In 1-2 well-developed paragraphs, explain the injustice displayed in your novel. What characters are involved, and what is the reason for the injustice?
**In your response, you should include one quotation that in some way exhibits the injustice or those involved in the injustice (don't forget to include the in-text citation)
*Remember to also include the author and title of your novel
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Octavia E. Butler`s Kindred is a novel that will surely pull at your heart strings. Dana, a modern black woman, is literally taken back in time to the antebellum South during the 1800`s. Dana finds out that her reason for time travel is to help a white boy named Rufus, who always manages to get himself into trouble. While Dana plays the role of guardian angel, she also must take on the role as a slave while she is there in order to survive. Being a free woman from the future, Dana finds out quickly how much her ancestors and African American slaves before her were treated as she becomes one of them herself.
ReplyDeleteSlavery and physical abuse are just two injustices that play a big role in Kindred. With the setting of the novel being in the 19th century, slavery is a common injustice that always led to other terrible things. Dana expresses the conditions for blacks during this time when she says, “Blacks here were assumed to be slaves-unless they had their free papers. Paperless blacks were fair game for any white” (Butler 34). Unfortunately, Dana is designated as a slave and is not free. She suffers beatings, harsh treatments, and other serious physical injuries.
Laurie Halse Anderson's novel, Chains, addresses two injustices in Revolutionary American society: slavery and hypocrisy. In the start of the novel, it is set in Virginia (but she setting quickly changes to New York.) The story begins with a slave girl, Isabel, burying her recently deceased owner, Miss Finch. In Miss Finch's will, Isabel and her younger sister Ruth are guaranteed their freedom. They aren't given it. They're sold in a tavern to the Locktons, a couple in New York that are Loyalists.
ReplyDeleteMadam Lockton is a cruel owner. She drugs Isabel and sells her sister (who is 5 and has epilepsy; who will care for her but Isabel?). When Isabel confronts Madam Lockton, she has her imprisoned, and put on trial for assault. She is found guilty; they brand an "I" on her face, standing for "Insolence."
The rebels are hypocrites; they promised to protect Isabel and free her if she spied on the Locktons, but instead they allowed her to go to trial instead, and abandoned her. These rebels are fighting for "freedom" and "justice," but won't grant it to those around them.
Karen Kingsbury’s book Unlocked, is about a boy named Holden who lives life through the lens of autism. From the outside, he looks perfectly normal and most of the girls think he’s cute, but all of that changes pretty quickly as we watch Holden’s everyday life unfold. He acts ‘different’ than the others. It’s almost like he’s in his own little world. He doesn’t ever talk to anyone, and he makes these crazy gestures with his hands and eyes. This book is really interesting to me because it’s giving a glimpse into the world of a person with autism and what their everyday life is like. Viewing from a distance, we see Holden gets picked on by the jocks at his highschool. We see the quarterback of the football team, Jake Collins jab hurtful remarks at Holden as he is minding his own business walking down the hallway, “ Hey, freak! Welcome back to school!”
ReplyDeleteIt’s one thing to pick on someone, but it’s another thing to pick on someone who has been forced into a world that they didn’t ask to be in. Holden has no idea what’s going on, when he is being picked on. He can’t even defend himself. The story takes us inside his head and how he is completely unaware of what’s happening to him. Next thing he knows he’s on the ground, and in a fight or flight result, he does pushups. Just like he always does when he feels threatened.
Sharon Creech's novel, Walk Two Moons, is based on the injustice of being left behind without an explanation. Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle was born and raised in Bybanks, Kentucky. For her, life was as sweet as a cherry pie. She loved the maples, the cows, the fields, the creeks, and every other work of creation that surrounded her; that is until her mother packed up and left she and her father with their mouths hung wide in disbelief. Throughout the many months of loneliness, Sal receives postcards from her mother with notes showing how much she misses her “other half”. Why would her mother leave her with absolutely no explanation? Is it because of me? When will her car tires come rumbling up the driveway? Eventually her father can no longer take living in a house haunted by her mother, so they pack up and move north to live with her crazy grandparents. Finally pushed to the edge, Sal and her grandparents drive the winding route to see her mother resting peacefully in Lewiston, Idaho. Sal tries to hold true to these words of wisdom that she found on a doorstep, “You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair” (Creech 154). Salamanca Tree Hiddle is determined to beat those birds of sadness with a broom until they never nest near her again.
ReplyDeletekatherine Bolles
ReplyDeleteIn Ishmael Beah’s book “A Long Gone” Ishmael is a 12 year old boy who lives in Africa during the time of a big war. These rebels that are causing this war are killing thousands of people. They are chopping innocent men, women and children in to pieces. These people were forced from their homes and to go into hiding. They had to take only what was on their back everything else they had to leave behind. They are unjustly treated because of the rebels wanting their independence by slaughtering innocent people by the thousands.
Ishmael has been confronted by many down falls of the war one was. “This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stop trusting each other, and every stranger becomes an enemy.” (pg. 37) this shows that all these killings have damaged the relationships with people. These people experience the injustices that the war has brought upon them. It has corrupted them so much they can not even trust their neighbor.
Anne Fine describes the injustices burdening the people of Stalinist Russia in her novel The Road of Bones. She tells the story through the perspective of young Yuri Molovotz, who, like every other person in his country, was being forced to live off very meager rations every day and work every waking hour for minimal pay. However, Yuri had been taught in school that these sacrifices must be made for the greater good of the Glorious Revolution. Yuri soon finds out that this is not the case, and that he and his people are being treated like this simply because their government can.
ReplyDeleteWhen Yuri is only thirteen years old, schools are ordered to be closed and all students are to work either in a cement yard or as a hod carrier. Yuri, since his last name begins with a letter past L, must work as a hod carrier. This simple fact shows the carelessness and brutality of the Stalinist government. Yuri carries out his job without complaining until his best friend is killed in an accident because someone had been careless in setting up the ladders on the build site. Yuri lets slip a few careless words at noon lunch and the guards come for him. Yuri narrowly escapes being taken away, and just afterwards describes the injustice of his situation, saying, "My poor, poor parents! What had I done? How could it be that the stupid outspokenness of one person in a family could lead to the punishment of others? How could they drag my mother away by the hair because her boy had said a few unguarded words? What sort of person could pile such terror onto someone who'd just lost her only son without the chance to hand him his one warm coat, or say goodbye?". If the guards came for someone and that someone escaped their grip, they would come for the family and take them away instead as bait to lure the "traitor" back to them. If the hardships of his daily life were not horrifying enough, surely being forced away from his family and his home to live alone running on the road of bones is injustice toward Yuri Molovotz.
Sue Monk Kidd’s, The Secret Life of Bees, is a novel that involves the injustice of an African American woman named Rosaleen. This book takes place during the 1960’s, and begins with an introduction by Lily Owens who is the white girl Rosaleen is raising. On their way to town, Lily and Rosaleen encounter three white men who insult Rosaleen purely for racial reasons. Rosaleen reacts by pouring her snuff jug, which was filled with black spit, across the tops of the men’s shoes. They all lunge at Rosaleen and she is then arrested and charged with assault, theft, and disturbing the peace.
ReplyDeleteThose three men waited for Rosaleen at the jail and beat her until they received an apology. Lily told Rosaleen, “What can they do to you with a policeman right here?” (Kidd 35). However, the policeman witnessed this entire scene without the least bit of objection. Rosaleen suffered the injustice of physical abuse because she was black woman who had no right to stand up to three white men.
John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" is a novel that is littered with injustices. the most prominent one is the corrupt jury. One of the main characters, Nicholas Easter, is the root of this corruption. He intentionally gets on the juries of trials where tobacco companies are being sued by people who have suffered from lung cancer and eventually death because of their smoking habits. Throughout the book, Easter shows his influence over the jury. One example of this is when the jury gets sequestered, the judge and deputy are supposed to examine the contents of their suitcases. At first the jury is fine with it. That is everyone except for Easter. "They think they're gonna inspect our bags, but they're not. Let's put them in here" (Grisham 197). This immediately influences the rest of the jurors; they go from being kind of okay with it to being totally against it all because of Easter's influence.
ReplyDeleteThis is an injustice for a few reasons. First, it's an injustice to the tobacco company and the person who's suing the company. There is no way they will get a fair verdict because Nicholas Easter can just convince the jury to lean a certain way. It's also not fair to the lawyers who have put a lot of time and effort into the case only to no avail because of one corrupt juror. Because Nicholas Easter was a corrupt juror, it takes away the effort and meaning to the trial and is a major injustice to all those who have put their time into this trial.
Baylee
ReplyDeleteS. L. Rottman's book "Hero" tells of an angry and confused fifteen year old named Sean. Sean's mom physically and emotionally abuses him while his father has been completely absent from his life for the past two years. The injustice in this story is child abuse and child abandonment. His mom is an alcoholic who spends her days sleeping and her nights out and about. Sean's abuse by his own mother has caused him to be prone to violence and trouble with the law. When Sean hears that a boy in his class named Rick is talking smack about him, Sean confronts Rick and they fight. This is not the first fight for Sean or Rick. Both boys are suspended from school for five days. Sean's anger and sarcasm come out when he speaks to his principal after his suspension sentence when he says, “Like what? I’ve been suspended for five days, three out, two in. And when I come back, I had better be a good boy, or Mommy and Daddy will have to come to school with me. And then, if I still want to be a bad boy, I may never have to come back to this stinking hole again” (S. L. Rottman, 17).
That night, Sean goes to a party and is caught for being out past curfew for the fourth time. He is then sent to a horse farm to do community service. The farm is run by a World War II veteran named Mr. Dave Hassler who intends to form Sean into the respectable and hardworking man he has the potential to be.
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ReplyDeleteThe injustice displayed in my novel, The Help written by Kathryn Stockett, is the mistreatment of blacks due to the strictly segregated way of life in Mississippi in the 1960’s. Hilly Holbrook, the leader of the Junior League, is the ring leader of the segregation parade. She resists the change to segregation fearing to lose her power over the blacks, and heavily influences the opinions of all of the upper class white women. These women believe that a blacks’ proper place in society is as the help and nothing more because that was the way it had always been. If the blacks were to get out of place there would be serious consequences like there was with Robert Brown. They said he, “Use the white bathroom at Pinchman Lawn and Garden. Two white mens chased him and beat him with a tire iron...I heard he blind” (Stockett 117). This was one of the more violent cases.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Skeeter Phelan, whose opinion on segregation is not swayed by her “best friend” Hilly, thinks that blacks are equal and believes this abuse should be brought to light. When Hilly puts forth the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, which gives the help a separate bathroom than the whites because of their “diseases and germs”, Skeeter decides to write a book from the viewpoint of the help revealing the goods and the bads of working for a white woman.
In Latifa's, "My Forbidden Face", the city of Kabul is overtaken by the Taliban. The Taliban have taken a public figure and publicly hanged him, frightening the townspeople. The main character, Latifa, and her sister, Soraya, must find a way to adapt to the new oppression of the Taliban. One of the injustices in this book is the treatment of women under the rule of the Taliban. The Taliban makes it so that the women in the city of Kabul cannot go outside in public, which means they can't attend school or jobs they had before the Taliban arrived, and, as the name of the book suggests, they are forced to hide their faces. The other injustice that has been displayed in this book is the unjustified persecution of a social group called the Pashtun. It is not clear why the Taliban is persecuting this group yet, but, incidentally, Latifa's father is a Pashtun, so that injustice is sure to expand as the book progresses. The final injustice apparent at this point in the novel is the Taliban's confiscation of all arms belonging to the Kabulis. Not only do they steal these weapons, but they take weapons even if they are antiques and cannot possibly be useful, like the gun and saber of Latifa's great grandfather that was taken. The injustice in this is even worse due to how much Latifa's father cherishes these antiques, displayed when the book says, "Tears well in my father's eyes, and I can see that he hesitates to part with these memories." (Latifa 18).
ReplyDeleteIn Same Kind of Different as Me, a true story that took place in the 1970's, Ron Hall and Denver Moore tell of their unique relationship. Ron is an upper class art seller who has little tolerance for the homeless who often pester his thriving Texas business. His wife, Debbie, opens the doors for an african-american homeless man to become friends with Ron. The two beat the odds and go against the prejudices of modern day slavery, racism, and the ill view of the homeless population. The modern slavery and racism are shown in Denver's birthplace of Louisiana where slaves are forever in debt to the farm owners who have supplied them with limited provision. Denver recounts his experiences by saying, "I had a shack I didn't own, two pairs a' overalls I got on credit, a hog, and a outhouse. I worked them fields, plantin and plowin and pickin and givin all the cotton to the Man that owned the land, all without no paycheck." (Moore, 3). Denver escapes slavery and ends up in Texas where by the grace of God he overcomes homelessness by stricking up a friendship with Ron Hall .
ReplyDeleteJohn Grisham’s The Firm tells the story of a bright young lawyer named Mitchell McDeere who has great moral standards and a prestigious resume. After graduating from Harvard Mitch starts looking for job opportunities and lands an interview with a small but very wealthy law firm in Memphis Tennessee. This law firm has looked at a large amount of applicants and favor Mitch; knowing virtually all about him. The main character is looking at other jobs as well but this firm (Bendini, Lambert and Locke) has enticing offers the others don’t in order that he might choose them. A large salary, new car, and a loan on a new house for him and his wife are a part of the job deal.
ReplyDeleteInjustice is evident in the first part of the novel in that Bendini’s firm uses dishonesty, manipulation and money to control every aspect of their employee’s lives. Mitchell McDeere experiences the injustice because he doesn’t know the whole truth behind this job offer although he questions where all the money from this is coming from. Mitch’s wife also questions this too, “I don’t understand, Mitch. Why are they so generous?” (Grisham 13) Mitchell McDeere ends up leaning toward Bendini, Lambert and Locke and that results in the greatest social injustice of them all: He doesn’t know what he’s getting in to. A few chapters later, Mitch does figure out what he gets into and has to conjure up a clever way to escape his fall into the trap of The Firm.
In my book, Thura’s Diary, Thura is a typical 19 year old girl. Except for one thing, there’s a war in her hometown. She lives in the neighborhood of Adhamiya, but has to leave to go stay with her grandmother with all of her aunts uncles and cousins. Everyone is there except for her dad. Her dad has to stay with their house because if he doesn’t it could be broken into or possibly destroyed.
ReplyDeleteWhile Thura is staying at her grandmother’s house bombs start going off and they don’t stop for days. One of these days she says, “It’s 9:02 pm. There is shooting outside from the Iraqi army. Saddam Hussein is on T.V. talking about the missels dropped on Mosul by British planes. Missiles are also falling on Kuwait. Things are not normal here.” This quote shows that other countries would view a war in their hometown the same way all people would. As a 19 year old, she has to be brave for her sisters, but at the same time she is unsure of what is to come.
-Marah Bond
The book Slumgirl Dreaming by Rubina Ali, is a look into what Rubina Ali has been through including her life in the slums to her stardom from the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”. Rubina talks about how her mom left her and her dad, Aba, and her brother and sister. She talks about how her life in the slums is and what her daily living was. It’s sad because she deserves so much better than that. To know that people in the world live like that is saddening, especially considering how fortunate we are. In the book on page 13 Rubina says, “After all the things I’ve seen and all the luxury and the pampering, I feel confused about going back to the filthy streets of the slums.” That must be hard, going from fame and fortune back to the filth of where it all started.
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ReplyDeleteSarah’s Key, a very moving novel, touches base with injustice. Being that the setting is throughout Jewish persecution, which has gone on from the beginning of time, the Jews received cruel and unusual punishment. Sarah’s brother wanted to be hidden and she wanted to help him, since it was too late for her, she hid him in the cupboard, locked him in there, and eventually was to send someone (most likely their father) to free him. The landlord revealed the Jews privacy, in order to keep herself protected from the authorities, and they were evicted as a result of their race and culture.
ReplyDeleteThe French and German mocked the Jews by forcing them to practice elements of their heritage to emphasize what they hated, in a way (they being the German and French); like the symbol of the yellow star being sewn onto their clothing. A quote that emphasized injustice to me was “‘Why are we here?’ she put her hand on the yellow star sewn on the front of her blouse. ‘ It’s because of this isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Everybody here has one.’ Her father smiled, a sad, pathetic smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s because of that.’ The girl frowned. ‘It’s not fair, Papa... She had seen the signs that seemed to be put up everywhere: JEWS FORBIDDEN… Unfair. So unfair.”(pg. 25) Tatiana De Rosnay embedded this picture in my mind when all you know is taken away from you simply because of who you are. Just like in the passage, it is sad because in that moment they did not belong to themselves anymore but owned by the French. In another passage found on page 65, Rosnay explained it as if they were cattle, being treated similar to beef.
John Grisham's book The Partner is a about a lawyer named Peter Lanigan. Lanigan used to work for a Law Firm in Mississippi. He was angry about his life. Around that time he found out that his law firm was about to steal ninety million dollars from the Government. He then decides to steal that money from his firm and leave the country. After stealing the money he leaves and goes and lives a simple life in Brazil. Four years later he is found by some men who want to take him back to the United States to face charges for stealing. Those men then torture him to try and get him to tell them where he hid the money. “Patrick screamed with no restraint,a scream so fierce and so horrible that Osmar and the Brazilians froze for a second on the front porch.”(Grisham 34)
ReplyDeletePatrick suffered for hours while men tortured him.
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ReplyDeleteIn Josh Grisham's The Testament,a billionaire named Troy Phelan is about to sign the will distributing his eleven billion dollars.Phelan has three ex-wives and several children all greedy for a share of the fortune.Troy despises his children and ex-wives and doesn't want to give them anything.Troy then signs the will for everyone to see, but then in private he signs another will leaving all of the inheritance to an unknown daughter. Now his lawyer, Joshua Stafford has to send someone to find Troy's daughter who is working as a missionary in remote Brazil.
ReplyDeleteInjustice is shown by Phelan by hiding the fact that he had another daughter and by secretly writing another will to leave all of his other children out of the inheritance. Troy explains his reason for acting like this when he says,"I had three families- three ex-wives who bore seven children, six of whom are still alive and doing all they can to torment me"(Grisham,2).
In John Grisham's novel, The Broker,injustice is present on almost every single page. Joel Backman is convicted as being in possession of governmental software. Six years before he was placed in prison for solitary confinement, three Pakistani scientists discovered how to manipulate secret governmental satellites. The three scientists had an argument on what they should do with the satellites, and they decided to sell the software to manipulate the satellites to the highest bidder. Before they could do that, however, they must find a broker, or someone that can find a good deal for them.
ReplyDeleteThat is where Joel Backman comes into play. Joel Backman was a broker that found the Pakistanis a good deal, but his second in command was killed. In order for himself to escape death, he was granted a twenty year prison sentence. Joel Backman, now, has been granted a full pardon from prison. However, what he is not told, is that four people groups and the American government, and the CIA are all plotting to kill him. "Here's the plan. If you pardon, then we will have him out of the country in a matter of hours... We'll wait, perhaps a year or so, then we'll leak the word in the right places. They'll find Mr. Backman, and they'll kill him, and when they do so, many of our questions will be answered." (Grisham 13-14)
In Suzanne Collins book, The Hunger Games, it is clear from the start what the injustice in this book is going to be about, or so I thought. I had the correct general idea, but I did not get it exactly. In this book there is a time every year called the reaping. This is where the capital city, the Capitol, selects one boy and one girl to participate in The Hunger Games. This is a competition in which you fight to the death, winner receiving food for their district. This shows injustice by the senseless slaughtering of 12 to 18 year old just to remind the people of how their rebellion failed and to not try again.
ReplyDeleteA quote describing the injustice is when Katniss tells us the real message of the Hunger Games, "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did District Thirteen." (page 19) This is a prime example of injustice.
Olugbemisola Rhuday Perkovich's "8th Grade Super Zero" is about an 8th grader named Reggie who tries to keep out of the spotlight. There is some injustice in his life - he's best friends with another boy named Joe, Joe is white and Reggie is black. At one point the mean kids at school were referring to Reggie as "Whiteboy" because he was hanging out with one of the few white kids in his class. He didn't like the nickname at all. The book focuses pretty much on the typical issues of an 8th grader, dealing with the "cool kids," getting good grades, spiritual problems, and the class president election. "Clark Junior is known for being the most 'ethnically and culturally diverse' schools in New York City, but we still keep things pretty seperate but equal when you get right down to it, so 'Whiteboy,' wasn't exactly a compliment." (Perkovich 25)
ReplyDelete- Kathryn Kostovetsky
So far in "Escaping Saddam" by Lewis Alsamari, Lewis is in his training to be a soldier for Saddam Hussein's army. He undergoes the brutal boot camp in hopes that he will get out of the country before he is assigned to a post. Sadly, his boot camp graduation arrives before he can get away. He is then assigned to go 400 kilometers away from his family and his hopes of getting out of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteAlsamari tells about , during boot camp, the intense, excruciating physical training and mental injustice they endured. They were tasked with crawling under barbed wire raised a little more than a foot above the ground in no more than 60 seconds, while officers randomly fired AK-47s. When Alsamari preformed then tasking just over the time limit by 8 seconds, he was beaten senseless. "Winded, i collapsed to the ground once more. Gasping to catch my breath, I felt a heavy boot kick into my ribcage as the two proceeded to beat me with their hands and feet until my body was bruised and bloodied" (Alsamari 9). He was then kicked in to a mud pit, hosed off, and sent to do it again.
In the novel "The Last Juror: by John Grisham injustice is everywhere. This book is set in the 1980's in the Deep South so not only black injustice there were many other forms. "I wanted to save the world by uncovering corruption and environmental abuse and government waste and the injustice suffered by the weak and oppressed."(8) The main character Willie Traynor faces injustice at multiple times throughout the book. For example, when he firsts gets there the people don't buy his paper and don't respect him because he is new. The main adversary in the novel is a guy named Danny Padgitt and he is charged with murder and rape. He faces injustice because his case is full of thoughts and everyone assumes he is guilty before given a trial. The topic of injustice is a major theme throughout this book and it definitely thickens the plot.
ReplyDeleteIn my novel, What Difference Do It Make, which is the sequel to Same kind of Different as me, the book starts off with a really good and long friendship between Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Denver has many of his own personal dealings with homelessness and some dealings with racism and slavery. These things are the main part to the story that has to do with injustice. Denver Moore was befriended by Ron’s wife Deborah, and she helped Denver greatly and through this showed Ron to help the less fortunate as well. This book just covers the past events that have happened between the last book and this one. These events are just stories from these men's lives in detail about these injustices. They also share about how God has worked throughout these stories and helped them through.
ReplyDeleteIn The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins, injustice adds as help to advance the plot. The reaping for the hunger games serves as part of the injustice in the book. As Katniss, the sixteen-year-old main character, states,”Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did District Thirteen." (page 19) This is when the Capitol selects one boy and girl, between the age of twelve and eighteen, from each of the twelve districts, and forces them to fight to the death with one winner left standing. This injustice serves to show remembrance of an attempted rebellion, that failed and resulted in District Thirteens destruction.
ReplyDeleteKhaleo Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns” focuses on the injustices of women in Afghanistan. One of the main characters that suffers from an injustice is Mariam. Mariam lives outside the city of Herat, Afghanistan with her mother, Nana. From the time she was a child, Miriam was verbally abused by her parents, but especially by Nana. When she breaks Nana’s most valuable tea set, she calls Miriam a harami which means bastard. Nana also lies to Miriam about her birth, telling her that her father didn’t care for her at all.
ReplyDelete“She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Miriam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, hope, acceptance.” (Hosseini, p. 4) The reason for Miriam’s injustice is because of her illegitimate birth. Her parents were not married when Nana got pregnant. Nana was working as a maid for Miriam’s father. Miriam is looked down on because her mother views her as a product of her pain.
In the memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmeal Beah at the mere age of 12 has a rude awakening to how cruel the world could really be. In this book Ishmeal if forced to fend for his life against the rebelling fighters who are against the government. Though these fighters are suppose to be fighting for the people, they have a poor way of showing it. The Freedom Fighter, as they call themselves, seek out innocent villagers including women and children to stand with their force in order to have more safety. Many of these human shields end up dying. Ishmeal is scarred for life when he sees a woman holding her baby who was killed by gunshots. He says, "I had heard from adults that this was a revolutionary war, a liberation of the people from corrupt government. But what kind of liberation movement shoots innocent civilians, children, that little girl? There wasn't anyone to answer these questions and my head felt heavy with the images that it contained"(A Long way Gone page 14). Ishmeal could not even wrap his mind around why anyone would do such cruel injustice. They plainly just do not deserve this.
ReplyDeleteIn the book We Beat the Street written by the main characters, Dr. Rameck Hunt, Dr. George Jenkins and Dr. Sampson Davis we see injustice on them. These three were very smart but had to struggle with gangs, violence, peer pressure, drugs and being black in a tough neighborhood in New Jersey. They were going down the wrong path and always getting in trouble until one day they come across a pre-medical progam in Seton Hall University. They decide to attend it and graduate from there making their dreams come true. They encourage and help each other to acheive their goal. ” We are real people. we started out as kids in the toughest neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, and today we are doctors. We had to fight drugs and crim and hopelssness. We had to overcome obstacles.” (All doctors) This was in the beginning and it shows the injustices they had to deal with.
ReplyDeleteJohn Grisham's novel, "a painted house" centers around old country cotton-picking in Rural Arkansas. Luke Chandler, a seven year old devoted to baseball and the Cardinals professional team, is growing up with not only his family, but about 10 mexicans and lots of "hill people." In the beginning we learn that Luke lives a very organized life, and things seem to never change. That is, until his family hires the Spruill family, and the "hill-people" to help pick cotton on their rented land. The Spruills are a motley crew consisting of Trot, a disabled boy, Hank, a mean scary young man, and more. Luke must spend the next couple months with these strange people everyday, in the hot sun. Being a farmer is hard work. Luke's description of his two month job of harvesting cotton sounds dreadful: "...afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice. My fingers would bleed, my neck would burn, my back would hurt." (Grisham, 10-11)
ReplyDeleteThroughout the cotton-picking season, Luke becomes a witness to 2 murders, and a few other fights. Not only does this story show the difficult struggles of a debt-stricken farming family in Arkansas, but also the journey of an innocent young boy maturing in his life experience at an early age.
My book was Octavian Unknown by John Grisham. The book is about a black boy in the American colonies. His mother was a princess in his land, and the child is an experiment. Not much has happened in my book, so all i can do is speculate as to what injustice is occurring.
ReplyDeleteThe boy, Octavian, is the son of a princess who was brought over during the slave trade. Octavian is abused by his teachers, who are actually studying him. Octavian is treated like an animal. Octavian is not allowed to go outside of the house, he is not allowed to show emotion, and he also is not allowed to hold a proper relationship with his mother. These are the injustices in my book.
In the book, We Beat The Street, written by three friends who grew up together in a low class black neighbor hood, Dr. Sampson Davis, Dr.George Jenkins, and Dr. Rameck Hunt, there are many social injustices. These three boys were living in a low class neighbor hood in Newark, New Jersey with gangs, drugs and violence. You had to be tough to survive and smart to make it out. These boys, now doctors, were all smart, but because of their situation in in the social class, they did not face many opportunities to be recognized. Because these boys were smart, they were considered different among their other friends. George was talking to his teacher on day and said, "It's hard to fit in with your boys if your grades are too good." (26) This teacher was on of George's biggest influences and encouraged him to make it somewhere in life. These three boys faced adversity and won. They came out on top and beat the social injustices of their lives.
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