Book Review of the Unique and Emotional Novel, Same Kind of Different as Me

Stuart and Terry Hirschberg. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2006.

The Dust Bowl drought has killed all the farmer’s crops and the land has lost it’s richness. Tom decides to travel with his family, even though he’s going against parole rules by leaving the state. The Joads travel west with all twelve members of the family and Casey piled into an old truck. The trip to California proves to be hard when their grandpa dies just days after their departure. Truck problems are regular occurrences and the penetrating heat tires the migrating family.

Even the town that the novel takes place in is Soledad, which is Spanish for loneliness. Of Mice and Men accurately shows the hardships that loneliness can inflict on people in the Great Depression and even today and is a topic that a myriad of readers can connect with and sympathies for. Candy, an aging swamper and former ranch worker, is a character that experiences the heartbreak of becoming lonely. Many can attest to having an extremely good friend that they lose whether it be because of work, personal reasons, and in Candy’s case death. When occurrences like Candy’s incident transpire one can feel as if the world is crumbling all around them.

He then goes on to say that the only time he saw his mother was at night, after she walked miles to get to him.2 To brake the bond between them two, the separation was necessary between slaves. He also believed that his father might be his master because slaveholders often impregnate their female slaves. Even though he was the son of a white man, there was a lot of distaste the children take after the status of their mother and his case is a slave. Which effect was great for the master because it increased his number of slaves, and the more slaves one man owned the more money he brought in. Douglass’s slave owner, The Colonel owned around 3-4 hundred slaves on his plantation where they grew tobacco, corn and w... ... middle of paper ... ... with doing this would increase the owners number of slaves, and profits.

Achebe explores the theme of suffering in his poem ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’ and explains how it has lifelong impact on the common man/woman, which he achieved through the use of negative imagery and foreshadowing. Achebe wrote this poem during the Biafran War and had a first-hand experience of the immense suffering refugees had to endure, which made him write such a down-right negative story about war’s consequences. The poem ‘Prayer Before Birth’ looks at the tragedies war brings and how it can have an adverse effect on future generations. Being a poet during the height of Second World War, MacNeice was inclined to write about the detrimental effects of war so that he could influence people to change. Throughout the poem ‘ A Mother in a refugee camp’, written by Chinua Achebe, the poet talks about how war takes away one’s prized and loved possessions.

Whether it is the subtle and sensual language of Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966), the coarse and explicit vocabulary of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer (1934), or the poetic and surrealistic prose of Djuna Barnes in Nightwood (1934), sex and desire, as a vehicle in the literature of these authors, exposes the chaos and confusion within their world and suggests the establishment of a new order for self and/or society. Written between 1931 and 1934, The Diary of Anaïs Nin chronicles one artist’s psychological journey. Deserted by her father as a girl, Anaïs experiences an “initial shock” that leaves her “like a shattered mirror” (Nin 103). The shards of glass, each developing a life of their own, come to be the “several selves” of Anaïs (103). Through the pages of The Diary, reflecting upon and dissecting these various selves, she concludes, “one does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities.

John Singer generously devotes himself to his compulsive deaf best friend, Spiros Antonapoulos. Jake Blount is an itinerant alcoholic vacillating between violent tirades and drunken stupors and he comes to town with a disorganized plan to begin a socialist revolt among the working class. He gets a job as a mechanic at the traveling carnival and often talked about social injustices and Jake Blount is lonely just like John Singer. Doctor Copeland practiced medicine for twenty-five years; he feels his job has frustrated his ambition to change the problems between whites and blacks. In addition, he had an illness with tuberculosis, and his son Willie is in prison being abused.

Jhumpa Lahiri's recently published fictional tome, "The Lowland" yields to a variety of interpretations because of the complexity of its plot and texture that have gone into its shaping imagination .Lahiri has rather intentionally turned her novel into" a tome of many-colored glass" ( to quote Shelley out of context), and leaves everything to the imagination of the circumspect reader to fill in the gaps in the multivalent mosaic of the narrative structure before he arrives at evaluative finality .There are two of the most significant strands that stand out transparently interwoven into the texture of the narrative -the one that deals with , as Lahiri calls elsewhere ," relational autonomy", and the other, the pivotally positined, and intricately melded with , is theme of existentialism. The central characters llike Udayan, Gauri and Subhash, around whom much of the narrative action revolves are meant to exemplify some of the basic tenets of Sartre’s existentialism. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines Existentialism, succinctly , thus: "Existence takes precedence over essence and holds that man is totally free and responsible for his acts, and this responsibility is the source of the dread and anguish that encompasses him". I would like to interpret the novel from two of these important foci which, seemed to me, are the conduits through which one must attempt to disinter the novel’s latent intention .I have a strong feeling that Lahiri intends her narrative to be an intricate oeuvre that turns out to be a challenge to the reader to piece its interests together . The one obvious strand of this multiplex narrative is concerned with interpersonal relationships .Udayan and Subhash are from the typical Bengali f... ... middle of paper ... ...ess”.

What he saw during this war influenced many of his writings, giving them quite a political slant (“Orwell”). After fighting in the war for part of the year, he returned to England and was married in 1936, resuming his profession. His writing career was mainly of writing essays for newspapers and magazines on various political issues (Merriman). Orwell did write two much acclaimed books during his career as an author, and these are 1984 and A... ... middle of paper ... ...emselves are symbols of the tyrants and the common citizens that existed in these events in history. Not only was Animal Farm an accomplishment for the world, it was an accomplishment of his goal to show the world the terrors of totalitarianism.

Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, brings to life how racism can seem confusing through the eyes of an innocent child, especially when they were misconstrued their entire life. This book encouraged a generation of young and old readers alike to rethink the way that they treated others, making it a classic. Others, while not yet classics retain aspects of quality literature, emerge from regular books as stories that compel the reader to think about how lucky they seem to inhabit a life away from horrors, which constantly remains illustrated in Zarah Ghahramani’s book, My Life as a Traitor. Quality literature exemplifies how a powerful, emotional, and well written story should exist, and causes the reader to think about their own life decisions. My Life as a Traitor throws the reader deep into a world of fear and pain that will stay in their mind for a long time due to emotionally vivid storytelling blended with excellent writing that creates an atmosphere and a sense of self-desperation not often seen in modern books.