Summary Over the summer, St. Francis High School juniors were required to read Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. The novel is about the protagonist, Marietta Greer, otherwise known as Missy who starts out in her hometown in Kentucky. Her only goal is to leave the town after graduation without getting pregnant. Once she does leave, she starts on a road trip by herself.…
Snapping People People, like beans, can snap so easily. In the poem, “Snapping Beans,” by Lisa Parker we see just easily people can break or change. It also shows us just how fast those things can happen. In the beginning of the poem we notice the words, “silver bowl,” telling us that this is a very special occasion, maybe because the young girl never really comes home.…
In Mary Pipher’s, analysis, “Saplings in the Storm.” Pipher argues that something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence that makes them more deferential, self-critical, and depressed. She claims that in the dramatic event that happens in a girl’s early adolescence causes them to “crash and burn” in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle. She develops this claim by first analyzing psychology documents. Then explain how girls are shown in early adolescence in well known pieces of work by Shakespeare.…
In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, the domineering Nathan Price is a static character whose potential for development is demolished by his extremism. Nathan abuses others in his vainglorious interests and leaves afterward a broken family, a dead little girl, and a ventured on society that never welcomed him in any case. Nathan, a microcosm of the severe western effect on the Congo, is a definitive lowlife – who's foul fingers have dismantled a society and a family and left the pieces excessively spiked, making it impossible to ever fit right again. Through perspectives, universe and microcosm and Nathan's own remarks, Kingsolver lights up the subject that the scoundrel does not get the last word; Kingsolver analyzes both the…
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver is about a girl named Taylor Greer who packs up everything she has from her small town in Kentucky and moves across the country to where her very old car finally gives out. Taylor has nothing more than a couple hundred dollars, a junk car, a lot of ambition, and her morals. The book portrays her as a strong person who isn’t to be messed with. She doesn’t let the fact that she is a woman affect anything she does, because deep down it’s obvious that it doesn’t matter to her. Taylor is strong, not because she is a woman, but because she knows gender doesn’t determine strength.…
In “Snapping Beans” by Lisa Parker, a girl is home for the weekend after being at school up in the North. She is staying with her grandma who lives in the South and has a very religious background. The grandma asks her how school is going and the girl is afraid to tell her that it isn’t going great. The conflict in this poem is person vs self because the girl struggles with an internal conflict whether or not to tell her grandma how school is going. The theme of the poem is that after growing up in one place and learning one’s own beliefs it is hard to adjust in other places.…
Rambunctious Garden Critical Book Review Emma Marris opens Rambunctious Garden by dedicating the book to her mother for sending her to Audubon Day Camp. Though her statement is unexplained, Marris seems to reference how she began to care about nature. In his A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote about how direct interactions with nature can lead one to care about the land, to develop a land ethic (Leopold 223-225). Audubon Camp was how Marris developed her land ethic.…
In the nonfiction book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson, a historian becomes an ambassador in the key formational years of 1933-1937 in Hitler’s regime. He has many opponents but he stands strong to his Jeffersonian beliefs. His daughter comes along and those two are the center of the story. To begin with, the story starts with Dodd, a University of Chicago professor.…
One of the main themes of Milkweed is that human nature is weird and confusing. For example, one night Misha witnesses kristallnacht and reflects, “What I really feared was being strapped to a horse backward with my face bouncing in and out of the horse’s tail.” (Spinelli, 38) As Jewish stores, homes and establishments were being torn apart by German rioters, Misha watched Jews suffer public humiliation. One man was tied to a horse as his face hung over the back end of the animal. The next day, Misha begins to worry that he may wind up in that man’s same spot because he is confused as to why the rioters are attacking people.…
“If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality”-Roopleen. This quote relates to both Ben Carson and Taylor Greene from The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver during their journey on accomplishing their goals. Gifted hands by Ben Carson is an aspiring story of how he started from Detroit and made his way to be an astounding pediatric neurosurgeon at John Hopkins by the age of thirty-three and never seemed to forget about his faith or family . The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver is a fresh coming of age story about Taylor Greene, who decides to leave her home in Kentucky before she ends up just like everyone else and as she venture across the states, she…
In Allan Johnson’s book The Forest and the Trees, he notions that in order to understand the concept of social life, we have to not only look at the individual, but also at the environment the individual is placed and how they interact and create social systems. Johnson explains that “a forest is simply a collection of individual trees, but it is more than that. It is also a collection of trees that exist in a particular relation to one another, and you cannot tell what that relation is by looking at the individual trees.” (Johnson 2014) By using the imagery of the forest and trees, he shows how social systems and people influence each other.…
Female Friendship: Necessary for Emotion Survival There are many ways a friendships can help you. Friendships can help in almost any aspect, from physically helping someone with a project, to emotionally by being there when you are depressed or stressed. There are multiple reasons why a friendship is necessary for human life.…
The Laws of Morality. The book The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver tackles some large important ideas. One of the most impactful ideas Kingsolver looks at is the idea of a person's moral code being more important than the law. Some examples of when this idea is brought up are Mattie helping refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador, Taylor’s favor for Estevan and Esperanza, and Estevan and Esperanza's favor for Taylor.…
The scene is dark, the only light shown is from a fire and the last breath of the sun as it kisses the earth goodnight. There are girls surrounding the fire with gifts in hand to cast a spell on those their heart’s desire. This is only the beginning of Arthur Miller’s 1996 film The Crucible, directed by Nicholas Hytner. While though this part of history is mostly known for the film version, it actually started as a play written by Arthur Miller in the 1950s. The movie is meant as reminder of the horrific 1692 Salem Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts.…
Stephen King is the author of novels and short stories with creepy settings admits that he even fears bugs to add to the list of things that freaks him out. One of his earlier short stories happening 1976, several women at New Sharon Teachers' College fall victim to a “Jack the Ripper” style character with a mysterious fog that weighs heavy over the campus. King, the narrator, also a student, leads us on a twisted tale of a foggy New England town to search who committed the horrifying acts. My analysis of Stephen King’s use of the literary elements, combined with his horror reflected his short story, “Strawberry Spring” (The Fact Site, 8 Apr. 2017) Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine.…