I had heard so much about it that I assumed I knew what the plot was going to be all about. I was wrong. And the author was in on the duping. A story as widely known as this, all of his readers were informed, to more or less, the same degree. And because the author knew this he had quite a challenge on his hands. And I had preconceived notions to dismiss. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, is the journalistic telling of the […]
Will the Native Americans in the Back Please Step Forward?
We don’t talk about it much outside of studying a few incidents during the Pioneer years of the 1800′s. I’m speaking of the atrocities committed against Native Americans. We hear about the Trail of Tears, Squanto, Sacagawea, maybe Chief Joseph. But do we ever listen to the stories they have to tell or do we just relegate them to historical indifference? This question has been bothering me as I’ve been reviewing my curriculum for a U.S. literature course I teach. I try to be aware […]
Kids are Mean
I’ve been on a big kick to read more graphic novels. One, because I like the visuals, and two, because I can read them in a day or less. Let’s be honest, it helps increase my book count. This particular graphic novel attracted my attention because it’s by the same author as a book I’ve previously reviewed, Saints. The author, Gene Luen Yang, has done a good job of sharing his parent’s Chinese culture with a dash of his own U.S. culture as well. In […]
Hitler, Sharks, and Torture, Oh My!
As part of my Cannonball reading list, I’ve attempted to include more nonfiction works. Growing up I focused mainly on fiction and only read nonfiction in school for required reading. What attracted me to this title is the fact that it deals with World War II and the Olympics. These are two topics I could spend all day with. The other element that caught my attention was that it’s also by the author of Seabiscuit, a story that I found inspiring. So basically, there wasn’t […]
Boarding School Doesn’t Look So Bad Anymore
I’ve always heard about the gulags in Siberia, but sadly I’ve never read anything about them. Solzhenitsyn’s name was recommended as a good, contemporary author to check out. This specific work was the first work featuring gulags to be published in the USSR. What’s ground breaking, on top of just being published, is that it was published while the camps were being run. This is quite different from the concentration camp survivors who wrote after the camps were shut down. Another unique facet of the […]
Never Fall Down
It was second grade. A girl named Thida joined our class a few weeks after the year started. She was from Cambodia, and shockingly, I could find Cambodia on a map then. Our teacher taught us the concept of “refugee” throughout the year. I didn’t really grasp the concept of “refugee” until years later. It was in high school. We were in the second semester five-weeks-until-school’s-over rush to get through U.S. History. We were discussing the end of the Vietnam war and the fallout in […]