6. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Copyright: 2012
Category: LGBTQ Novel/Memoir
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is an incredible book. I was excited to read this after researching Benjamin Alire Sáenz for the “Something About the Author” discussion board and the book did not disappoint. This book was chosen for several awards including the Stonewall Award, so I thought it would be great for the LGBTQ selection on our reading list. This book
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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews has the distinction of being by and far the funniest book I’ve read for this class. It first came to my attention during an outreach visit to a local high school where the media center specialist told me that she had taken it out of circulation for being “disgustingly crude”. I was very excited to see it on our reading list because I had already planned to read it someday, it was just a matter of finding the time. I am so glad to have the opportunity now. I will say that it is crude – especially in the very beginning. I would guess the media specialist probably didn’t make it far past chapter nine “A More or Less Typical Conversation with Earl” before she wrote off the entire book. I felt the dialog was very much teen boys being teen boys. The most challenging thing in this book for me was the main character. It takes a lot of patience to like the narrative voice of Greg Gaines. The titular dying girl, Rachel, made very little impression on me—positively or negatively. I feel that like Greg I got to the end of the story without knowing much more about Rachel than the fact that she was dying of cancer. Earl, however, won me over …show more content…
In general, I don’t like illustrated texts – I find pictures distracting when I read and would rather imagine scenes for myself. I struggled through reading this book, but I did come to appreciate some of the things it has to offer. While Smile had a more consistent narrative – Telgemeier’s journey on the way to getting her teeth fixed – each chapter in Fullmetal Alchemist felt like its own separate storyline. It felt quite a bit like reading a cartoon – the same characters taking part in a different plotline each episode. There might be an overreaching arch (finding the philosopher’s stone and getting their original bodies back) but each chapter can easily stand on its own without context from those surrounding it. I don’t know how easy it would be to skip from Vol. 1 to Vol. 20, but I think I could have easily read the chapters of Vol. 1 in any order and still had the same experience with the book. I can understand why teens like manga’s so much after reading this – there can be quite a bit of fun in reading an ongoing adventure of the characters you know and
what kinda sucked about it is that they dragged out to the end. which made you know what's going to happen when ending came. that's why it was so dull cause I was on the last page and Sam still hasn't been killed yet so I knew right away what was going to happen. Recommendations: I would recommend this if you want to study the sight affects of the war.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Notes Allen Mandelbaum and Gabriel Marruzzo. New York: Bantam Books, 1980
The main character, Tom Tin, faces hardships and struggles many fourteen year olds do not have to face so early on. His father has mistakenly got himself into trouble and it is up to Tom to save his father and help make his family’s future bright again. Tom has good intentions throughout the novel, but he gets himself into trouble. He turns out to be an unlikely hero after pushing through his doubts and finally triumphing over his mistakes along his journey.
I think that overall the book was an amazing book. It drew me in the entire time and I could not put it down because of that. If any part started to get boring something insane would happen to make it interesting. For example in one part of the book it starts to get a little bit slow because it just talks about search methods a group of Bzrk members were using. Then suddenly a fake swat team busts into the house and kills everyone inside besides one child who ends killing almost all of the fake swat team. Another example was that a girl was sitting on the beach counting and kept counting for a while. Then suddenly she gets kidnapped and brought aboard a ship that is full of crazy people. Those are just some the things that happen throughout the book that keep interested on every page.
1) Philosopher John Rawls believed that one's own wealth or status should be unknown for the legal system to achieve full fairness and to be unbiased. For example, in the case of one being appointed free legal representation, the judge would be unaware that it was free council. In this situation, there is no ‘veil of ignorance’ because it operates on the complete knowledge that the offender could not pay the fine. I feel that the veil of ignorance would be unjust in this situation, as it is a very different situation to have someone struggling financially be unable to pay the fine over someone who potentially could, but chooses not to. 2) Aristotle believed poverty is the parent of revolution and crime, so I believe that he would have replied with; it is in the laws best interest to help people escape poverty instead of further trapping them within it (by making one pay an unrealistic fine or disabling them from working by sentencing them to either jail time or house arrest).
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinskey. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. Print.
In conclusion, I would highly recommend this book to early teens who are fans of drama and comedy because they could probably relate to most of the issues discussed to a certain extent. Girls my age, especially, would enjoy this book as they could relate to the issues discussed and they have probably already experienced similar
Malik, Keenan. "A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 8]: DANTE, POET OF THE SECULAR." Pandemonium. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2014.
The boy’s growing maturity, autonomy, and painful disillusionment are used by Rios to impart the loss of innocence theme. He discovers his carefree times are taken away by nature, his mother, or merely because he is growing up. His experiences equate to that of the lion’s roar, wondrous and unforgettable, much like the trials people are subjected to when they begin maturing and losing their innocence. In the end, the boy develops into a mature and self-sufficient individual who discovers a new way to enjoy life and all its intricacies.
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” This maxim applies to the poet Dante Alighieri, writer of The Inferno in the 1300s, because it asserts the need to establish oneself as a contributor to society. Indeed, Dante’s work contributes much to Renaissance Italy as his work is the first of its scope and size to be written in the vernacular. Due to its readability and availability, The Inferno is a nationalistic symbol. With this widespread availability also comes a certain social responsibility; even though Dante’s audience would have been familiar with the religious dogma, he assumes the didactic role of illustrating his own version of Christian justice and emphasizes the need for a personal understanding of divine wisdom and contrapasso, the idea of the perfect punishment for the crime. Dante acts as both author and narrator, completing a physical and spiritual journey into the underworld with Virgil as his guide and mentor. The journey from darkness into light is an allegory full of symbolism, much like that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which shows a philosopher’s journey towards truth. Therefore, Dante would also agree with the maxim, “Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools scarcely by their own,” because on the road to gaining knowledge and spiritual enlightenment, characters who learn valuable lessons from the misfortunes of others strengthen their own paradigms. Nonetheless, the only true way to gain knowledge is to experience it first hand. Dante’s character finds truth by way of his own personal quest.
Imagine you and your best friend processing your relationship to the point where both of you love each other. Seems normal? The love transforms. Now one of you wants to kiss the other. In Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, two teenage boys become best friends after a couple of days. As time passed, Dante desired to kiss Ari and they do which directly connects to their homosexual love that Sáenz depicts with tennis shoes. Throughout the book, tennis shoes display Ari and Dante’s homosexual love for one another by revealing them as characters who refuse to value shoes.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. John Carlyle. New York: Vintage Books, 1959.
Alighieri, Dante. "The Inferno." The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: First New American Library Printing, 2003.
In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states, “All men by nature desire to know.” Although, this is a generalization, of this insightful statement about the nature of humans and human understanding this statement truly captures what Aristotle was trying to figure out about humans and their thinking. Everyone has a desire to know or to understand. As rational beings we tend to contemplate very simple ideas to the most complicated, like our existence, or parts of the universe, or the universe as a whole. Aristotle is known as the father of modern day psychology and biology, even though many of his ideas of these two sciences was proven incorrect. The most important concepts of Aristotle’s theory of human understanding are the notion of cause, the infinite, and the soul.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, Inferno. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.