A review of Things fall apart
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart brilliantly relates to the reader the story of one man's life and chronicles its disintegration. This man's name is Okonkwo; it is his journey and his trials that are followed, most significantly those in which he interacts with his family. From the beginning,...
The Martian chronicles: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The plot description in the back of this book fascinated me. It is a philosophy or ideal from the mind of the author, which is really almost a palindrome. This is a science fiction book with the idea that there is life on other planets but that they are just as skeptical of our human existence as...
The Iceman cometh: Review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The Iceman Cometh is an American tragedy set amidst the desolation of a saloon crowded with the marginalized elements of society. While Eugene O'Neill, the playwright, may not have been the most talented author in his ability to pen the most realistic, eloquent, or beautiful dialogue, he was...
The house of the seven gables: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a story more akin to a moral fable than the gothic writing one might expect from a piece of nineteenth century horror. Set across two centuries, and varying between the present and past, Hawthorne captures the peculiar nature of the...
Ayn Rand's The fountainhead: A book review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I chose to read The Fountainhead based on a couple of recommendations. Written by Ayn Rand, it is an astounding piece of literary work that follows the life of a young architect, Howard Roark. The Fountainhead takes place in New York beginning in the mid-1920's and continues into the 1930's. In...
Ruth Rendell's The crocodile bird: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I came across this book at random when I needed something for a book check. After reading the first few pages I was hooked. The book seemed mysterious and provocative in its own slightly twisted way. This story takes place in a very small town in England in the nineteen eighties and early...
A review of The confessions
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
For this book club I spent a lot of time looking into all of the books on the list that I had never heard of. I read the summary of each of the books on the list and eventually settled on The Confessions by Saint Augustine. I chose this book because it seemed like the Catholic equivalent to...
Koren Zailckas' Smashed: Review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
I had seen a recommendation for this book along with an interview of the author more than a year ago in a magazine. It had always looked interesting to me as I am interested in a career in addiction medicine, so when I recently saw it in a store I jumped to buy it. This is the memoir of a girl...
A review: On liberty and utilitarianism
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
John Stuart Mill's treatises on the nature of civil liberty and the political philosophy of utilitarianism are some of the most groundbreaking, and perpetually relevant, discourses on the subjects. His works stand as a testament to the ability for progressive, and at a given point in time...
Of mice and men: A review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I read this book because my peers read it. Peer pressure, right? I needed an honors book, it was short, and it was the first book my mom offered me when I told her that a classic would fill the requirement. It is a classic book, not sure what genre it falls under, but Wikipedia places it under...
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
This novel covers the time period of three generations. It is a work of fiction but comes off as an autobiography. The narrator, is of the youngest generation, and grew up in Detroit but tells the story as an adult living in Austria. The narrator's parents also grew up in Detroit. The first...
Norman Mailer: The naked and the dead
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The Naked and the Dead was Norman Mailer's debut novel detailing the lives of a group of American soldiers during World War II. Coming just three years after the conclusion of hostilities, this lengthy tome transported the country back into the horrors of war. The poetry in this first foray...
In cold blood: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood stands as what must be one of the finest works of American storytelling, made all the more gripping by the fact that it is nonfiction. The immense popularity of the tale practically require that some knowledge of the events are ingrained upon an American mind....
Everything is illuminated: Book review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
After watching the movie, Everything is Illuminated; I knew that I had to read the book to prolong the experience that Jonathan Safran Foer wrote about in his novel. There are several different stories inside this single novel. The main story is set in modern day Ukraine and is recorded as the...
Arrowsmith: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis, is a sprawling examination of 1920s America. The author employed his hero of sorts as the vehicle through which he conveyed his distaste for the commercialism that had captured and, in his eyes, corrupted the nation. In order to accomplish this feat, Lewis created...
An individual's encounter with conflict
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
At the center of human nature is a fundamental attraction towards the power of individuals over others. It is upon this subject which thousands of writers have based their learning, to attempt to understand the way people interact with the world around them. Two such writers are Jean-Jacques...
1984: George Orwell
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
1984 is a modern classic that is based on a society where a government has the ability to control citizens' minds in order to maintain their power. I selected this book after I read Animal Farm. I had greatly enjoyed reading Animal Farm and thought that I would try reading another book from...
The saga of Seabiscuit
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
During the 1930's, America was recovering from a period where nearly every citizen was completely down and out. The Great Depression had caused the nation to crumble and had left people hopeless and downtrodden. They were looking for a hero, someone to represent their struggle and provide them...
Women: Inferior to men, inferior to women, through The Rover and The Way of the World
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Seventeenth century British women held no personal value. Throughout Apra Behn's, “The Rover” and William Congreve's, “The Way of the World,” women are commoditized, used as pawns by men and powerful elders. Their value is not a human value, because women are seen as objects...
Subjectivity in Wollstonecraft's 'A vindication of the rights of a woman'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The romantic period in English literature littered the written landscape with fresh, progressive works. By the later part of the eighteenth century, the artistic backbone of artists and intellectuals pushed against traditional art, representing, instead, a stronger emphasis on the emotional...
Analysis of - There eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The novel starts by saying that men and women are different. Men wish for what they can't have in vain, while women on the other hand are more realistic in that their goals are actually attainable. And like other women of her time the lead character Janie Mae Crawford aims for a real...
The Black Pages book review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the poem “I hope You Believe Me”, Heru strives to teach about the oppression faced by people of African descent through metaphors. Heru's poem has three strengths. It is provoking, articulate and subtlety reflects on various black thoughts on oppression. The poem is provoking due to...
Observing the life and times of a 'Kaffir Boy'
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Emotion and sensitivity engulf the reader into the world of this powerful memoir that rightfully and adequately portrays the story of a youth coming of age in apartheid South Africa. On all levels the main character in Kaffir Boy, Johannes was demeaned by whites for being African with a tribal...
A review of the book "Techniques of the Observer" By Jonathan Crary
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer grants a theatrical still modern point of view on the ocular culture of nineteenth century. In this book he has re-approached the complications and plights of visual modernism and social modernity both. Extroverting conventional ideas the author has...
The interplay of tragedy, comedy and the grotesque in the storm in King Lear
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Comedy and Tragedy, the two modes of Drama, are usually seen as separate and distinct. Philosophically, they are. Comedy unites; it brings characters into a greater sense of harmony with one another and the universe, rewards the virtuous, punishes the wicked, and upholds the cosmic order. Tragedy...
Time passes: Experience and expression in 'The Years' and 'To the Lighthouse'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The present unfolds as I trace my way along the thin black lines laid across the page. Woolf writes; I read. We then assemble these fractured signs, these fleeting moments in our conversations to compose a unified “whole.” A scene passes. My eyes discern a pattern and then resume their...
The Siren and the domestic ideal
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Written during the Victorian age and in a strict society, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray was a book all its own. It is mostly categorized as a satire; however, it speaks volumes about the realities of the time. Women were considered as a property, and the men laid down the law....
The three-part structure of To the Lighthouse
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse makes great use of introspective thought and philosophical questions infused within the prose. It is a novel in the modernist sense, wherein the plot is secondary to the emotional responses sparked by the heavy dialogue spoken throughout the story....
Identity theft
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Don DeLillo's main character, Professor Jack Gladney, candidly remarks to his class “all plots move deathward,” and the plot of White Noise proves no exception. In the novel, Don DeLillo establishes a contemporary society where two kinds of people exist—killers and diers—or...
Scaling, airbrush, cropping and other ways to transform a portrait
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. The times change, and we change in them. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus certainly transforms over time. At the core of this modernist novel lie issues of religion, art, aesthetic, and conversion. James Joyce brilliantly...
