Book Review: Lying Awake
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a biographical work on a Hmong family living in California during the early 80’s. While the book is a true accounting of the Lee’s family attempt to secure quality healthcare for their epileptic daughter while traversing the American medical system and the Department of Children Services. The author, Anne Fadiman, takes the reader on a painstaking but necessary journey of Hmong history and culture and how they came to reside in Merced, California. As you learn more about the history of the Hmong people, you come to admire them as a strong and resilient people that have, as a people, overcome many challenges with respect to being conquered, nomadic and always having to start over.
Miranda Hill’s book Sleeping Funny is a collection of short stories that are brought together through wit of her writing and an unexpected series of events. Specifically, the stories “Apple”, “Petitions to St. Chronic”, “6:19”, and “Digging for Thomas” are relatable for readers and cover harder topics in a light and humours way. Each story is quite different from the next but can be linked together through motifs or character driven hardships. Although the stories are not directly related, “Apple” and “6:19” have a strong connection between themes.
In Jon Krakauer’s masterpiece, Into Thin Air, he provides an in-depth explanation of what happened one disastrous day on Mount Everest. While the book is essentially a memoir, it incorporates the excitement of an adventure novel, the suspense of a mystery, and the factual detailing of a school textbook. Jon Krakauer doesn’t leave out any experience to the reader; he very carefully explains every detail so anyone can read his book, even those who have never heard of what happened in Spring of 1996 on Mount Everest. The story essentially explores Jon Krakauer’s months of preparation for and climbing of Mount Everest.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman is an analysis of Western medicine and traditional Hmong medicine in the treatment of a young child with severe epilepsy in Merced, California. The book also details Hmong culture, history, and their life as refugees in the United States. The majority of the Hmong populations, especially in central California where the book takes place, rely on welfare and this creates tensions with the other populations in the area. Her book is an eye opening introduction into the Hmong culture, the clash of traditional and western medicine, the discrimination of refugees, and the importance of cultural inclusivity.
The medical field in relation to varied cultural beliefs and traditions is something that is important to many, yet rarely talked about by almost all individuals. In other words, the cultural clashes created in medicalization is under looked by a multitude individuals. This is because many do not experience the hardships first hand. For that reason, the thought of difficulties within treatments of health issues or illnesses does not cross some individual’s minds. Nonetheless, each group of people is unique, in addition to, how they perceive the medical world.
For the first half of our course in mediation, we have been looking how people typically make decisions and how a mediator can use certain strategies to help bring people together to make constructive decisions that is beneficial for both parties and minimizes conflict. These themes are laid out and explored deeper in Malcom Gladwell’s novel, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This book focuses on how people make sudden judgments and decisions, while never even consciously aware of these decisions or the factors that influenced their decision-making processes. Gladwell describes this phenomena as an “automatic pilot,” where “the way we work and act and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment are a lot more susceptible to outside influence than we realize.” It is important to note that while these quick assessments come from the unconscious and cannot exactly explored in depth, the author argues that ways do exist to reasonably explain these “blink” decisions.
Dreams, contrary to popular belief, are terrible. The best thing to do, is to stop chasing dreams because all dreams do is distract people from more important responsibilities. People spend their time chasing their dreams, but they don’t perform their day to day tasks they need to survive on their own. In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette’s mother, Rose Mary, has a dream of becoming an artist. Instead of getting a job to provide for her poverty stricken family, she decides to stay home and paint all day.
Deception is the action of deceiving someone. However it is a trick or scheme used to get what you want. Deception is perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak, untruthful, under-minded, have protected themselves against the strong. Through the ages, at all stages of sentient activity, the weak have survived by fooling the strong.
Morgan Cook Unbroken Book Review 1/16/18 Mrs. Campbell Honors Literature PD 1 “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand was published in 2010. From the first chapter i was hooked. Hillenbrand’s imagery and style caught my eye and pulled me into Louie’s story with no hesitation. I absolutely loved Hillenbrand’s structure in this book and it was much better than others i have read.
In “The Way We Lie”, author Stephanie Ericsson gives her readers a list of ten lie we sometime use it for a purpose and sometime we did not realize we did it. She starts out her story with four lie she used in the same morning as she is starting out her day. She explains these lie are intentionally use to minimize the complications and make the day goes much smoother. However, she questions whether these lie can actually make an impact on the person who carry out and the person who receive the lie.
Wake up From the Night Wake up From the Night Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and frequently appears in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, these acts of cruelty express and enhance the theme. One of the large themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes the mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, the common people, and other Jews. Watching the large amounts of violence, abuse, and discrimination that occur in this memoir show us the horrors of the Holocaust and how it transformed the men and women who experienced it, as well as those who caused it.
In Kate Chopin 's novel The Awakening and the short story “The Story of An Hour” feminist beliefs overshadow the value in moral and societal expectations during the turn of the century. Due to Louise Mallard and Edna Pontellier Victorian life style they both see separating from their husband as the beginning of their freedom. Being free from that culture allows them to invest in their personal interest instead of being limited to what 's expected of them. Chopin 's sacrifices her own dignity for the ideal of society’s expectations. Chopin 's sad, mysterious tone seems to support how in their era, there was a significant lack of women 's rights and freedom of expression.
The movie Awakenings who was directed by Penny Marshal and lead by the actors Robert Denero and William Roberts, Robert Denero as Leonard Lowe and William Robert as Dr. Melcom Seyer. The book Awakenings the author is Oliver Sacks. The movie is about the doctor who applied in a hospital where he was assign in a ward full of catatonic patient. This paper will be presenting the curiosity of Dr. Seyer in order to find the cure of catatonic. The doctors in the movie where not dedicated to their work as much as Dr. Seyer.
“I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” written by Louise Erdrich focuses on a child and a grandfather horrifically observing a flood consuming their entire village and the surrounding trees, obliterating the nests of the herons that had lived there. In the future they remember back to the day when they started cleaning up after the flood, when they notice the herons without their habitat “dancing” in the sky. According to the poet’s biographical context, many of the poems the poet had wrote themselves were a metaphor. There could be many viable explanations and themes to this fascinating poem, and the main literary devices that constitute this poem are imagery, personification, and a metaphor.
The short story “Half Sleep” by Matt Krampitz is about a young boy Yates who started out as a kid that would pick up spiders of the floor and let them outside then turns into a person who steals to buy drinks and supposedly drugs, he had a brother and they were really close till in the winter Yates moved out and they never really talked again then one night the brother heard the door slowly opening then he was wondering if it was his brother then he heard footsteps going down the hallway down to Yates brothers room then Yates opened the door and went to the guitar that Yates was going to teach him on then his brother woke up the next day and the guitar was gone. Through the indirect characterization Matt Krampitz uses Human Vs. Self conflict
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