Category: Book Review

The contention at the focal point of the book, the Barbary Wars, occurred somewhere in the range of 1801 and 1815. Under President Thomas Jefferson, America aligned itself with war-focused mindset against a group of North African states along the Barbary Coast. These included Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and the autonomous Sultanate of Morocco. These nations…

Derek Alton Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright who is well known for his contribution to literature in the Caribbean as he explored Caribbean culture. He was trained to become a painter but turned to write when he was young. He published his first collection of poems when he was fourteen (14). During…

Summary: Gabriel and Young (2011) designed a study to test three hypotheses. The first hypothesis they were testing if reading a passage from either Harry Potter will make participants “become” wizards or if reading Twilight will make participants “become” vampires. More specifically they examined and proposed the narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that reading…

Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics studying dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.​ This theory can be applied to life and more specifically, the two lives of Wes Moore. The nonlinear progression from the starting point of a cycle can create a nearly unpredictable result. The two Wes’s lives can be…

With references to wider reading, explore and compare the impact of a totalitarian state in The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro). In The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go, both authors explore and compare the impact of the totalitarian states present within the novels. Both Atwood and Ishiguro…

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell. The novel follows Gothic and Romantic traditions of the time, complete with images of natural grandeur, literal and metaphorical sublimity, and elements of the supernatural. Throughout the novel, Brontë uses descriptions of the dark landscape and stormy weather to reflect the…

The plot of the novel revolves around a twentieth-century English family pertaining to the working class, made up of a drunkard miner-father, Walter Morel, his wife, Gertrude Morel, and their children, Paul, William, Annie, and Arthur. It was the first novel to inspect in such detail the intimacy of a family and the processes that…

When people of different cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds are living together, they tend to see themselves as a representation of a larger society. ‘The Book of Unknown Americans’ tells a story about people coming from different countries to the United States. Every character moved to the United States for a different reason: some moved because…

“Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values”. Intending to find the ‘meaning’ of life, 36-year-old Paul Kalanithi pursues a career and devotes his life to a neurosurgeon. But everything takes a turn when the doctor turns a patient himself. The book is the journey of the author who was…

‘Stargirl’ is a novel by the author Jerry Spinelli. Jerry is an American writer that grew up in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and he now lives in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He decided to become a writer at the age of 16 after a poem he wrote about sports was published in a local newspaper. Jerry went to Gettysburg…