That was Then, This is Now by S.E. Hinton
Book Report
1. Title: That was Then…This is Now
2. Author: S.E. Hinton
3. Number of pages: 158
4. Setting: That was Then…This is Now, had multiple settings but it was mainly placed in either Charlie the bartenders Bar, or in Bryon’s house in Tusla, Oklahoma. In Charlie’s Bar, there is a set of pool tables, lounge chairs and booths, and a long bar. It’s centered near an alley and has a big neon “Charlie’s Bar” outside of the building. Bryon and Mark usually go there to relax for a while, get a couple free cokes from Charlie, and hustle people into playing pool. Though Bryon and Mark are still underage to be in the bar, Charlie keeps a safe guard watching over the two, just in case one or two police come in for a drink. Bryon has a growing I.O.U fund for Charlie since he’s been getting about two cokes every time they go to the bar, but Charlie lets it slide because they two are good friends. The other main setting of the story is Bryon’s house. It is a two-story house, which resides Bryon’s mother, brother, and Mark. Mark lives there because Bryon’s mother had adopted Mark. Bryon’s house is located in the low-income area, where the ruffians live. Though there are a lot of gang-related people there, Mark and Bryon are good friends with everyone, and nothing bad usually happens in there presence.
5. Major Character: The major character of That was Then…This is Now, is Bryon. He likes to hustle people at pool, get girls, drink and smoke cigarettes, and hang out with friends. He has had his share of good and bad relationships. One of them was with a girl called Angela. In one of the chapters of That was Then…This is Now, Angela sets up a hit against one of Angela’s other ex-boyfriend’s, Ponyboy Curtis. As he is about to get hit, Bryon’s best friend, and adopted brother gets in the way to protect Curtis. He get’s hurt in the process, and Bryon get’s mad at Angela and gets revenge by shaving off her eyebrows and cutting her hair off. Bryon has respect for people, and if people mess with his crew, those people get messed with right back at them though he can mostly be careless of other people and what his actions do. The most important lesson he learns in the book is that everything and everyone changes overtime, just like his childhood best friend who he thought he knew, but as time came and went, he slowly evaporated into an entirely different person.
8-Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters is a compelling glimpse into the lives of females in gangs. The book highlights two things: these women do exist, and they are screaming for help. The book's author, Gini Sikes, is a New York-based journalist who spent two years chronicling the worlds of these girls and women in three cities--Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee. Through her travels she became immersed in the lifestyles of each gang. What she found on her journey through backyards, living rooms and housing-projects was startling. There are perhaps thousands of girl gang members across the nation, and yes, many of them are violent. Sikes' portrait of female gangs in America will both shock and move you. She delves far beyond the usual clichés and shows a depth to her subjects that are rarely seen. These girls carry razor blades in their mouths and get into fights just like their male counterparts, but many of them overcome tremendous adversity to get out of their gangs and change their lives. Sikes reports on these girl gangsters with compassion and honesty, compellingly raising the issue of our troubled urban youth without posturing or preaching. Sikes details the girl's reactions to her as well as to their own environment. 8-Ball Chicks describes everything from gang members' stories of dangerous initiation rites (girls knowingly having sex with an AIDS infected boy; gang rape initiations; gang wannabes allowing a dozen girls to beat them up at once) to the conditions that drive these young women to join gangs in the first place. Most of these girls she discovered entered the gangs for power and belonging. They did not care if they were hurt because survival became their most significant recourse. If they survived the abuse and the poverty, then they felt powerful. In 8 Ball Chicks, we discover the fear and desperate desire for respect and status that drive girls into gangs in the first place--and the dreams and ambitions that occasionally help them to escape the catch-22 of their existence.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
CNN presents the documentary, Homicide in Hollenbeck, spotlighting gang activity in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollenbeck. This documentary explores the subculture of gangs existing within Hollenbeck from a several perspectives. The people documented include a mother who lost both of her sons to gang violence, a priest that has tried to help rehabilitate gang members, a police officer that has worked in Hollenbeck for five years in the gang unit, and a current gang member. For a conclusion, Homicide in Hollenbeck focuses on a juvenile exposed to gang life on the cusp of decided where they want their life to lead; gangs or freedom. Problems attributed to the high rate of gang activity and number of gangs in Hollenbeck are the high poverty rate, low employment rate, and broken families that make up the majority of Hollenbeck. The crime most discussed, as per the title of the documentary, is homicide The number of gang related homicides has risen even though the criminal behavior of gangs has ultimately decreased in the neighborhood. In order to fight the overwhelming gang presence, the police believe in increasing the amount of gun power on the streets and number of jailed gang members. The priest who runs Homeboy Industries stated that he feels most gang members are just young men who can’t get out of the gang life. With more funds and opportunities, he thinks the problem could be decreased. In the end, the documentary mentions that the FBI has formed a gang center where local law enforcement agencies can share information to gain more knowledge and to better fight the presence of gangs.
In "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin, the essay uses fragments throughout the essay to symbolize all the topics and people that are involved. The fragments in the essay tie together insides and outsides, human nature, everything affected by past, secrets, cause and effect, and development with the content. These subjects and the fragments are also similar with her life stories and her interviewees that all go together. The author also uses her own memories mixed in with what she heard from the interviewees. Her recollection of her memory is not fully told, but with missing parts and added feelings. Her interviewee's words are told to her and brought to the paper with added information. She tells throughout the book about these recollections.
Joshua Nealy, a prominent medical school graduate, died last night from complications of losing his dream of becoming a practicing physician. He was 39 years-old. Soft-spoken and borderline obsessive, Joshua never looked the part of a “professional”, but, in the final days of his life, he revealed an unknown side of his psyche. This hidden quasi-Jungian persona surfaced during the last three years of pursuit of his long reputed dream profession, a position, which he spent nearly 10 years attaining. Sadly, the protracted search ended this past March 18th in complete and utter failure. Although in certain defeat, the courageous Nealy secretly clung to the belief that life is merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences. It’s not a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan. Asked about the loss of her dear friend, Emily, the girlfriend turned fiancé and dPT expert of Berkshire County, described Joshua as a changed man in the last years of his life. "Things were worse for him; not following his dream left him mostly lifeless, uninspired," Sammons noted. Ultimately, Joshua concluded that if we are to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess the powerful ability to change ourselves and the world around us; the choice to make ours from nothingness.
Young black men crowd the corners of Baltimore. They are all hard talk, hard jaws, and crisp white t-shirts as big as sails—strapped. One precocious boy witnesses a shootout near a drug lord’s stash house and takes up sticks to play guns ‘n’ robbers. His trajectory is as follows: he graduates from sticks and piss-balloons, to g-packs and real guns, to taunting cops with brown bags of excrement, to housecats and lighter fluid, to bold, cold-blooded murder. In the words of social reformer Charles Loring Brace, this boy is one of the dangerous class—an undisciplined, delinquent youth. A creation of David Simon’s for HBO’s crime drama, The Wire, the character of Kenard may be a fictionalization, but his presence adds to the much-praised realism of the series. There really are young boys like Kenard that exist on the streets of American cities—falling into the easy and familiar trap of the drug industry. The Wire makes a point to follow the tread of Baltimore’s youth throughout all of its five seasons, introducing the topic of juvenile delinquency to the considerable range of social issues the show discusses. The Wire almost flawlessly represents the factors which cause a young person to “defect”— from the failings of the city school district, a difficult home life, or the struggle of homelessness, to the surrounding environmental influences that arise from life in the city of Baltimore. However, while The Wire and its examination of causalities does many things for the discussion of Juvenile Delinquency on the whole—taking the conversation to levels no other scripted telev...
During the opening six minutes of Nicholas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, the viewer experiences a dynamic mixture of film techniques that form the first part of the narrative. Using metaphor and imagery, Roeg constructs a vivid and unique portrayal of his parallel storyline. The opening six minutes help set up a distinct stylistic premise. In contrast to a novel or play, the sequence in Don’t Look Now is only accessible through cinema because it allows the viewer to interact with the medium and follow along with the different camera angles. The cinematography and music also guide the viewer along, and help project the characters’ emotions onto the audience because they change frequently. The film techniques and choppy editing style used in Don’t Look Now convey a sense of control of the director over the audience and put us entirely at his mercy, because we have to experience time and space as he wants us to as opposed to in an entirely serial manner.
John Hollander’s poem, “By the Sound,” emulates the description Strand and Boland set forth to classify a villanelle poem. Besides following the strict structural guidelines of the villanelle, the content of “By the Sound” also follows the villanelle standard. Strand and Boland explain, “…the form refuses to tell a story. It circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development” (8). When “By the Sound” is examined in regards to a story, the poem’s linear development does not get beyond the setting. …” The poem starts: “Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound” (Hollander 1). The reader learns the time of the poem’s story is dawn. The last line of the first stanza provides place: “That was when I was living by the sound” (3). It establishes time and place in the first stanza, but like the circular motion of a villanelle, each stanza never moves beyond morning time at the sound but only conveys a little more about “dawn.” The first stanza comments on the sound of dawn with “…gulls shrieked violently…” (2). The second stanza explains the ref...
The neighborhood of Philadelphia in which the 6th Street Boys reside is not the poorest neighborhood in the city, however, it can still be classified as poor section. The young men being examined have never really had a positive male role model in their lives, and were exposed to crime at a very young age. Institutional bodies are also at play here. The gang did commit crimes, however, the police that patrolled the neighborhood were portrayed as bad guys, who just wanted to make these young men’s lives a living hell, by harassing them, their loved ones, and neighbors. The other institutional body at play was the high school that the gang members went to. A simple schoolyard tussle was blown out of proportion, thus leading the men to not trust authority figures. Drug use also seemed to run rampant throughout the neighborhood. This led to one of two things, either becoming a junkie, or becoming a dealer. While some people emerge from these backgrounds as successful adults, many do not, and Goffman made sure to ram that point home. The in depth description of Miss Linda’s (a drug user and abuser) home almost made me sick. According to Goffman, it was a mess, smelt like animal urine, and had cockroaches roaming all around it. This leads us to assume that this was the state of many of the homes in the
Every one is scavenging for the next big gadget- the future is a standard that society strives to have in their grasp. However, Joel Achenbach a former humor columnist solves the mystery of the future in his article, “The Future is Now: it’s heading right at us, but we never see it coming” .he presents a sense of urgency describing that the future is not something that society needs to wait for it happens behind closed doors. He argues that the future is a fast pace entity that occurs all around us. Achenbach proves this point by sticking to his humorous style, with the use of witty allusions to Sci-Fi films.
There are many stories shared in this book about the boys and their crimes. Most of the boys have physical abuse, drug addictions, gang affiliations or a combination of these in their background. Several of them have been bounced around to their grandparents, aunts and uncles or even foster care.
In the essay “Everything Now” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, author Steve McKevitt blames our unhappiness on having everything we need and want, given to us now. While his writing is compelling, he changes his main point as his conclusion doesn’t match his introduction. He uses “want versus need” (145) as a main point, but doesn’t agree what needs or wants are, and uses a psychological theory that is criticized for being simplistic and incomplete. McKevitt’s use of humor later in the essay doesn’t fit with the subject of the article and comes across almost satirical. Ultimately, this essay is ineffective because the author’s main point is inconsistent and poorly conveyed.
In his research Jay Macleod, compares two groups of teenage boys, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both groups of teenagers live in a low income neighborhood in Clarendon Heights, but they are complete opposites of each other. The Hallway Hangers, composed of eight teenagers spend most of their time in the late afternoon or early evening hanging out in doorway number 13 until very late at night. The Brothers are a group of seven teenagers that have no aspirations to just hang out and cause problems, the Brothers enjoy active pastimes such as playing basketball. The Hallway Hangers all smoke, drink, and use drugs. Stereotyped as “hoodlums,” “punks,” or “burnouts” by outsiders, the Hallway Hangers are actually a varied group, and much can be learned from considering each member (Macleod p. 162). The Brothers attend high school on a regular basis and none of them participate in high-risk behaviors, such as smoke, drink, or do drugs.
Breaking rules is what makes humans learn. This is what David Levithan interpreted in his 322-page fictional novel, Every Day. David Levithan uses characterization, vivid imagery, and irony to convey to readers that systems don’t follow rules.
What should our goals be in life? Bill Strickland makes the point that no matter who you are you can do anything you put your mind too. In his book “Making the impossible possible” he explains his own struggle and how he made it through life to be able to help others. He explains his young childhood. He talks about how he had to live through riots and the racism. He talks about how he wanted to help people make their lives better. He explains his struggles with trying to maintain these buildings and how he made great connections. He tells about his love for pottery and his want to help others. His book was truly an inspiration and turned out to be more than I took his book for in the first few pages. His book made me think about my life and how I can relate to him.