Delicate Edible Birds” is a story by Lauren Groff, full of tensions and characters very well developed. This story was dictated in a third-person point of view, during the World War II in France. With the third-person point of view, the author can give the readers admission into characters’ moods and thoughts. For each journalist, minor bits of back story were included, but the largest amount was dedicated to Berm, who was the only female among the band. The story’s image works during, applying to French compatriots bombarded by a German plane, to almost everyone in the path of the Nazis as they occupied France, to these journalists, to women in general, and to Bern herself. Groff’s story contains an explanation of female war correspondent
The essay Four Menus by Sheila Squillante challenges mainstream pieces of writing in various ways. This essay closely resembles poetry with its metaphors and symbolism. This similarity is not a surprise given that Squillante is also a poet. Most essays explain an idea in a structured format which is greatly different from this piece. Four Menus jumps from scenes starting at a Korean restaurant and later at a house. Within the essay she tells flashbacks of times with her friends. These flashbacks are rather random and there seems to be scattered ideas. While pondering all of these aspects of her work I came the conclusion that an essay does not have to be black and white; as long as a main idea is covered it can be left as is. Most of us grew
The book, The Truth About Sparrows by Marian Hale is about when Sadie Wynn moves to Texas because of a drought in Missouri. She is separated from her best friend Wilma but before she left Sadie made a promise that she would be Wilma’s best friend even if they were apart.
Parrot in the Oven, by Victor Martinez, is a novel that portrays the lives that forty-five million Americans live every day from the point of view of Manny Hernandez, the main character of this book. He is a Mexican-American citizen who lives in the projects of his hometown in California. Manny lives with his mother, his abusive father, his two sisters Pedi and Magda, and Nardo, his irresponsible older brother. Throughout the story, Manny goes through many big events that help him discover what his real values should be and who he really is. Scenarios including speaking too soon, rebelling against his father and joining a gang that changed his character drastically. Manny gradually shifts from obliviously reckless, to outgoing and cautious,
In Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy”, the contrasting moods of the nightmarish rice patty and rejuvenating sea show that you can never leave your trauma behind when you come of age. Paul Berlin is a new soldier, fighting in the Vietnam War, afraid of being caught out, Paul and his troops had to head to the sea, but on their way, they had to pass a rice patty, it was all “mud and algae and cattle manure and chlorophyll, decay, breeding mosquitoes and leeches as big as mice, the fecund warmth of the paddy water rising up to his cut knee”. The use of imagery to describe the rice patty illustrates the effect of the disgusting rice patty have on Paul Berlin which create a nightmarish mood. Disgusted and afraid, Private First Class
American consumers think of voting as something to be done in a booth when election season comes around. In fact, voting happens with every swipe of a credit card in a supermarket, and with every drive-through window order. Every bite taken in the United States has repercussions that are socially, politically, economically, and morally based. How food is produced and where it comes from is so much more complicated than the picture of the pastured cow on the packaging seen when placing a vote. So what happens when parents are forced to make a vote for their children each and every meal? This is the dilemma that Jonathan Safran Foer is faced with, and what prompted his novel, Eating Animals. Perhaps one of the core issues explored is the American factory farm. Although it is said that factory farms are the best way to produce a large amount of food at an affordable price, I agree with Foer that government subsidized factory farms use taxpayer dollars to exploit animals to feed citizens meat produced in a way that is unsustainable, unhealthy, immoral, and wasteful. Foer also argues for vegetarianism and decreased meat consumption overall, however based on the facts it seems more logical to take baby steps such as encouraging people to buy locally grown or at least family farmed meat, rather than from the big dogs. This will encourage the government to reevaluate the way meat is produced. People eat animals, but they should do so responsibly for their own benefit.
For this project I chose the book written by Jane Goodall called Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. Being a very big animal lover I was excited to see her name on the list of book choices so I can further invest my time into getting to know her ideology that goes beyond the world of chimpanzees. I had first seen her inside a documentary I found on Netflix when I had the flu a few years ago. I had never heard of this book and never been familiar with a lot of her views and opinions surrounding human health. Although not surprising, her views surrounded itself with a high awareness for the environment, animals, and long lasting happy health for you and your family. The healthy alternatives she is proposing inside this book, like choosing to eat organic foods for example, goes beyond a temporary suggestion and reaches into the realm of helping the reader change their lifestyle for the better. This interesting book surrounds itself in her personal health and food advice supported with evidential facts. The strongest points that I personally found the most refreshing were her ideas on alternative ways to consume more healthy foods.
Food means different things to people in different countries of the world; pasta is common in Italy, hamburgers are a favorite in the US and tacos are a typical dish in Mexico. Human existence solely depends on this source of energy. A person’s fundamental need for food makes it a very important item, placing the people who control the food in a very high esteem. Consistency is also important in the delicate balance of life. Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet in the Western Front, and Elie Wiesel, author of Night, both use food in their novels to convey this idea. Many of their thoughts and “meanings” concerning food paralleled one another. Food, one of the quintessential elements of life, plays a significant role in wartime experiences around the world and even in different time periods.
her grandmother) and grief, Viramontes successfully paints an endearing tale of change. “The Moths” emphasizes the narrator’s oppression by her
Since its first appearance in the 1886 collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the short story A White Heron has become the most favorite and often anthologized of Sarah Orne Jewett. Like most of this regionalist writer's works, A White Heron was inspired by the people and landscapes in rural New England, where, as a little girl, she often accompanied her doctor father on his visiting patients. The story is about a nine-year-old girl who falls in love with a bird hunter but does not tell him the white heron's place because her love of nature is much greater. In this story, the author presents a conflict between femininity and masculinity by juxtaposing Sylvia, who has a peaceful life in country, to a hunter from town, which implies her discontent with the modernization?s threat to the nature. Unlike female and male, which can describe animals, femininity and masculinity are personal and human.
The structure of Faulk’s Birdsong allows us to observe the impact of the War upon numerous individuals across the generations. Throughout the novel, even outside the 1914-1918 time-frame, Faulks continues to maintain a link between the past and the present through his use of a number of motifs and themes. The lasting impact of the War suggests that history should never be forgotten, which is the paramount message in Birdsong.
In the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, the author talks about, not only vegetarianism, but reveals to us what actually occurs in the factory farming system. The issue circulating in this book is whether to eat meat or not to eat meat. Foer, however, never tries to convert his reader to become vegetarians but rather to inform them with information so they can respond with better judgment. Eating meat has been a thing that majority of us engage in without question. Which is why among other reasons Foer feels compelled to share his findings about where our meat come from. Throughout the book, he gives vivid accounts of the dreadful conditions factory farmed animals endure on a daily basis. For this reason Foer urges us to take a stand against factory farming, and if we must eat meat then we must adapt humane agricultural methods for meat production.
Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘War Photographer’ shows the life and actions of a photographer and portrays how unappreciative we are of what the photographer has to see and go through to take photographs. The poem shows that photographers are doing their duty, but we are not reacting to the photographs in the way that we should be. ‘War photographer’ tries to put a point across to make us realise that war is wrong and the public have become hardened to it. War in the media does not affect us as much as it should do. The editors use gory pictures to shock the readers as something that is disturbing shows the darker side of humanity. While the editors put in pictures of people suffering and facing death, their best interests are not for the people in the picture, but are in the readers, as the more shocking the pictures are the more people buy the paper. That fact that we buy papers because of the explicit photos show us how much we have become hardened to war and that there is also a small element of enjoyment when we see the pictures. This is reflected in the editors of the “Sunday Supplements” who choose the five or six photos for the ‘hundred agonies’.
Memories are an important part of anyone 's lives. To remember is to reflect and to impose meaning onto past events. In the texts, “A Bird in the House”, written by Margaret Laurence, and “Simple Recipes” written by Madeleine Thien, the authors bring across the idea of memories in the main character’s retelling of their lives to show us the relationship between the characters and their fathers respectively. Through the use of visual imagery and the main character 's choice of speech, the idea of memory is emphasized and shown in both stories. In "A Bird in the House", the memories shared with us are all related to the idea of death. Specifically, death in the family as well as death in the idea of holding onto old memories. In "Simple Recipes",
The cultural attitudes of 1960s North America towards gender roles and marriage are typified in the characters of the ‘office virgins’ Marian works with at Seymour Surveys. They are all, as their nickname implies, virgins, who believe that sex belongs only in marriage. Lucie fears what people would say, while Emmy, the “office hypochondriac” (16), thinks it would make her sick. Their life plans are all similar: to travel, get married, settle down and quit their jobs. As Rebecca Goldblatt explains in her essay "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists," these women are typical of the time period in which The Edible Woman was written and can be assumed to take place. They are "young women blissfully building their trousseaus and imagining a paradise of silver bells and picket fences" (275). Goldblatt continues, "these women search for a male figure, imagining a refuge. Caught up in the romantic stereotypes that assign and perpetuate gender roles, each girl does not doubt that a man is the solution to her problems” (276). The other women in the novel also experience these patriarchy-influenced attitudes towards the institution of marriage, although they deal with them in different ways. Marian, in particular, experiences significant difficulties in her encounter with her boyfriend Peter.
Despite the initial parallels with the Emersonian persona, the bird's song takes life and beauty away from the natural images that it describes, denying the immortal quality of nature. In "The Oven Bird," several natural images, traditionally symbolizing strength and beauty, construct a romantic landscape. But, these images are individually deconstructed, leaving the natural scene as a whole barren and hollow. Frost crafts a poem that is dependant on nature for both its subject and it...