Felix L. Sparks

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs is a memoir of Augusten’s childhood and adolescent life where he experiences the frenzy of his parent’s deteriorating marital relationship and his livelihood under his mother’s psychologist’s household. The book begins with the introduction of young Augusten, a seven year old boy who enjoys dressing up in his mother’s clothes and polishing jewelry. His childhood resembles that of an average boy. His father, a mathematics professor, would take him out…

In the mind of many, Nicholas Sparks is considered one of the top influential authors in today’s current society. Like a great deal of authors, he had to overcome many struggles and hardships to earn his prestigious label, such as, being born into a hard working and poor family or having to cope with his mother and father dying at a young age. (“Home.”) This is just the start of the journey of Nicholas Sparks’ amazing and unique life that included a challenging childhood, a deep faith filled…

During and after the Reconstruction Era, the US Supreme Court needed to interpret a substantive meaning of the 14th Amendment in a response to legal arguments brought by women and laborers. The US Supreme Court’s interpretation of the amendment’s Sec. 1 affected women’s legal rights in both positive and negative ways. The Sec. 1’s privileges and immunities clause undermined women’s legal rights in Bradwell vs. Illinois (1873) and Minor vs. Happersett (1875) by the US Supreme Court’s narrow…

Imagine a university professor accuses a student of cheating on a final exam. Before the student can defend herself, the university decides to expel the student. Understandably, the student decides she wants to challenge the expulsion as a violation of her due process rights. Can the student challenge the action? Surprisingly, the answer depends on which federal circuit the student lives in. In 1975, the United States Supreme Court held that state law could provide primary students a…

Schumann’s Involvement in Resurrecting J.S. Bach As editor and writer for his own music journal, Neue Zeitscrift für Musik, Robert Schumann made it his personal mission to write about worthy composers and lift them up as examples to the music community. He was tired of the “Philistines” of the current music establishment, such as Wagner and Meyerbeer, who he felt were commercial and pretentious. He brought Brahms and Chopin to Germany’s notice, because he felt that their music was “honest craft…

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a total of seven justices to the United States Supreme Court. Professor of Law at Harvard, and author, Noah Feldman, focuses on the background and evolution of four of FDR’s most influential justice appointees—Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Robert Jackson— throughout his book Scorpions. In the Supreme Court of FDR, and in our modern-day court, one often wonders how justices’ rulings are influenced. Throughout Scorpions, one…

Phil 3P97 Take Home Test 3: Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus Desire has a complicated history to philosophy; for most of philosophy's history they were viewed as fundamentally opposed. Since Plato, philosophy has viewed desire as base and something to be controlled by reason. By emphasizing reason over base desires, philosophy encouraged a pervasive self-denial identified by Nietzsche as the ascetic ideal. The core of this ideology was based on the notion that beliefs should be based upon…

a place in which a person can seek safety and be given a chance to start over. This story is about a young woman named Katie, who’s life has been changed by an abusive and egotistic ex-husband. This story is proudly named “Safe Haven” by Nicholas Sparks because Katie goes seeking a new place to start a new life, where she would be forever safe from her ex-husband. Throughout the story, Katie changes by learning to overcome being abused, adapting to a new environment, and developing relationships…

The Bridge to Terabithia written by Katherine Patterson, won the Newbery Medal in 1987. This story was about a friendship between a boy named Jess and a girl named Leslie. In this story, they had an imaginary world they called Terabithia, and they were the queen and king.Their friendship was good, strong, and could not be broken. But one day, something tragic happens. Leslie dies and Jess has to use all his strength to recover from the tragic incident. This book deserved the Newbery award…

Love is a sacrifice within itself. In the Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks, Noah is a man from a small town who was given nothing and had to work for everything he wanted. Noah falls in love with a women named Allie who is from a very wealthy family and is often handed anything she could think of. The love is strong but not strong enough to break the bond of Allie and her parents. Allie’s parents try to split up Noah and Allie and they succeed. When Allie’s family moves, Noah and Allie lose all…