Interstellar By Rebecca Mcclanahan

The poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright reanimates the horrible scene of a racial lynching and forces the reader to endure the victim's pain through the first person’s narrative voice. The poem contains structured lines and visual division into three stanzas. Moreover, there is one more type of division in the poem. The author uses an ellipsis four times throughout the poem. This punctuation mark frames the poem into the timeline, where the historical past of the African American poet becomes the present experience of any human, despite the race. The climax of the poem is presented in the middle of stanza two. The animated moment, which starts from the sentence “the ground gripped my feet”, dramatically shifts the

Two best friends, Chris and Win, decided to do something great their summer of senior year before heading of to collage. Chris and Win are going to bike along the West Coast to Seattle, where Win’s uncle lives. At first Chris’s mom is against them going, while his dad pushes him to go because he had a similar dream that he did not accomplish. Win’s parents seem to not have a care in the world that their son is going to bike across the country. Eventually both sets of parents agree and the boys start their journey. The trip is going great but somewhere along the way things started taking a turn for the worst. The book Shift by Jennifer Bradbury is a great realistic mystery that keeps the pages turning.

In the 1959 movie Imitation of Life, we meet a main character, Sarah Jane Johnson. Sarah is the daughter of Annie Johnson who is an African American mother. The problem that conflicts the whole story is that Sarah rejects her mother and her friends in order to live a life as a white women. Since Sarah is white colored and her mother is Black colored, Sarah lives a life she doesn’t want. She wants to be “All white” as she puts it. As series of events pass on and Sarah’s mother gets sick and passes away, Sarah finally admits that she was wrong and that she didn’t mean any harm towards her mother. We also read Sophocles’ play “Antigone,” and from what I gathered the title character is a young women of royal blood who sacrifices her life for the honor and integrity of her family, and to obey the commandments of the gods. We also read from our readings in our book “A World of Ideas,” and there are four authors that would react in a strongly manner to the life situations of Sarah Jane Johnson and Antigone.

Just reading an excerpt from “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins made me immediately want to read it, especially after finding out that the book was loosely based on her daughter’s life. The way this book was written was very effective because after seeing that it was written in a poetic free verse, I instantly knew it was going to be a very interesting read. My first thoughts on the main character was how innocent she was before she started taking drugs and how they had such a large impact on her life/personality.

In his novel, The Fault in Our Stars, John Green describes the hardships, endless love, and a tragedy, that two teenagers must push through to find their forever. Hazel Lancaster, an intelligent, aware, and selfless young girl, has struggled with cancer since the early age of thirteen. Augustus Waters, a smart, metaphor loving, cancer stricken kid, falls completely in love with Hazel Grace, but a great misfortune cuts their time together short. “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities (Green, 260).” Both Hazel and Gus learn to appreciate the time they spend together and make their small infinity one to remember. This novel is based off of a girl by the name of Esther Earl, she and Green met at a Harry Potter convention and Green thought her story would be an amazing way to spread the word about this dreadful disease. Green’s purpose of this novel is to bring awareness of the horrible disease called cancer and how it not only affects the patents life, but others as well. Since this book is narrated by Hazel, it has a tone of being very frank, Hazel tells it like it is and does not sugar coat anything with the fear that if she does she will hurt someone even more. With the use of ethos, logos, and pathos, Green appeals to his audience of young people who may not realize how extremely well off they are and inspire the people who are struggling to find themselves.

In Louise Ederich’s book Tracks the story is told with two narrators. Having two narrators helps show you the two different points of views. That’s what make humans unique, the way we view things, the way we hear things and interpret things is different from anybody else. So we are reading two completely different forms of the story. Do we know if that information is reliable, well I guess that’s for you as a reader to figure out? Many different forms of literary devices were used very well in this book, but the use of Metaphors and Symbolism is what really stood out. One of the most important things in this book is survival, it plays a pivotal role in just about everybody’s life

How would you feel if you were at a summer college program and found out it was an old asylum with a creepy background? In Asylum by Madeleine Roux, the mood gives the reader chills and the teenagers who are drawn to it. This creepy tale of a haunted asylum and teenagers who are drawn to it. The details have terrifying chills to have the reader feel when you don't know what is gonna come next. When Roux creates the story she uses brutal pictures to go along with the story. Books can have readers so intimidated in their books by simple things that happen.

Anticipation, heartache, and mystery are only a few of the abundant emotions immigrants feel on their journey to the United States. Notably, in Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, The Arrival, the main character experiences the same series of emotions on his immigration journey seeking safe haven. In fact, through the three-week introduction to a new adventure and literature, I was able to tune into the same feelings and genuinely understand the dismal journey of the immigrant archetype. Furthermore, this new-found perspective projected me to grasp a deep understanding of my father’s immigrant journey.

In Across the Universe, the director, Julie Taymor focuses on a range of controversial topics. For example, the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, police aggression, the “hippie” movement, and many others. Although the movie covers a wide array of topics, Taymor focuses on two keywords in particular: freedom and destruction and their correlation with one another. She does this by drawing the viewer’s attention to the Vietnam War, Max’s war injury, and Jude and Lucy’s relationship. Taymor uses visual echoes to show the progression of freedom throughout the time period. To accomplish this she illustrates, using visible pauses, how the characters’ lives are impacted by the war and ultimately how freedom comes after a period of destruction.

He specifically admires the star’s “steadfast” (line 1) trait. The speaker obsesses over one miniscule detail about the star, instead of investigating various attributes of the star, he only focuses on the one trait. The speaker romanticizes this trait by dreaming about being steadfast on his “fair love’s ripening breast.” (Line 13). He completely disregards other traits of the star.

Julie Taymor's musical film, Across the Universe, takes place during the Vietnam War. Jude sails from Liverpool to New Jersey and meets Max and falls in love with his sister, Lucy. Max gets drafted, and the wars and protests tear relationships apart, but in the end, love is still possible.

Entering the fifth section of her book, If you love this Planet, Helen Caldicott gives a brief synopsis of an experience she encountered with the initial release of the plastics industry. There was a slight differentiation in the style we lived years ago as she describes how much simpler times were and how complex provision has become. In this section titled, “Toxic Pollution”, her focus is plastic. Introduced to her in 1972 during her residency, plastic took over and quickly became a part of everyday life, replacing conventional tools and devices. From this small instance in her lifetime, she remembered most of how her environment was changing and now she sees the results from the millions of items implemented. Helen Caldicott is the character Public Health professionals identify as one individual that forms the target population. In the field of public health, the focus is to prevent disease, prolong life and promoting healthy lifestyles through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, legislations, communities and most importantly individuals.

In many instances throughout history groups have made attempts at colonialism. A range of tactics have been used with different degrees of success or failure and evaluations of these encounters along with fiction novels showing encounters between groups have attempted to give us insight as to how to be successful in these encounters. In her novel Mind of My Mind, Octavia Butler tries to convey that fear tactics are not effective in contact between two groups but that love and respect are more effective methods. She was successful in conveying this through her portrayal Doro’s character and his use of fear tactics and Mary’s characters and her contrasting strategy and how they contributed to the outcome of the novel. (reference other novels/articles)

In Delirium by Lauren Oliver, love is a disease. As I read it, I was almost instantly taken into the story. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book and I’ve felt like I was actually there in the story, witnessing it firsthand. I love this book because it teaches that you can’t dwell in the past and that love is misunderstood in the book and in life.

Icarus Madalynn Hyman Humans have a certain mindset of what their fate should be and what they want it to be. We often confuse fate with destiny. In the poem Icarus the author, Edward field, takes the myth of Daedalus and Icarus and alters it so that Icarus lived and and is living a mundane lifestyle. Throughout the poem Icarus battles with coming to terms with his fate. He doesn’t want to accept the fate in the actual myth, which states that he drowns, and also refuses to accept his fate in his new life which is normal and mundane.