The Dead And The Gone By Susan Beth Pfeffer

The short story, “Ashes,” by Susan Beth Pfeffer is about a girl, Ashes, who has divorced parents. She is torn between her parents when she is given the opportunity to help her dad, but the twist is she has to steal from her mom to do this. A lesson that is learned from “Ashes” is that someone who normally teaches you to do good may also teach you to do something bad.

Randall Kenan born in Brooklyn, NY 1963 was raised by his grandparents in a rural community in North Carolina. In 1985, he graduated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in English and creative writing. One of his instructors recommended him for a job for and editor at Random House where he was an eventual assistant to senior editor’s prestigious subsidiary, Alfred A. Knopf. (Fountain) Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, followed in 1992. He has written five other works and has received numerous awards. (RandallKenan.com) Randall Kenan is a talented African-American author of the present era who writes about the human condition. He not only writes about what it is like to be a black man in the south, but he throws in homosexuality into the bible belt. Kenan repeatedly pits homosexual characters against an oppressive, closed minded community that is against new views of acceptance and equality of the times. With these themes of racial and sexual identity, forgiveness and acceptance; “Kenan, perhaps one of the first Southern authors to openly analyze the struggles of homosexuals, he subtly intertwines common concerns and ideals from the Civil Rights Era and parallels the Gay Rights Movement of today.” (Turley)

50% of children experience the divorce of their parents according to www.marriage-success-secrets.com. In Ashes, by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Ashleigh’s parents have been divorced for the last two years. She loves both of them but has a special soft spot for her dad. Ashleigh’s mom is a practical person and her dad is described as a dreamer. After a dinner with her father, Ashleigh receives a request. He wants her to to take her mom’s emergency money to pay off a deal he made. Ashleigh makes the decision to not give her dad the money because she questions the process and outcome, her father has a history of making irresponsible decisions, and the clouds symbolize her feelings towards her dad’s plan.

In Alex's situation, food is very valuable because it lacks in amount. He had to choose between saving his sister or leaving his sister behind for a can of food. Clearly Alex really loves his sisters to make sacrifices for

In The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Alex is left in charge of his sisters. While Alex’s mom is at the hospital, his dad is in Puerto Rico, and his older brother, Chris, is in the army. So, it’s just him and his two younger sisters when the moon gets pushed closer to the Earth and throws everything off. People begin to panic. The electricity doesn’t work, and neither does the house phone. In the middle of the night, his uncle Jimmy comes to him needing help packing up all the food in his bodega before the people come and steal it all. Alex figures they will need it, so they all go to help his uncle. Benny, another guy helping Alex’s uncle, is carrying a gun, just in case, but Alex does not think this is that serious.

Most people feel or have felt special before but when Ashes was needed for her dad's money problem her dad thinks of her as one-in-a-million. In the story Ashes by Susan Beth Pfeffer Ashleigh has two parents that are divorced. Her mother was the workaholic while her father was a dreamer (her mother calls him a lazy bum). When Ashleigh’s dad gave her a nickname of Ashes and used it a lot every time, her mom just used her actual name which to her wasn’t that special to her. At the end she was faced with a choice that was to disobey her father (don’t take the money) or disobey her mother (take the money), So Ashes picked to take the money because she loved her father, she knew the problem’s he was going through at the time, and he always considered

The book I’m reading is Deep, Dark, and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn. The book is about a girl who goes to a lake with her aunt. The girl’s name is Ali and she is hanging out with her Aunt Dulcie and cousin Emma. The story starts out when Ali goes to read her mom’s book. She opens a page and a picture falls out. The picture is her mom, aunt, and another girl. On the back of the photo her grandmother wrote their names but the other girl's name was torn off. The first letter of her name was T. It was a mystery to Ali, so she went downstairs to ask her mom who T was, but she had no clue. A few hours later her aunt showed up and asked her if she wanted to go to Maine to go to the lake. While Dulcie was

The excerpt "A Sorrowful Woman" can be regarded as a sequel to A Secret Sorrow. Both stories involve the women having internal battles that they go through, it's as if Gail Godwin, the author of "A Sorrowful Woman", intended for her short story to be a twisted sequel of A Secret Sorrow. Faye's crisis happens before her marriage and Godwin's character starts to have problems after her marriage and having a child. In Van der Zee's story, A Secret Sorrow, she encourages marriage, while in Godwin's short story it questions the concept of marriage.

I watched the documentary Dying to be Thin, which aired on PBS, it followed the lives of young women who have struggled with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. There were many thoughts which raced through my mind. After having watched Dying to be Thin I read the articles Anorexia Nervosa: Friend or Foe? By Lucy Serpell, Janet Treasure, John Teasdale, and Victoria Sullivan. I also had read Bulimia Nervosa: Friend or Foe? The Pros and Cons of Bulimia Nervosa by Lucy Serpell and Janet Treasure. What first captured my attention was when the narrator of the documentary spoke about a young woman Heidi Gunther. The narrator stated that Heidi Gunther died at age 22 due to her heart giving out, which was caused by an eating disorder. I think about this and I think about how her body no longer had enough nutrition for her to live. This made me think about what other women said in the documentary. Katy Tracey said that an eating disorder is “love, glory, power”. These are powerful words. If a young woman is saying that an eating disorder is having love, having glory, and having power then what else is left? It sounded like what the deeper meaning behind those words are would be that that an eating disorder consumes the person who has it until there is nothing left. It is interesting to look at anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa and dissect them more closely. From what I have learned from the articles bulimia nervosa has “Two positive themes (BN allowing the

Strange Attractions Life is filled with experiences and lessons to learn from. The short story The Death Child, by Gabrielle Roy revolves around the reality of how death can affect an individual’s life. It starts off with an inexperienced teacher receiving an opportunity to teach at a school, for a month. The new teacher contemplates whether this short teaching experience will be enough to build a relationship with the students; subsequently, she frets, “will that month be long enough for [her] to become attached to the children or for the children to become attached to [her]? Will a month be worth the effort?”

In the short story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Asleigh the protagonist, is a normal teenager

Susan Beth Pfeffer's realistic fiction story “Ashes” is about a girl named Ashleigh, or Ashes for short. Her parents are divorced and she loves her father even though he is irresponsible. One evening he sweet talks her and takes her out to eat, just to ask her to steal money from her mother. Ashes has to choose to help her father or stick to her morals. One lesson the story suggests is that sometimes the individuals that people trust could be using them.

Melissa Olson was born on June 3, 1983 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She has a degree in Film and Literature from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree from the UW-Milwaukee. She lived for a while in Hollywood before she moved to Madison in Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband and two kids.

As I have progressed in reading this book called Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, I really come to enjoy all of the stories that David Eagleman, the author, talks about and explains. Chapters thirteen through twenty really have some interesting ideas and aspects on how the afterlife is going to be for someone. In class, we sometimes talk about how we think our afterlives are going to play out and the materials or objects that are in them. This book is really interesting and I have definitely enjoyed reading it so far.

In his article “Death, time, history” Piotr Hoffman discusses the Division II of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The essay is logically divided into three main parts. The first one is introduction and brief overview of author’s objectives (Hoffman wants to bring Heidegger back into the framework of the subjectivist tradition, which is not of our particular interest today because of its controversy). The second part is named The Human Self and mainly includes such themes as totality and authenticity of Dasein, being-toward-death and care, also emphasizing some parallels between Heideggerian and Cartesian worldviews precisely between the concepts of “constant threat” and “evil demon”. The third and the last part is named Time and History and