Reading is extremely underrated in our country today. Those who do read know what I’m
saying. And I’m not talking about Dr. Seuss or Ann M. Martin. I mean REAL books! Books by
Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and other best-selling authors. One best-selling author that I have
the utmost respect for is Mary Higgins Clark. She’s written chart-topping novels such as Where
Are the Children?, A Cry in the Night, A Stranger is Watching, and The Cradle will fall. The
book that I have recently read by her is entitled Stillwatch. It was a New York Times bestseller for
10 weeks, and I know why!
We meet Pat Traymore, a young, beautiful, and talented reporter living in our nation’s
Capital. She is very in love with an older congressman named Sam Kingsley. They had a love
affair two years before the present time, when his wife was dying.
Pat is doing a TV series entitled Women in Government, and her first show is to be over
Senator Abigail Jennings, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President. Well, Pat starts
going back into Abigail’s past to find out more about her. What she does find genuinely intrigues
her: murders, love affairs, suicide, an extremely obese mother who wasn’t appreciated, and an
ex-fiancé...but that’s not all.
Pat’s real name is Kerry Adams. She is living in her parents’ old house in Washington. 24
years ago, her parents died. It was said that her father had killed her mother and then himself.
Pat’s not real sure that was the case. She’s living in that house so that she can try to conjure up
some memories. And she does...like it or not. Pat begins to remember scenes such as tripping
over her mother’s bleeding body, crying for her daddy, and running through the house in a state of
shock.
Pat is seeing Sam again, and Sam can’t stand Abigail Jennings OR her burly assistant,
Toby. Toby doesn’t exactly have a clean record, and Pat’s been getting very explicit threats
about doing this show on the Senator. Sam suspects Toby, but he hasn’t even thought about
Eleanor Brown.
Eleanor was taken to prison for stealing money from Abigail. Then she got on parole and
disappeared. No one had seen her since. But now she’s living with a psychotic nursing home
assistant who believes himself to be an angel. He thinks that it’s his duty to put the elderly people
out of their misery when the time comes -- he kills them. He is who is threatening Pat.
Lisa Genova, the author of Still Alice, a heartbreaking book about a 50-year-old woman's sudden diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University. She is a member of the Dementia Advocacy, Support Network International and Dementia USA and is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer's Association. Genova's work with Alzheimer's patients has given her an understanding of the disorder and its affect not only on the patient, but on their friends and family as well (Simon and Schuster, n.d.).
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
Summary and Response to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Called Home” In “Called Home”, the first chapter of the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver presents her concerns about America's lack of food knowledge, sustainable practices, and food culture. Kingsolver introduces her argument for the benefits of adopting a local food culture by using statistics, witty anecdotal evidence, and logic to appeal to a wide casual reading audience. Her friendly tone and trenchant criticism of America's current food practices combine to deliver a convincing argument that a food culture would improve conditions concerning health and sustainability.
Even in today's society, there is a balance in power to keep the country calm. If the president had all the power, then he would be able to pass whatever ludicrous laws he wanted and basically do anything to benefit himself. Abigail had enough power, not to pass laws, but to testify and decide who should receive a warrant for witchery. When a little, irresponsible, whore of a girl has enough power to do this, she will definitely take advantage of it, and she did.
The children; children are representative of the breakdown of respect, and discipline, and are consequently a forecast of future generations.
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.
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)
When Meghan hears me enter she runs crying "Tim's teasing me and I'm hungry." I ask the kids, "Why didn't you feed her?" Tim responds, "she didn't say she was hungry." Pat runs up from the basement and reminds me I have to take him to guitar practice now or he'll be late.
is not like Caroline. By the end of the movie Sam learns a valuable lesson about being her own person and even gets the guy along the way.
forfill her dream. Three months after her mom died, her father got a letter in the mail. It was
... sins, but she can’t take back what she did so she will forever have blood on her hands. This guilt and all of the lies she has told is giving her true trepidation and in the end she decided to end her terror by taking her life.
Firstly, Abigail is one figure that blatantly abuses her newfound power in the play. " 'You are charging Abigail Williams with a marvelous cool plot to murder,
Abigail begins to claim that she knows who the witches are and begin to make random accusations. Through this she gets many people
She died of a suicide and she that because at a certain point in her life she had enough of suffering.
George R.R. Martin once said, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” For centuries, books have transformed readers into someone else and transported them to different worlds. In my fourteen years, I have fought dragons, saved the world, and survived World War II. I have become others who were anywhere from a toddler to an adult. I have gone to wizarding school and a summer camp for demigods all because of books. Something magical happens when I open bound pages of words and begin to read. Books inspire me because they each open up a new world of experiences and feelings that will last with me forever.