With their backs against fort walls a soldier's-eye, view of the siege of Zeelandia
Book review - 25 pages - Literature
On February 17th, 1662, in the stifling, humid chill of Formosa's cold season, they marched. Despite being deathly sick, injured, partially starved and otherwise exhausted, the 400 to 500 men of the Dutch East India Company remaining in the garrison of Fort Zeelandia marched to the beat of...
In the Merchant of Venice, do you consider Shylock to be a villain or a victim?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
One area that I need to look at before I discuss this question is whether Shakespeare himself was anti-Semitic or that he was influenced when writing The Merchant of Venice by the attitudes of Christians to Jewish people at the time. At the time that Shakespeare was writing Britain was a...
Compare the Presentation of School Life in "The Pieces of Silver" and "The Winter Oak". How do Sealy and Nagibin suggest to you that the schools in these stories are out of touch with the needs of their pupils?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
“The Winter Oak” and “The Pieces of Silver” are both set within a school and both of the boys come from poor backgrounds. Some of the ideas in the stories are similar. Both refer to the teacher learning a lesson, or a system which the teachers uphold is challenged or defeated...
Explication of "The Winter Evening Settles Down"
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
T.S. Eliot's poem, “The Winter Evening Settles Down”, tells about the time period of which the poem was written in 1917. During this time, World War I was occurring, there was an early economic depression that preceded the Great Depression of the late 1920s into the 1930s, and it was a...
"Disillusionment of Ten O' Clock" Explication
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In Wallace Stevens' free-verse poem, “Disillusionment of Ten O' Clock,” he presents the reader with an aggregation of vivid and descriptive words that help illuminate the theme, or the idea, of the poem. Stevens uses his literary work in a way that affects the person reading it and most...
William Blake's "The Tyger"
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
In William Blake's “The Tyger,” he questions, multiple times throughout, how the tiger was created - ultimately, it is up to the reader to draw his or own conclusion. Blake's questioning of who created the tiger and how the tiger was created is the central theme of this poem. As a...
Examination of the my lai massacre- one of the most infamous events of the vietnam war review of the book "my lai: a brief history with documents" (james stuart olson, randy roberts) - published: 21/05/2012
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
This report will analyze the book “My Lai” by the historians Olson and Roberts. To look at the different issues that surrounded the My Lai massacre, it is necessary to look at the specific situation of the area at the time. The Vietminh emerged in 1941 with the aim of obtaining...
The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World by Evgeny Morozov- Review
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
This article reviews the book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, Evgeny Morozov. The themes of the book explore the dichotomy between the democratic nature of the internet being used by opposition forces all over the world and the blatant repression of stable authoritarian regimes...
L'Allegorie du patrimoine or The invention of the Historic Monument (&translated by Lauren M. O'Connell) by Françoise Choay
Book review - 10 pages - Literature
L'Allegorie du patrimoine or The invention of the Historic Monument (&translated by Lauren M. O'Connell) was written by Françoise Choay. She was born in 1925 in Paris, has been a historian of the theories and of the urban and architectural forms. She is an emeriti professor at the university of...
If on a Winters Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The story If On A Winter's Night a Traveler is about the immersion of a reader within a story and his determination to go on with the plot and discover what happens. This is foiled within this story when the Reader constantly encounters with books that suddenly break off and have no ending. What...
Magic realism in 'The Enchantress of Florence'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Salman Rushdie's novel 'The Enchantress of Florence' is a powerful and multi-dimensional expression of the incarnation of globalization in literature. Important themes arise as relevant to globalization through the technical advantages of magic realism, which Rushdie employs as the key...
Temporal and Spatial divides and identity in 'Lucy'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jamaica Kincaid's novel 'Lucy' illustrates the story of a girl with desperate desire to manipulate her personal identity. With motives so deeply ingrained in her determinedly expendable past and their manifestations in her present, her quest propels her obsessions divides past from...
Repetition and Ambiguity in Narrative Structures of 'The Monk'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The narrative, structural, and linguistic intricacies in Matthew Lewis' Gothic novel 'The Monk' illustrate a complex network of patterns and sequences that expand and contract the influence of ambiguity as a Gothic convention in the text. The novel's narrative structure can be...
Thomas Nagel on death
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Let us assume for the time being that you believe cake to be a good, and find cake-eating emphatically positive. Now imagine that one day, when you go to your local bakery to eat your daily serving of cake, you find that cake no longer exists. They are out of cake indefinitely, they tell you,...
'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison: A comment
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison is a novel detailing an unnamed African-American's journey from the south to the streets of Harlem. The reader sees the main character attempt to find his place within the world, as well as within himself. In this novel written in 1947, there exists a...
The Underrated Backstory: Backstory as it 'Effects Our Nig' and 'Washington Square'
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The information provided in a backstory is often integral to the development of characters and plot within a narrative. In both 'Our Nig' and 'Washington Square', an account of the events prior to those of the central plot provide necessary context for a clear and cohesive tale....
'The Cult of True Womanhood Disassembled' by Kate Chopin and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: A review
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Through the oppressive times when women were meant to be no more than homemakers and pawns to their bread-winning men, the 'Cult of True Womanhood' symbolized everything that the females of America were supposed to be. It stated that they must be pure in mind, body, heart, and soul; for a...
'Rebecca' as a Gothic Romance: Far from the classic Cinderella story
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Daphne Du Maurier's novel 'Rebecca' can be interpreted in various lights; for instance, for many, it is commonly held to follow the form of a fairy tale. While there is, no doubt, adequate ground for this interpretation, the novel's characteristics seem to embody more the elements of the...
Hejinian's 'My Life': A Poetic Autobiography of Multiplicity
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Lyn Hejinian's poetic autobiography 'My Life' crosses over the boundaries of genre and into an indefinable realm of its own. It contains elements of poetry, autobiography, personal narrative, and women's fiction, while simultaneously entering into a continuous dialogue with the nature of...
Analysis of 'The Birth of Tragedy'
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In his work 'The Birth of Tragedy', Nietzsche argues that, “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the existence of the world is eternally justified (Sect. 5, p. 52)”. Simply put, Nietzsche maintains that, without the guidance and creation of art, the terrible truths of the...
Aristotle & the Hellenists
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In book I (The Object of Life) of 'Nicomachean Ethics', Aristotle sets out to determine what the concept of good represents for man and, more specifically, what the supreme good for man is. Aristotle asserts that, although there are many different relative goods that humans strive for,...
The Scarlet Letter - A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The mind is truly valuable, intrinsic, secure and powerful. No entity can take the mind away from a person, nor can anyone control the way it functions. Thus, a society that seeks total control over its people will never flourish and thrive. Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" articulates...
The significance of age and aging in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In the remote town of Mocondo which Gabriel Garcia Marquez vividly depicts in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the process of aging plays an important role in the development of the characters, their development and in the plot as whole. Throughout the aging process, some characters'...
The Cause of Samuel Death in Grace Paley's "Samuel"
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The death of the young boy in Grace Paley's “Samuel” was caused by irresponsible behavior, not by the repetitive interference of the passengers in the games of young people. The brave men in the train did not convey a message of absolute disapproval towards the boys' dangerous games,...
"Flying Carpet", Steven Millhauser - "flying up to the sky"
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Steven Millhauser is a writer of realist fiction. However, his work cannot be limited by labeling it only realistic. Another dimension is added to his short stories. They are full of interpretations. In Flying Carpet, though the story seems to be quite casual, even banal - a child trying to reach...
"From the Diary of an almost-four-year-old", Hanan Ashrawi (1988)
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The poem, 'From the Diary of an almost-four-year-old' was written by Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, a Palestinian writer, in 1988. The speaker in this poem is an almost-four-year-old little girl who was fired at by a soldier, during the Israel-Palestine war. She lost an eye and she wonders about...
"They came for the Jews," Martin Niemoller, and "God loves you anyway" Harold Kushnersay - the care of others
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
The first essay is a poem entitled 'First, They Came for The Jews', written by a German Pastor named Martin Niemoller. It talks about what happened in 1939-1945, during World War II, where many people died, due to the nazi government in Germany. The second essay is an extract of a book...
Catch-22 : black comedy or satire ?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Catch-22, often considered as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, is also often analyzed as being either satirical, or characteristic of the theater of the absurd, or even both. At first sight, this appears to be totally irrelevant, given the subtle but still significant...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies - Overture (Chap. 1) "It was early" - "were lost forever"
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
This text is an extract from the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Earlier in the novel, we discovered the main character, Nathan Glass, a 60 year old man in remission from cancer. He was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn to...
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies Farewell to the court (Chap. 3)
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
What we are about to study is an extract from the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Here, we are at the beginning of the novel, where Nathan and Tom are having lunch and talking about Tom's activities. We may wonder in what ways the passage is...
