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...
A subjective analysis of what one might term as a lighthouse
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Woolf could choose many ways to describe the Ramsay's to her audience. She could start with a description of their summer home, the price of their rent, or their family lineage in an attempt to engage the reader and establish some common ground on which to build from. But, as Woolf points...
Berlusconi's Italy: A critical review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
E. Shin and John A. Agnew is in many ways about the notorious Silvio Berlusconi but it is actually more focused on Italy and its politics as a whole. It is about what the authors call the “followership” of Berlusconi more so than his actual leadership. This book review will discuss the...
Reaching for a Larger History: A comparative book review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Hugh Kearney's The British Isles: A History of Four Nations and Gary Nash's The Unknown American Revolution both attempt to introduce an often missed dimension into their respective subjects. Although each book has a unique style and approach (because of differences in scope, audience,...
Confessions of self-displacement in Great Expectations
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
One sometimes suspects, while reading Great Expectations, that Dickens could have been good friends with Bishop Tutu. One of the particular satisfactions of the novel is the often tender justice meeted out for character's sins. Very few characters who actually appear for any length of time remain...
The empowered woman in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
Speaking of his king's command to “stay [his wife's] tongue,” (The Winter's Tale, 2.3.110) Antigonus very succinctly states the theme of female empowerment in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Throughout the play, Shakespeare employs various strategies to communicate this idea. One...
A review of T.H. White's book The Once and Future King
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
An epic historical fantasy with a point that transcends the genre, T.H. White's classic four-part novel is a time telescope with a mirror at the end in place of a lens. As with most classical literature, White's tale contains a higher intention hidden beneath the folds of his satirical prose,...
A review of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In “The Closing of the American Mind”, Allan Bloom argued about what he believes is the failure of contemporary American universities and colleges. The very first thing he mentioned in his book was that “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes,...
A review of Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher
Book review - 11 pages - Literature
Tom Perrotta, the reigning bard of American suburbia, can inspire compassion for the most unlikely of subjects. In Election, he humanizes heartless, bitchy Tracy; in Little Children, he measures out kindnesses to Larry the violent racist as well as Ronald the convicted sex offender. But in his...
Phallocracy in Alan Moore's "From Hell"
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Alan Moore offers a diagnosis of reality that portrays misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism, and governmental tyranny as demonic forces. Moore uses the graphic narrative medium as a means to communicate the demonic nature of these systems of power. In Moore's work on Swamp Thing, he created...
The drama of discrimination in Henry James' The Ambassadors
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Ambassadors is clearly a novel: the novel is free, and has the most elastic form. We could be tempted to say that there is no drama in the work. In fact, drama has different meanings. First, it is the name of theatrical plays of a particular kind or period. Secondly, it can mean a situation...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The theme that interests us is the quest for identity in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. The book was written in 1901 and the plot takes place in India during the time of the British colonization. Kim presents several quests: a quest implies that the protagonist has to seek something noble, like the...
Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The text under scrutiny presents us an extract of the confession of a man to his psychiatrist: he talks to him more precisely about his childhood, and the way his mother used to act with him during that period. What is interesting about this text is the manner the narrator presents his memory:...
How Shakespeare dramatized the changes in Lady Macbeth
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
“Ambition is the step that can turn a noble-hearted man into a sinner” is the message Shakespeare wanted to convey to the audience when he wrote the play Macbeth in 1606. Lady Macbeth's is the wife of an important nobleman: Macbeth, they are both characterized by their great ambition of...
Harry Potter - Translation and analysis
Book review - 12 pages - Literature
Everybody has heard about Harry Potter, the famous book by J.K. Rowling and the famous wizard. It is, as everybody knows, a very popular novel everywhere in the world. It is particularly popular in the country where it was written. Not only children, but also many grown-ups actually love it. We...
"Nothing that is so, is so": The extent of role of this statement in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
“Nothing that is so, is so”, says Feste. He says so ironically, talking to Sebastian, who he is convinced is actually Cesario. This is said for a specific situation, but it might actually be relevant for the whole play: Indeed, this apparently absurd quotation raises the question of...
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Chapter 7 reviews
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
At the beginning of this chapter, a letter from his father explains to Victor the circumstances of William's murder. He leaves for Geneva immediately to comfort and grieve with his family. But it is dark when he reaches Geneva and gets close to home, during a thunderstorm and Victor is started to...
"I.O.U. The debt threat and why we must defuse it", Noreena Hertz
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
NOREENA HERTZ is a British economist who teaches political economy at the University Of Utrecht, Netherlands. Her last book is I.O.U. The debt threat. In this book, she talks about Bono, the lead singer of U2 (real name Paul Hewson), who will challenge the rich world to help eradicate Third World...
Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Since the very beginning of the play, we realize the essential role of dreams and reminiscences in Willy Loman's life because he seems to live in his own world. Indeed, as soon as he comes back home, we learn that this day, he wasn't able to drive all the way to the place he was supposed to go...
Richard Dawkins, "The selfish gene"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins elaborates on another perspective of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, basing his argument on the recent discovery of the DNA molecule's structure. The theory of evolution, which relevance had been largely suffering from a lack of physical validation, now...
Book review on gender and higher education: A collection of essays edited by Becy Ropers-Huilman analyzed
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
This paper will provide a review of a collection of essays edited by Becky Ropers-Huilman entitled Gendered Futures in Higher Education. Critical Perspectives for Change. The book was published by the State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., in 2003. The paper will consider how this...
A review of the book An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Reading An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison, was much like driving by the scene of a horrible car wreck. We snuck a peek, turned a page, faced disturbing images and soon became entwined with gut wrenching emotions that made us want to run away. As if transfixed by a cavalcade of emergency...
"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," book series; and why it has a deep connection with American teen girls
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The "Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants," consists of four books. These books have solidified the series as a literary masterpiece that has been heralded as a great work for young people. It has been celebrated as a wonderful literary effort. The books evoke thoughts of serene and picturesque...
Science in action: Review
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Latour suggests that the construction of facts and machines is a collective process. He argues that there is nothing inherent in a statement that makes it a fact; rather it is the future processes of others who accept it, support it, ignore it, challenge it, etc wherein the destiny of a statement...
Masquerade in seductive fictions
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
In her Masquerade and Civilization, Terry Castle hypothesizes that the concept of “masquerade” is central to 18th century consciousness, and provides an intriguing insight into how the self was conceived of in “the age of disguise”(Castle, 5). Implicit in the idea of...
Machiavellian strategies in Koestler's "Darkness at Noon"
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
What would it be acceptable for a society to sacrifice in order to achieve a utopia? Does this utopia exist, and if so, is it even possible to achieve it? Is it possible to build paradise from concrete? Arthur Koestler, in his novel Darkness at Noon , demonstrates the impracticality of using...
"Sisters and Lovers: Women and Desire in Bali ": A review
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Megan Jennaway's theoretical framework in the first half of Sisters and Lovers: Women and Desire in Bali, fuses feminist anthropology, Marxist power asymmetry discourse, and postmodernist concerns of representation and reflexivity. She posits that sexuality and desire have not been explored in...
The duality of Holocaust literature
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Other than the odd revisionist, the vast majority of sentient humans will attest to the horror that was the Holocaust. Unfortunately, those who can give first hand testimonies are few in number and quickly disappearing. The story gets even more muddled when psychologists protest that memory is...
