southern culture. Friday Night Lights exploits the events of what would happen in a real Texas football town through a fictitious story, while highlighting many common themes of Southern culture, such as, escapism, the Southern Belle and Gentleman stereotypes, and the depiction of “white trash”.…
"In the Heat of the Night" is novel written by John Ball to show racial attitudes that happened in a small town in the southern part of the United States. The novel shows how one can never get rid of discrimination but can overcome it. The movie displays how some of the white men in the town of Wells judge based the exterior of individuals. The white detectives think they are a superior class so they are influenced to make rational and unrealistic decisions based on class\colour. As the police force work to find the murderer they make many false accusations along the way. In the end they come to the realization the fog blinding their vision is nothing but their ignorance.…
The book "Friday Night Lights", is a book about a team of high school football players; all with different characters, personalities, and situations. The town of Odessa, in Texas is where the story begins and takes place in. To some of the players, football is just a game and for others, it is much more. To portray the mood and feeling that there is more than what meets the eye, Bissinger uses various rhetorical strategies throughout writing the book; however the strategies that are more often seen throughout is his use of pathos, ethos, and his way of structuring.…
American football is among one of the most popular sports in the western culture. It is considered “‘normal’, healthy, and expected,” like with other sports (Cherney & Lindermann, 2014, p. 2). The television show Friday Night Lights uses the platform of football to show the “mythology of a rural U.S. heartland,” in a place known, “…for aggressive sport culture…” (Johnson, 2010, p. 61). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the episode, “Last Days of Summer,” from Friday Night Lights using the text from Kellner and Fiske. I assert from a critical cultural studies perspective that “Last Days of Summer,” normalizes gender roles through separation of parenthood into: motherhood and fatherhood, and how their interaction with their daughter furthers the ideological family dynamic.…
Brian’s Song and Remember the Titans are not just stories about football but about much more. These books show what it truly is to be a team. Team is about everyone sticking up for one another and forgetting about differences. I have always had the motto in my head as team meaning Together Everyone Achieves More. In these stories you can tell that motto is slowly but surely shining through. Think about it this way if you are on a team and your starting player breaks there leg the night before the championship game your team has to work even harder to make up for the missing player. That is what happened in Brian’s Song and Remember the titans. They both had to come together in this way but also…
American Literature is important for todays modern student. It not only helps students learn American history, but it also teaches grammar, and helps with reading comprehension. The book Cryer's Cross is a mystery/romance. Kendall Fletcher, a high school senior from Cryer's Cross, Montana is madly in love with playing soccer with her "boyfriend" Nico Cruz and the rest of her soccer team. Everyone knows everyone in this small town and when Tiffany Quinn, a freshman student from the small one room classroom, disappears everybody is mortified of what happened to her. Nobody knows what happened to her and even through the curiosity of all, Kendall Fletcher is soon to be the only one who wants to find out. This book will appeal to the reader through its sense of mystery and romance. Cryer's Cross is a real "page turner". The book leaves the reader on the edge of their seat wanting more.…
For Brian Chavez, football does not play as large as a role in his life as it does for the other players. Chavez is very smart and works hard at school, therefore he plans to have a career from his education, not from football. Boobie Miles is relying on football as a career and does not perform in school, therefore football plays a very large role in his life as he is relying on football to make money as a career. The people of Odessa are similar to Boobie as they only care about football, not education. Football does not play a similar role in my community. Chavez will be much more prepared for life after football as he has a good education to fall back on, whereas Boobie has made his life revolve around football, therefore when it is finished he will have nothing.…
The Lost Boy, a novel by David Pelzer, is the sequel to A Child Called It. As a young boy David is forced to bounce back and forth between five different foster homes. His only possessions were literally the torn and tattered clothes that were on his back. David's life has been a long, harsh and a cruel reality. David grew up in a home with an alcoholic, abusive and unloving mother, a father who refused to deal with his own sons' mistreatment, and brothers who saw David as the household maid. It wasn't until the love of a teacher that David finally escaped the physical and emotional abuse of his own mother. However, David's search for love and happiness was far from over. Everyday that he was in foster care…
In James Baldwin 's short story "Sonny 's Blues" a young man questions his brotherly obligations after finding that his younger brother has been arrested for using drugs. In the attempt to rectify his younger brother 's behavior and life, the young man faces his own feelings for his brother and comes to terms with the life his brother Sonny lives. The developments of certain elements-plot, character, point of view, setting, symbolism-in the story help accentuate the narrator 's struggles and theme(s) of the story.…
Based on the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher, The Blind side opens with footage of the monumental moment when quarterback Joe Theismann got sacked by Lawrence Taylor, turning the offensive tackle into one of the highest paying positions in football but ending Theismann’s career. If you are not a football fan, The Blind Side is about Michael following in Taylor’s footsteps, but more so about how his adoption into the Tuohy family got him they’re to becoming a professional football player.…