The Fantasy Genre: The Two Towers By Cinda Williams Chima

American journalist, writer, and magazine editor David Remnick once said, “The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy.” In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls the main character and author of the book tells of her crazy and adventurous life she experienced with her not so ordinary family. This quote relates to The Glass Castle, because like it states, life is full of both tragedies and beauty which is exactly what Jeannette experienced growing up with her free spirited and non-conformative parents. Walls is able to express her main purpose of the book that life is a mix of good and bad times through imagery, tone, and pathos.

Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, describes the unfortunate struggles of Jeanette and her family throughout her childhood. Often times, the hardships in one 's life can shape their future and how they develop as a person. Jeanette went through so many hardships that seem unbelievable to me. Her struggles and life experiences are much more extreme than mine will ever be. Her hardships have helped shape her personality and her career. She has made the best out of her childhood, and everyone should take a tip from Jeanette, including myself. I have not had many giant hardships in my life to this date. Jeanette is a role model to people everywhere. She showed that it doesn’t matter where or how you grow up, the only thing that matters is

In the memoir, The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls the author depicts her poverty-stricken past along with her eccentric morals, and dysfunctional parents as they traveled around the country avoiding debt-collectors, while handling unruly situations. The author lives with her three siblings: Brian, Lori, and Maureen Walls; and her two parents: Rex, and Mary Walls. The mother a struggling artist, and the father a jack-of-all-trades with an alcohol addiction. Together they move from town to town, and state to state avoiding the clutches of the ‘FBI’ a nickname Jeannette 's father gave to the debt collectors that were constantly chasing after them. Along the way they struggle with cases of sexual harassment, bullying, and

As human beings, we live by our morals, outlining our ethical principles in distinguishing what is right from what is wrong. Our morals define who we are as a person, how we behave, how we communicate, and how we manage challenging situations. As stated by President John F. Kennedy, “a man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality” (225). In order to achieve and portray one’s morals and ethical principles regardless of the circumstances, a person must portray courage. As Ernest Hemingway defined it, “Grace under pressure (Kennedy 1).” According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, courage is the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.” In the Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage, written on 1957 by John F. Kennedy, some of the greatest deeds of political courage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are discussed through the accounts of the historical events that inspired such acts and the consequences of those brave enough to carry them out. The author of the award winning memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls, could not be considered a candidate for John F. Kennedy’s Profile in Courage Award because of the failure to fulfill of the requirements of the award, the type of courage portrayed, and the limited sphere of influence.

In the vivid, personal memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she painstakingly recalls her “story” and how it affected and made her who she is today. She grew up in an environment that most children typically do not. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a selfish woman who put herself first. You could say their way of parenting was not your average “cookie cutter” household. One main social issue in The Glass Castle, is the impact on child neglect in a family and how that affects the way the child turns out. Although, Jeannette Walls ended up as a successful writer along with her siblings Lori and Brian, her other sister Maureen took a route which many neglected children face. What set apart these siblings and how the

“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is a memoir of a family that is frequently homeless and living in very poor conditions. Despite all this, the protagonist Jeannette Walls does not lose faith but, but does the exact opposite. She does everything in her power to earn money and get an education so she can escape her current life and move to a place with better opportunities, which is New York (Walls 2005) This book intrigued me because of the way Walls tells her story. She does not have a trouble-free life, but she is a brave woman for telling her story to others. Walls admitted in her interview with Oprah as well as in her book, that she is so embarrassed of her parents in the streets. While she lives in her warm and comfortable home, her parents are in the street looking through garbage cans for food. Jeannette Walls’s approach to life is astounding, and the way she tells her story with such emotion but at the same time some parts are relatable to many others. Walls uses many rhetorical techniques in her writing that absorbs the reader not only to enjoy her book but also to empathize for her.

“Be who makes the impossible possible,” my grandmother loves to say. In life dreaming big is the idealistic state of mind. Dreaming big is what gives one hope to becoming who they aspire to be and reach their goals.

Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.

Masculine-focused groups like fraternities or all-male schools are built off the idea of brotherly love. These groups exhibit certain qualities of personalities of their members that differ from the norm of social interactions and love. A possible way of explaining the differences between the love people are generally accustomed to and a love between males in the context of brotherhood groups is science. Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do and Become, describes love as a “positivity resonance”, using science to explain how it can be thought of as a connection between individuals through small, positive interactions. Susan Faludi, author of The Naked Citadel, illustrates a

There is a massive difference between wanting to keep a tradition alive and being so avid about living in sameness that it becomes dangerous. Fluidity and being open to revision is necessary in order to survive in an ever changing environment. In The Naked Citadel, Susan Faludi recounts the events that occurred during the period that Shannon Faulkner fought for acceptance to the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. Throughout this time, the school community experienced utter chaos as a result of mixed emotions about letting a female gain the honor of becoming a cadet. In The Minds Eye, Oliver Sacks shows the necessity of change in order to survive by describing the changes that blind people made in their lives in order to become as successful as they are today. When an individual is forced to change, they are more likely to tackle the situation with an open mind as a method to make the best of that situation. In contrast, when change is not necessary, it can be much more difficult to adapt due to the presence of fear and insecurities.

Claire Standish or “the princess” portrays the stereotypical popular teenage girl in The Breakfast Club. She is in detention with everyone else because she decided to skip class and go shopping, which also plays into the stereotypical teen girl image. It can also be assumed that she is spoiled and rich since her father tried to get her out of detention but failed, and she mentions to the group that her parents only use her to get back at the other one. She brings a fancy lunch of sushi while the other teens either have nothing or the standard lunch one’s parents might pack for them. There are a couple of times in the movie that she brings up her social standing and could even be considered as looking down on those who are not as popular as her. Even closer towards the end of the movie she informs the others that if they were to say hello to her in the hallway in front of her friends, she would have no choice but to ignore them. By the end of the movie, she has opened up to everyone else about her fears of letting her peers down and has formed a close relationship with Bender.

“The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls is an extremely captivating novel that really kept my attention throughout the entire story. It’s a fascinating story of growing up in circumstances that kept me shaking my head as I turned the pages. The Walls family is unquestionably one unlike any I’ve ever come across. The lessons and experiences that the children learned and endured were ones that molded their lives and established who they are today. Jeanette Walls goes through many descriptions of situations that she faced that people normally should not face. For most of her childhood, her family traveled from town to town because her parents always thought that they would hit it big, unfortunately her father was never ever to find a

In the novels Oryx and Crake and Frankenstein, mental health impacts the main characters and their everyday lives. Each character has been through different life changes that influence their state of mind. To more thoroughly comprehend what each character is going through, this paper analyzes the life changes that occur due to each characters’ mental state.

The looming tower by Lawrence wright is a nonfiction book that covers the decades that lead to the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, and around the world. This book described the how the lives of men from different backgrounds and countries came together and organized the most fear terrorist organization in the modern history. This book goes on to show the lack of understanding that the United States intelligence community had when dealing with the Islamic community, and how all of this culminated into what most remember as 9/11.