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 - publié le 23/02/2010
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...
The tale of Evangeline and the rebuilding of an Acadian identity after the "Grand Derangement"
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
In 1847, Henry Longfellow, a well-known American writer published a poem entitled 'Evangéline, a Tale of Acadie', in which he tells a tragic love story of two young Acadians forced to exile during the time of the Deportation. This epic poem of 1400 verses is based on oral tradition and...
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...
Annotated Bibliography - A Farewell to Arms
Book review - 27 pages - Literature
Killinger's argumentation is very convincing. He presents the connection between Hemingway's work and the existentialist movement in a tremendously clear and effective way. Every aspect of existentialism is covered, and backed with concrete examples and quotations from the text. The...
Catch-22 : black comedy or satire ?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Catch-22, often considered as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, is also often analyzed as being either satirical, or characteristic of the theater of the absurd, or even both. At first sight, this appears to be totally irrelevant, given the subtle but still significant...
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...
Ernest J. Gaines, A lesson before dying
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
"A Lesson Before Dying" was first published in 1993. It was written by E. J. Gaines. He is a Southern writer. Most of his novels are historical fictions and also a social commentary from an Afro centric point of view. His novels often deal with alienation and search for dignity and masculine...
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...
Monsters in Beowulf
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The Beowulf poem is one of the most important heritages from the historical sources of the Middle-Ages. Unfortunately we still don't know who wrote it, maybe was he a poet in a royal court or an erudite monk-poet. Moreover, we cannot date the text more precisely than between the seventh and...
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....
The Voyage, by K. Mansfield (1921)
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In 1923 one of the most famous New Zealander writers of the colonial period Katherine Mansfield died. She had gained renown as a modernist storyteller for her symbolic short stories, in which she displayed her admirable mastery in depicting human feelings and psychological tensions, such as...
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,...
