John Green's Looking for Alaska

Imagine coming home to a house that has no warmth or food. Constantly feeling like you are in a place you can’t get out of. This is how poverty may feel to others. The expeirences from the author Jo Goodwin Parker in the story “What Is Poverty” and the McBride family from the novel “The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute To His White Mother” show that there are various effects of living in poverty that include emotional problems, adolescent rebellion, and

Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth Living in Bootstrap America, tells her story of what it’s like to be working poor in America, as well as what poverty is truly like on many levels. With a thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses her journey from lower class, to sometimes middle class, to poor, and everything in between. Throughout the read, Tirado goes on to reveal why poor people make the decisions they do in a very powerful way.

Poverty is a main part of life for many people in the world, more importantly the United States. Jeanette Walls shows how big of a problem poverty is in her memoir “The Glass Castle”, with her stories of how she grew up and her family’s struggles. How her family was treated along with what the people living around them found important clearly shows their economical class. The problem of food scarcity, or not having the bare necessities are some of poverty’s main problems. In “The Glass Castle”, the issues of poverty are displayed through not having the basic necessities, not being able to provide for children, and how there is not always enough food to feed everyone in the family.

Jo Goodwin Parker’s essay, “What is Poverty?” is about Parker who has personally experienced rural poverty. She explains her story from childhood to adulthood. Parker’s struggles are overwhelming; look at any sentence, the evidence of her daily struggle is there. From her underwear to living arrangements, and everything in between, Parker resides in poverty. In her essay, she says to listen to the story of what poverty is. Then she talks about the different aspects of poverty. Parker talks about the lack of health conditions she and her three children suffer from. She decides to be a mother even though she has no ability to provide

An ideology created in the 1960s, the culture of poverty is the idea that people stuck in poverty during this time had no way of breaking out and that they were trapped in a vicious cycle. The people living this way are helpless and could not provide for themselves, and many born in this lifestyle are heading downward with no avail. To spread awareness in the 60s, CBS sent reporter Charles Kuralt to document the quality of life and present the culture of poverty that ravaged in Appalachia. He went around a small town in mountainside Kentucky and interviewed families and documented the state of life around Christmas. This CBS News Special Report, Christmas In Appalachia, affirms the ideology of a culture of poverty, and the interview with Ibe Johnson, a hardworking husband and father, solidifies this through several filming techniques. Using a mix of eye-level and low level angle shots along with scale, duration of the interview, and composition of the scene, the film subjects the viewers to evidence of the culture of poverty.

In the article, “What’s So Bad about Being Poor” by Charles Murray, Murray states that “One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor”. He discusses how, contrary to present day, in America up until the 1950s those in positions of influence and power included a sizable amount of people who had been raised “dirt-poor”. Murray states that, because of this, many Americans with their lack of exposure to such people, they develop a skewed perspective of what poverty is. On account of this, Murray challenges the reader with several thought experiments which he uses to help the reader come to certain conclusions that convey his message.

When someone thinks of the poor they instantly imagine a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box or the nearest garbage can, but the working poor especially in the inner-city is commonly overlooked by society. However the working poor, in this case the working poor in the inner-city, are people advancing to try and make their lives better. They are taking minimum wage jobs so that they can barely afford a roof over their heads. Within Katherine Newman?s novel No Shame In My Game, she studies the working poor in the inner-city to draw conclusions about how to help them and dispute common stereotypes and the images people commonly view. Newman?s conclusions along with the

Poverty hits children hardest in the world. When I was younger, the Armenians had faced the hard facts of poverty after they break up with the Soviet Union, war with Azerbaijan, and a devastating earthquake. My family moved into our motherland Armenia while our nation was going through these huge dramatic changes. Furthermore the poor economy and inflation destroyed numerous hopes and futures. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, Arnold Spirit, describes his hardships involving poverty living on Spokane reservation. The people on the reservation are stuck in a prison of poverty. They are imprisoned there due to lack of resources and general contempt from the outside world, so they are left with little chance for success. Like Arnold, I also went through hardships regarding poverty and education.

In Edelman’s piece Still Hungry in America, she is discussing poverty in America. The purpose of this piece is to convince readers to take action to support federal programs that could help end the problem of poverty. This piece is intended to communicate that poverty is a real problem and America and needs our help to put a stop to it. Edelman is trying to communicate to those who don’t know anything issue and those who want to know how to help solve this issue.

Cultural critic bell hooks is known throughout the academic community as an academic rebel, so it is only fitting that she would write about the sensitive subject of being poor. The term “poor” has become a dirty word which most people try to distance themselves from as much as possible. In fact, the second sentence in her essay “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” paints a pretty clear picture about the word: “Most of us use words such as ‘underclass’ or ‘economically disenfranchised’ when we speak about being poor” (432). The purpose of this essay is to educate the reader about the reality of being impoverished and to break away from the negative stereotypes that they face. hooks accomplishes this through her use of pathos to give the reader a glimpse of what it was like for her to grow up poor; additionally, this glimpse creates ethos because she is sharing firsthand knowledge.

Poverty is a main part of life for many people in the world, more specifically the United States. Jeanette Walls displays how immense of a problem poverty is in her memoir, “The Glass Castle”, with her stories of how she grew up and her family’s struggles. How her family was treated along with what the people living around them found important unmistakably shows their economic class. The problem of food scarcity, or not having the bare necessities are some of poverty’s key problems. In “The Glass Castle”, the issues of poverty are displayed through not having the basic necessities, not being able to provide for children, and how there is not always enough food to feed everyone in the family.

In her book, titled, Growing Up Empty, award winning public service journalist, speaker and author of eight books—Loretta Schwartz-Nobel brilliantly employs all four of these ideas. In her book, Schwartz-Noble takes her reader on a behind the scenes look at an impoverish America. Her book chronicles true life stories of some of these poverty stricken individuals living among us. It portrays some of the events that led up to forcing one in ten families to depend on food banks and soup kitchens as their only means of feeding their children. It exposes the “men who knew about hunger but lied” and those who “learned about hunger but voted for economy at the expense of the hungry poor”. This book was written, according to the

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going.” (120) John Green’s Looking For Alaska is a book for young adults that has been greatly challenged by parents and schools all around the world for it’s mature content. Although it has swearing and some sexually explicit scenes, the book's main purpose is to make the reader really think about and question the many deeper meanings and troubles of life. The book touches on how the characters deal with the grief of losing loved ones, friendship, and how harmful alcohol can be. Alaska is one of the main characters in Looking For Alaska, and her character is very dynamic.

In the book “looking for Alaska” by John Green it takes about a Miles a 11th grade student who moves to a new boarding school to find his great perhaps that he could not find in his old school. Miles was introduced to the reader as a not very social person that just moves to this new school that he had no one that he knows. The character Miles was known as a lovable person by everyone he meets, remembering people last words was one of his favorite thinks, and he has his own thought about what happens after death. First off, Miles was a lovable person by a lot of people that he meets. For example ‘’having a boyfriend who lives far away when there’s a good-looking lying next to me’’.

Looking for Alaska is a book about a boy named Miles that goes away to a private school called Culver Creek were he meets a group of friends that he starts to hang out with throughout the year. He becomes very good friends with everyone and they begin to let him in on their secret spot called "the smoking hole", where they all smoke their cigarettes without getting in trouble. Soon he starts to get a crush on a girl named Alaska, which seems to already have a boyfriend. As soon as Miles starts to fall in love with her a horrible thing happens. Alaska dies in a terrible car accident, which turns into a very mysterious and confusing death. When Miles and the other boys get the news, they start fighting to find out the truth on what really happened. After reading this novel, one is left with the question, "How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?"