The book that is going to discussed in this essay is The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt. It is about a boy named Holling and his teacher named Mrs. Baker. This is going on during The Vietnam war. Holling thinks that Mrs. Baker is a mean teacher, but he has to stay with her every wednesday, because he is Presbyterian and everyone in his class goes to Catholic or Hebrew school. Here is the two questions will be discussed in the essay are How do the plays Holling reads with Mrs. Baker mirror events in the book?
Nine Days by Toni Jordan is a novel that portrays the experiences of Australian soldiers during World War I. The novel depicts war in a variety of ways, from the physical and psychological effects on soldiers to the impact on the home front. War is represented through its impact on the attitudes of the characters.
People always question themselves, they are always trying to perfect everything they do. Everyone does it, because everyone wants to be better. They want to achieve their goals in life and be successful. They will also do almost anything to gain perfection. Whether it’s gain in wealth, jobs, friends, relationships, or anything you could imagine.
The book The Best War Ever, by Michael C. C. Adams, is about World War II, the events that led up to the war, and the years following the war. Adams starts the book off explaining some myths that people have about the war. The biggest myth associated with the war is that it was the best war ever. Adams then spends the rest of the book talking about why this may or may not be true. In the following chapters, Adams explains the events that led to the war and the events that accorded during World War II.
The theme I chose for The Wednesday Wars is the growth of Holling. They call it The Wednesday Wars because every Wednesday Holling had to stay with his teacher that he thought did not like him and she made him work and over the year he grew in friendship with her. The reason I chose the growth of Holling as the theme is because throughout the year, Mrs. Baker helped him grow in stature and knowledge. I chose this because at the start of the book Holling was bad at running and then Mrs. Baker helped him and he grew in running. Lastly, I chose the growth of Holling is because Holling grew in friendship with Meryl Lee.
In chapter one of What They Fought For, I learned about the letters and diaries of the Confederate soldiers. The themes of the letters were home-sickness, lack of peace, and the defense of home against their invading enemy. The thought of soldiers fighting for their homes and being threatened by invaders, made them stronger when facing adversity. Many men expressed that they would rather die fighting for a cause, than dying without trying and this commitment showed patriotism. Throughout the letters, soldiers claimed their reason for fighting, was for the principles of Constitutional liberty and self-government.
Life is strange when everything you know one minute is suddenly different from the next. The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt shows how important it is to find people who support you while showing kindness as you persevere through hardships. Holling starts off thinking everyone hates him, but I think it's just his perspective. The next thing he knows is how everyone is growing up with him. Holling grows as a person with the help of Meryl Lee, Heather, and Mrs. Baker.
In the 1950s, Texas was at the forefront of two major, but very different civil rights movements—the African-American movement and the Mexican-American movement. Fighting Their Own Battles by Brian Behnken describes and compares the separate battles for rights of the two movements. People in Texas knew what was happening and newspapers reported about the different events that occurred throughout the 1950s. In hindsight, and with the help of Behnken’s book, one is able to see the subtle influences of both civil rights movements in the Texas newspapers. At the time however, these differences in strategy between the African-American and Mexican-American movements were not so easily understood.
Jill Lepore used quotes and images from English colonists and portraits to show how colonists wrote about their experiences during King Philip’s War and how the narrative of the war has changed throughout the centuries. It also sets how colonists will narrate wars for future centuries. She spoked about how their writings of the war had a consequence of temporally silencing the Native Americans version on the war and how people have forgotten or even have any knowledge of the war. She uses a Boston merchant, Nathaniel Saltonstall account tilted “A true but brief account of our losses since this cruel and mischievous war begun” written in July 1676 year after the war had begun. He lists towns such as Narragansett, Warwick, Seekonk and Springfield
Respondek 1 Andrew Respondek Mr. Osselaer Economics 28 February 2024 The Forever War Book Report Dexter Filkins is an American reporter born in 1961. Filkins was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Filkins wrote the book to show the world his time in Iraq during the invasion and the years after. The book is written chronologically from the first-person point of view of Filkins's personal experiences.
Jay Winter’s book, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, analyzes the ‘memory boom’, a phenomenon that occurred in consequence of the Great War. It was an, “act of defiance, an attempt to keep alive at least the names and the images of the millions whose lives have been truncated or disfigured by war.” (p.12) It was a movement to commemorate all those lost or affected by World War I, in the matter of literature, memorials, photographs, etc. Winter’s primary argument is that the memory boom was constructed by Europeans in need to remember and pay tribute to the victims of war since 1914 and the consequences the war caused.
The majority of the book is involving General John Pershing and his efforts to build an American army and how he uses this army in battle. Coffman focuses his attention to the actual battles that involved the United States soldiers at the turning point of the war. Edward M. Coffman wrote this book “The War to
It is sometimes difficult for individuals to settle the discrepancy between truth and illusion, and consequently they drive others away, by shutting down. Mrs. Ross, in The Wars by Timothy Findley, is seen as brittle while she is attending church, and cannot deal with the cruel reality of the war and therefore segregates herself from the truth by blacking it out. As a result, she loses her eyesight, and never gets to solve the clash between her awareness of reality and the actuality of the world. She hides behind a veil, and her glasses to distance herself from reality. Mrs. Davenport has to wheel her around in Rowena’s chair to keep her awake, so she doesn’t harbour up subconscious feeling within her dreams, which she is unable to deal with.
In The Wednesday Wars, the Vietnam war, which also took place in the 1960s, is mentioned numerous times throughout the novel, causing Mai Thi, a vietnamese student, to face discrimination from her peers and teachers. “On the last day before holiday break, (Mrs.Bigio said) to Mai Thi: ‘... You shouldn’t even be here, sitting like a queen in a refugee home while American boys are sitting in swamps on Christmas Day. They’re the ones who should be here. Not you.’” (Schmidt 95).
War, something that sounds so cliché yet endeavours a greater meaning; a meaning of finding your true self within yourself, and seeing your natural, brave or mediocre side. The concept of bravery and heroic men is often the label associated with war; however, in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, it is in fact the exact opposite. The Wars is an anachronistic example of what one goes through both physically and mentally. Findley accurately portrays the protagonist, Robert Ross, as a naïve nineteen year old who wishes to escape his excruciating feelings of reality for being held accountable for Rowena’s death by enlisting into war, as well as to adhere to societal norms. Robert is an incompetent young boy that achieves most of his knowledge of war from
