Essays on Book Review

The Tree of Heaven It is a fact of life that people encounter hardships, setbacks, and disappointments constantly. However, in the end, people learn to rise above the challenges and grow their strength and character further than before. In the novel A Tree Grows In...

Karen Russell’s modern Southern novel, Swamplandia! is informed by various works of Southern Literature through different time periods. It is through the use of themes and motifs specific to literature of the American South that Swamplandia! gets its confirmation as a modern interpretation of the...

­Traditionally, drama has been an outlet for the extraordinary; only fairly recently with more modernist plays have the focus been shifted onto more ordinary lives. Greek tragedy follows the fall of a noble protagonist; by comparison, domestic tragedy as in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons...

Title: A Universal Loss of Innocence: Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” Author: Katherine Perry Words: 1,139 Written: January 23, 2009 Paul Bäumer lives in a world where killing is the only way to live, memories are as foreign as the enemy himself, and...

Perhaps nothing is more frequent in the pages of history books than wars. Since the beginning of time, men have fought to hold their ground and conquer more. Yet the images of war are not always the trumpeting, flag-flying, fresh-faced recruits that they are painted...

Loneliness and isolation are themes explored in various differing ways throughout Tennessee William’s play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) and Colm Toibin’s novel ‘Brooklyn’ (2009), mainly through the way their protagonists are presented and developed. In ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, loneliness is caused...

“Each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire, and to plunge...

“Some people build fences to keep people out, and other people build fences to keep people in,” offers the sage Bono one afternoon during his usual bonhomie with fellow refuse collector Troy Maxson. The seemingly minor line encompasses the entire leitmotif of August Wilson’s play,...

In the play Fences, written by August Wilson, the theatrical is full of symbolism that shows the meaning to growth and death through; baseball seeds and blues. At the same time, Fences views the African-American experience and relations. Troy an ex-Negro Baseball League player deals...

Knut Hamsun’s fin de siècle novel Hunger sets the reader up for a journey with its opening sentence when Hamsun writes, “Christiania, singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away traces of his sojourn there.” (Hunger 1). Here, Hamsun puts into place the...

Craig Silvey’s Australian novel Jasper Jones stresses the importance of truth and justice in formulating human experiences, shaping understandings of oneself and world. It highlights that events aren’t always positive; justice isn’t dealt out fairly, and truth can be a burden. Silvey suggests that people’s...

In Harold Pinter’s Moonlight, discordant scenes create a state of transition for the characters, who are facing the death of family patriarch Andy. Throughout the play, Pinter sets up scenes which would not fit logically into a linear story. Old friends reappear and converse with...

In ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ the characterisation of the protagonists allows the concept of death to be explored deeply. Webster’s portrayal of the Duchess marks her embracement of death as she appears to be prepared for her fate, whereas the Cardinal is shown to be...

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls that elaborates her upbringing particularly her experience with her sisters, brother, and parents. In a sincere but loving manner, Walls reveals the irresponsibility and selfishness of her parents which resulted in Walls and her siblings...

Many people have varying opinions on parenting, usually motivated by deeply personal beliefs. These differing outlooks on raising children develops children themselves into different people with very specific values instilled in them by their parents. The impact of childhood on their development is undoubtedly substantial,...

Despite being faced with adverse conditions while growing up, humankind possesses resilience and the capacity to accept and forgive those responsible. In The Glass Castle (2005) by Jeannette Walls, Walls demonstrates a child’s ability to develop resilience in the face of trouble, early autonomy, and...

William Yeats said, “I am of a healthy and long lived race, and our minds improve with age.” It’s true that as individuals face the world, they can only gain wisdom from exposure. For a young Jeannette Walls, it’s none other than her troubling life...

In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a father, Rex Walls, keeps his family from amassing substantial wealth. Rex buys hard drinks whenever the family begins to earn money. When he comes home he unleashes his anger onto his family by destroying the...

Upon reading Jonathan Edwards’ Personal Narrative, one would undoubtedly find that Edwards’ descriptions and expressions of his insurmountable love for God (and all things in relation to the Christian faith) are of an extreme degree uncommon to that of the ordinary believer. It is therefore...

In Emily Bronte’s famous novel Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is indisputably an evil character. He commits innumerable atrocious acts, yet Bronte ensures that one cannot help but feel sympathy towards him. One reason that the book is considered a study in psychology is the manner in...

Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying is about 29-year-old poet Isadora Wing, who is bored in a bourgeois marriage. She dreams of a sexual encounter with a stranger, and when she travels with her husband to Vienna and meets the attractive Adrian Goodlove, she indulges in...

Aragorn Louis most probably perfectly captured the relationship between McMurphy and Ratched in saying, “Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms...

The amount of characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey may seem unusual and maybe even a bit overwhelming. The patients and staff of the ward make up the novel’s long list of characters. However, Kesey’s choice of numerous characters goes...

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is unique in that the narrator and arguably main character of the story, Chief Bromden, is not the protagonist. Instead, McMurphy fills this role, and Bromden acts as both the main character, providing our view of the...

Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is set in a mental institution, where the characters’ mental illnesses reveal much to the reader. Kesey enlightens the reader by characterizing the reticent Chief Bromden, who narrates the main events of the story, as a...

“Hell yes, we have a quota…We do keep women out, when we can. We don’t want them here — and they don’t want them elsewhere, either, whether or not they’ll admit it.” This statement, issued by an unnamed dean of a medical school in 1960,...

The late 1950s and ’60s saw a merging of government and corporation. For the most part, this took place during the Eisenhower administration. This new political climate seemed to be too powerful to many in the beatnik generation. One of these is Ken Kesey, whose...

Sexuality has always been a powerful tool for writers: it can make heroes or break them, forge relationships or destroy them, suggest utter misery or heavenly bliss. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest offers a unique take on this theme: there is no...

Power is the predominant theme of Ken Kesey’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’: who holds power, who doesn’t, who wants it, who loses it, how it is used to intimidate and manipulate and for what purposes, and, most especially, how it is disrupted and...