On the summer night of July 29, 1976 shots rang out in a New York City neighborhood. This marked the beginning of the .44 caliber or the Son of Sam murders. His reign of terror would grip this city and its surrounding areas for over a year. Sadly the Son of Sam whom was eventually identified as David Berkowitz a severely disturbed young man that fell under the several theories of crime causation. In his early life he felt awkward and scorned by his peers because of being adopted and his appearance. These feelings would later follow him into his adult life and as referred by Bardsely (n.d.)”, he would be creating fantasies that would crowd out reality and eventually David lived in a world populated by the demons his mind had created,” (22. The Blood Monster, para. 5). Further reading and research of the Son of Sam uncovers that he would have had the potential to find his way into the theories of labeling and psychological criminal causation.…
In Elliot Ness’ memoir The Untouchables, the author personally narrates the story of how the name “Untouchables” came to be. After being released from prison, Al Capone was starting trouble again in the streets of Chicago. Capone tries to bribe the police officers trying to take down his operation but Ness and his team refused the bribes. Being proud of this accomplishment Ness immediately goes to the press and told the story, and the press in turn coined the trio as the “untouchables” because of their inability to be bribed. Through his usage of tone and dramatization, Ness achieves his purpose of hooking his audience into his story and depicting himself and his team as being larger than life.…
When the fighting began, Shaara illustrated the deeper aspects of war and soldier life by illuminating the readers on the personal lives of the otherwise hardhearted men. When light is shed on James Longstreet and Lewis Armistead’s arduous pasts, I began to see them as actual people rather than bloodthirsty soldiers. Longstreet had been thrown into battle after having just lost three of his children to fever, and the Confederate Armistead was faced with losing his best friend, Union general Winfield Scott Hancock, after already having lost his wife. Shaara took his readers by the hand and guided us through General Chamberlain’s struggle of duty as a soldier versus duty to family as he strived to serve the Union as well as protect his younger brother, Tom, without showing favoritism. The most impactful part of The Killer Angels, to me, was that the characters were developed as real people…
In Los Angeles, California there are more than 450 active gangs made up of different races. In 2005 LA had 600 members that were white and only 11 gangs is from. But in LA there are 21,790 members that are Hispanics and there are 264 gangs made up by Hispanics. The title of my main work is Always Running by Luis J. Rodriguez is about the gang in La and he lives in a struggle environment, racism occurs in his lifetime. Despite the school board’s recent sentiments regarding the lack of value that fiction provides, fiction should remain in the school’s curriculum due to teach students to have their mind open to other things and have different perspectives. If they take fiction books away, they will just give us autobiography books which would give students a perspective that would not allow them to think more in depth.…
The book, “The Killer Angels”, written by, Michael Shaara; is about a battle at Gettysburg concerning slavery. Not everyone who fought in this battle fought for or against slavery. Many had their own views of why they chose to fight in this war.…
The mythos of America had started long before the era of modern militarism; however, it had boomed in popularity during said era due to John Wayne. It was soon known to be the John Wayne mythos. Said mythos became of the talk of the nation, filling up novels and films, and used as propaganda for the war. It is built on heroism, the idea that America is the impeccable saviour of the world—that they are always right, no matter what the situation is. Despite how bright this mythos seems, it has some extremely negative effects on the American society. This heroic mythos of America is ruining said nation by creating distrust and violent characters among the people.…
Each and every character in Angels in America faces changes in some degrees but each character reacts differently to the situation. In the beginning of the play, when the characters first face changes, they all are afraid of changes and prefer comfort life by denying what is happening to them. For example, when Louis finds out that Prior has AIDS, he leaves Prior even though he knew it was not the right thing to do. Prior also struggles after the angel visited him and tells him that he is going to be a prophet.…
On May 6, 1993, three eight year old boys were found savagely murdered in West Memphis Arkansas. The investigation lacks hard evidence and a suspect, and the police automatically turn their focus on Satanism. Unfortunately, three teenage boys became the prime suspects: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. Because they wore black and listened to hard rock music, they were outcasts. With nothing but circumstantial evidence mounted upon these teenage boys, the community lets a "Satanic Panic" outweigh the facts. All the while, there is more than just circumstantial evidence that points to one of the victims' stepfather, John Mark Byers. He had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit this heinous crime.…
Every day we encounter fights sometimes small sometimes way more aggravated. The movie The Interrupters shows us how fights can escalates from just talking to someone getting killed. The Interrupters by Steve James uses life stories of the team members and visual arguments to show how circumstances can change someone’s life forever, However they show viewers that CeaseFire changed everyone’s life in a very brief duration while some of the team members were not sure in what they were doing themselves furthermore they never showed a case they failed to solve.The Interrupters gave parents and people who do not deal with this dilemma everyday a great massage.…
When a major act of violence takes place, regardless of whether or not it has extensive media coverage, the people that witness or hear about it can sometimes identify and relate to either the victims or the perpetrators. In three different stories, acts of violence are all defining characteristics of how the general population react. The first story, “How To Tell A True War Story” by Tim O’Brien discusses the difficulties associated with trying to explain to people what being in war feels like when O’Brien tells a woman about brutal events that took place while he was serving in the Vietnam war. In the next story, “The Power of Context” by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about crime on the New York subway system and preventative methods to lower the crime rates on the trains and subway platforms. One event in particular was about a man who shot four teenagers that had criminal records who were pestering the man when he got on the subway in the projects and was actually portrayed by many people in the community as a vigilante. The last story, “Losing Matt Shepard” by Beth Loffreda, the brutal and violent attack that eventually lead to the death of a homosexual student at the University of Wyoming named Matt Shepard that caused a media uproar, bringing attention to people on both sides of the spectrum, ranging from other LGBTQ community members to radical anti-homosexuality groups like the Westboro Baptist Church and other religious organizations. Different factors affect the way we do or do not identify with perpetrators and victims of violent acts in a variety of…
Wickedness in the Flesh Stephen King (1975) once wrote, “I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or telepathy because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling”. Most individuals are unable to wrap their minds around the evil seeping within their society. However, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, is one work that allows the blissfully unaware, a glimpse into the dark twisted world of satanic abuse.…
Members of the Hell’s Angels Refer to themselves as “one presenters”. A half century old boast playing off the saying that one percent of trouble markers give a bad name to ninety-nine percent of respectable bikers. The Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang is known as a group of “outlaws”, bad boys making their own rules and doing what they want. This group has been around for a long time, starting trouble all over the United States and other countries. They have done everything from drug trafficking to assault; this gang is no one to mess with. During the 1960s around the time of the world wars this group of individuals was considered a militant group. Now they are considered a dangerous motorcycle gang to stay away from.…
Her fascination lay within the other faith that she observed throughout her life, the fundamentalist Protestants of the twentieth century. Christian themes show traces in each of her stories-fall and redemption, nature and grace, sin and innocence (Friedman, Clark 138.) O’Connor believed in both the God and the Devil, and both were present throughout most of her work; however, Evil, and the Devil make a more common appearance in her work. Preston Browning Jr. compares her to Nathanial Hawthorne, saying “I believe it is accurate to say that no American author since Hawthorne has made such an extensive use of the devil” (6). Frederick Hoffman accuses O’Connor’s work of being preoccupied “with the Christ figure, a use of Him that is scarcely equaled by her contemporaries” (15:411). These views seem to be contradictory, but perhaps it is through the lack of a clear “Him” in many of her stories, with the focus on violence, despair, and grotesqueness, both physically and spiritually, that makes this preoccupation most…
l oDo you agree with the view that Mary Seacole, and not Florence Nightingale, was the real ‘Angel of Mercy’ in the Crimea?…
Hephaistion [The Persian Warrior], Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004) Post-modernism in the 1980s has, without any doubt, had a lasting impact on architecture today. It is a strand of architectural thought has continued to be expanded and developed even after it’s prominence in the 1980s. Definitions of the “post-modern” are often ephemeral, post-modernism could be understood as stylistic play, using the techniques of inversion, subversion, pastiche or irony. One of the leading proponents of a post-modern architecture is Charles Jencks; he attempts to define the post-modernist: “They may not always try to heal the rifts in culture, but they do recognise the contradictory pressures at work today and aim to derive an art and politics from them. Hence their typical style – radical eclecticism hence their characteristic tone – the double voiced discourse which accepts and criticizes at the same time. It is this double-coding which makes post-modernism relatively new and not a simple compromise,”…