Semester One Reflection

    Since August, I have read five books, which actually surprises me, and this is probably my smallest rate of reading in a very long time. Now, I have also read many other forms of media, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, and The Buckeye Sports Bulletin. (I read way to much sports stuff). The few books I did read this semester were by two authors, Tom Clancy and Dan Brown, both authors recommended by father, and of course, all of the movie versions of their books available on Netflix. I enjoyed all of the movie versions of the books, especially the adaptations of Clancy’s novels, but the novels, especially Patriot Games, are filled to the brim with over-detailing of the situation the characters are in. Dan Brown’s books, however, I like much better. He can magically blend religious themes, an action-packed plot. multi-level characters and of course, no unnecessary details. So overall, I enjoyed Dan Brown’s books out of the novels I read this semester, and I plan on reading his final book over Christmas break.

     I feel that my blogging over the semester has evolved in a positive manner. I have always tried to write detailed analysis of the book and it’s events, and attempting to pair them with pictures, videos and quotes from the book. However, I feel like I have slacked off a bit on the former. I feel that after I would give myself between a six and an eight for most of them, with a  few nines or tens thrown into there. 

     A few goals I have for next semester all go back to two words…”Try harder.” My first improvement would be to improve on how often I blog, as I didn’t really keep up with it as much as I wanted to. However, I plan on getting a laptop in the coming months, so it’ll be easier to complete these assignments at home, as the computer I had at home was total garbage. Secondly, I hope to see myself add more types of media to my blog posts. And thirdly, I hope to read at least twice as many more books than I did this semester.

The Plot of The Lost Symbol

The Capitol Building, where the book's opening action take place

     Ever since I saw the movie "National treasure" the idea of the Freemasons and secret societies in American history always fascinated me. This book has all of that. The book follows Robert Langdon, who has been asked to deliver a speech at the Capitol Building in the place of his friend Peter Soloman, a scientist and high-ranking Freemason. When he arrives in DC, he finds that there was no speech, and that Soloman was kidnapped. Meanwhile, we learn the story of Mal'ahk, a Turkish man who kidnaps Peter and plans to get him to spill the location of the Freemason's long lost treasures. He will do anything, including murder, to achieve his goal. Meanwhile, Peter's sister, Katherine, has just escaped being kidnapped by Mal'ahk, and after getting a phone call Langdon, meets up with him. While all of this is going in, Langdon has uncovered a small pyramid, which is soo  revealed to be a... well, I guess I can't spoil it for 

Summary of "The Hunt for Red October" by Tom Clancy

    

Cover of The Hunt For Red October

     The book The Hunt For Red October is a thrilling spy novel that takes place in the Atlantic Ocean during December 1984. Captain Marko Ramius is the best naval captain in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Soviet navy has just put him in control of their newest and most advanced nuclear submarine, "Red October". After setting sail on the sub's maiden voyage, Ramius kills the political officer, Ivan Putin (Which made me laugh because the current President of Russia is Vladimir Putin). He then switches the sub's original orders to his own, which call for the ship to engage it's "caterpillar drive", a jet-propulsion system that is so quite, the sub doesn't show up on sonar. What most of the crew on board "Red October" don't know is that Ramius plans to defect to the United States. So the USSR sends a large chunk of their naval fleet to hunt down and destroy "Red October" before Ramius defects and hands the sub over to the Americans. Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, is put in charge of finding out what Ramius's plans really are, as they do not know Ramius's intentions. After all, a gigantic nuclear sub equipped with twenty nuclear missles chugging towards the American coast is kind of a cause for alarm. The story all so follows Jones, a sonar operator and his commander, Bart Mancuso, on the USS Dallas, who decipher the sound of "Red October's caterpillar drive off of Iceland. These three groups eventually meet in the climax.

     I remember my father saying a few weeks ago to my grandpa, "I'm happy Tim Clancy died!" I asked why. He replied that Clancy's books were too long and were a pain to read. This book was no longer than one of the medium-length Harry Potter books. I give the book a 4 and a half out of five stars. I find military history fascinating, and this book is perfect for people who love military history, thrillers, spy novels. The actual difficulty of read was probably an eight, as there is alot of Russian words in English lettering, but you still don't know what they mean. But still, it is a great book and I plan on reading as many Tom Clancy books as I can this year.

The Hunt For Red October Trailer:

http://youtu.be/3C2tE7vjdHk

The video above is the trailer for the 1990 movie version of The Hunt For Red October. It stars Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan (A roll that would later be filled by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck). It also stars Sean Connery (in probably one of the greatest casting decisions ever, despite his awful Russian accent) as Marko Ramius

Final Thoughts on A Long Way Gone

Author Ishmael Beah

So, after we finish the memoir unit, I left A Long Way Gone untouched for about a week. Then, as I lay awake in bed on Thursday night, I realized that I still had some of the book left to read. I finished the book and here are my thoughts on it.

Best Part of the Book - Description of Life-Threatening Scenarios: Now, this may sound a bit strange, but the way Ishmael yeah, the author narrates his story is phenomenal. He talks about his first time out fighting with the army. I think that the reason he can especially remember these fights was that it was the first time in his life that he actually was not just the witness, and also because he speaks about doing large amounts of drugs like cocaine before every outing. Beah writes "We walked for long hours snd stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with agri, sniff cocaine, brown-brown [cocaine mixed with gunpowder] and take some brown capsules. the combination of these drugs gave us a lot of energy and made us fierce." 

Worst Part of the Book: There really isn't a name for what I hate about this book, and that is that the main point of this book, the point that he was a child soldier for the Sierra Leonese government, is that he doesn't get to that part of his story until the second half of the book. The first half of the book is just about he gets into the situation of being a soldier. And that first half is pretty boring, there's little action, and it's mostly just about them walking around the countryside, hoping that they find something to call home.

So obviusly, this book had it's ups and downs, but it definitely had a large amount of shock factor, and it does a fantastic job at getting this message out about the use of child soldiers in times like this.

The Freemasons: WHo Are They?

Cover of 'The Lost Symbol."

The book The Lost Symbol is the third in the critical and commercially successful Robert Langdon series of books. In the story, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard, gets a  call from his friend, Peter Solomon, a scientist and a high-ranking member of the Freemasons, asking him to speak in his place at an event in Washington DC. Langdon travels there, where he finds out an impostor, who had kidnapped Solomon, wants  him to find "the portal", a way to seemingly look back into the past.

     Who are the Freemason's. When someone bring up the term, you probably conjure up images of a Satanic cult, or the Illuminati. However, the Freemason's are a society with a worldwide presence. Founded by a group of actual mason's (People who woked with stone), past members included several Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Ben Franklin and Samuel Adams. Current famous members include anyone from politicians to celebrities to teachers, businessmen and everyone in between. The group, which only allows women to join, is very secretive. New members must vow to never spill the secrets of Freemason rituals, ehich the antagonist of the book wishes to do.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - By: Ishmael Beah

     My partner and I are almost finished reading A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. In the book, the author tells us about his hellish nightmare that is the Sierra Leonese Civil War in the 1990's. We follow him as he criss-crosses the country, attempts to survive and eventually join the ranks of the army, where as a child soldier, he kills several people, does drugs including marijuana and "brown-brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder" and becomes just as bad as the rebels he hated.

A Sierra Leonese Child Soldier, holding an AK-47, the weapon the Ishmael used during the war.

    

One of the central ideas of the book is the brutal violence these people endured. Ishmael tell the reader how the rebels would initiate new recruits into their ranks. He writes "They had carved their initials RUF (Revolutionary United Front), on his body with a hot bayonet and chopped of all of his fingers with the exception of his thumbs." For years, the public has been exposed to violence in the form of film and television. One such example of this violence are films directed by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has directed critically acclaimed films such as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Volumes 1&2 and most recently Django Unchained. But all of these films have one thing in common, a very large amount of violence. In an interview, Tarantino said "I work in crime films and martial arts movies, I guess there's gonna be a fight or two. "http://www.miramax.com/subscript/quentin-tarantino-violence-in-films/ 

 So what we have here is contradictory sentiments. We have Ishmael, who believes that we already have enough violence in the world, and we have Tarantino, who believes it's alright to put graphic violence in his films. Now, I personally enjoy Tarantino's films, and there is lots of graphic violence in them, but it's just a film, and only people who can handle such violence should watch the movies, same as with "A Long Way Gone".

The Setting of the Novel "The Lost Symbol"

Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon

The book The Lost Symbol is the third in the critical and commercially successful Robert Langdon series of books. In the story, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard, gets a  call from his friend, Peter Solomon, a scientist and a high-ranking member of the Freemasons, asking him to speak in his place at an event in Washington DC. Langdon travels there, where he finds out an impostor, who had kidnapped Solomon, wants  him to find "the portal", a way to seemingly look abck into the past.

     The author, Dan Brown is the ultimate master of character, plot and setting development.. he craetes characters that you can easily love, hate and you never know who's good and who's bad until the very end. But, I especially love the subtle ways Brown can incorporate certain events to easily show the time of year of the plot. During the scene where Langdon arrives at the Capitol to speak, a security guard says, "NFC play-offs ... Everyone's watching the Redskins tonight."  This dates the book to January, but the year the book take place in is not disclosed. A person receiving and iPhone is mentioned,  so you can date it to anytime after 2007, as that was the year the first iPhone came out.

There is  talk that  this book will be made intoo a film, with Tom Hanks starring as Langdon, a role in which he has played twice before. And you can bet that I'm going to see it.
     

Why I Chose to Quit Reading "Patriot Games"

 

Trailer for Patriot Games

     Every school year, I always fall into this pattern of reading one book series for the entire year. 6th grade was Harry Potter, 7th was Alex Rider and 8th was the Divergent series. This year, I decided to read a more mature book series, the Jack Ryan books, by Tom Clancy. I was inspired to read them after watching "The Hunt for Red October" at 1:30am the morning I went to Hawaii. So, for my first book of the year, I read the book version of the movie. Then, to continue the books, I read the next one, Patriot Games, but this book may have turned me off to the whole series.

     In this book, Jack Ryan, the series protagonist, saves the Duke and Duchess of Wales from an attack by a ultra-radical, Irish paramilitary group. Then, this group tries to get back at Ryan by trying to kill his wife, daughter and unborn child in a car crash. But as interesting as it may seem, the majority of the book is just guys standing around, talking to each other. Nowhere near the scale of the previous book, where the worst possible outcome would be a nuclear holocaust and not a bunch of people getting killed. There were also rouge Soviet naval commanders and nuclear subs and everyone denying everything. Now it's just alot of talk that keeps the plot moving, and seems kind of lazy to me. There just wasn't enough action, which from the movies I've seen, actually makes the movie version of Patriot Games.

The Best and Worst Parts of Patriot Games

Poster for the film version of Patriot Games

     Patriot Games by Tom Clancy and in comparison to my first post on this book, the action is still quite slow. Still, the best parts of the book are the action sequences, meticulously detailed by Clancy to give the readers a picture in their mind of what's going on. For example, in the beginning of the book, there was an assassination attempt on members of the British Royal Family in London, complete with a car bomb and AK-47 flailing Irish nationalists firing into the Rolls-Royce. This is how the story starts, with our protagonist Jack Ryan knocking out one of the terrorists and killing another, for which he gets knighthood. A little later in the book, the captured Irish national, Sean Miller, is being taken to a prison on the Isle of Wright via an armored truck. But at a stop at a bridge, members of the Ulster Liberation Army (ULA), an ultra-violent, Maoist paramilitary group Miller is a member of, use bazookas to blast the doors of the van open and free Miller. The following quote describes what was going through the mind of Sergent Highland, a cop in the van with miller during the escort and shows perfectly the way Clancy describes people's minds.
I am now on page 215 of
      "Highland wanted to say something , but knew nothing would really matter. he wouldn't even entertain them with a curse - and it came to him that he understood Miller a little better now. the realization shocked him out of his fear. Now he knew why Miller hadn't spoken to him. What d**mded fool things go through your head at a time like this, he thought. (Clancy 169) This type of narration is also one of the best parts because it gives you what the character is like, how they act, think and live.

Patriot Games Review (up to page 130)

 

Patriot Games is the second book in the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy. In the book, Ryan, on vacation in London, stops the attempted assassination of the Duke and Duchess of Wales and their son (Their counterparts being Prince Charles, Princess Diana and Prince William, respectively). He even manages to capture the leader of the attempt, Sean Miller, who works for the ULA, part of an Irish militant group, but I'll get back to that. After being shot himself, and recuperating, he becomes a witness during Miller's trial. After the trial, he flys back to Washington DC, on the Concorde.

The story is set on the back drop of The Troubles, for about 30 years between the late 60's and 90's, tue British military fought against militant groups in Northern Ireland, who were fighting for seperation from British rule. Groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA), would some times act like terrorists, blowing up buildings and cars. The fictional ULA, is an extremely violent, Communist off-shoot of the IRA.

     To be honest, I really am not liking this book. I find that it's moving slowly and there isn't as much tension as The Hunt For Red October had. But my dad says that the ending is awesome, so I guess I'll read on.

     

Chracter Development in the book "Into Thin Air"

         The book I read over the summer was Into Thin air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. It tells the story of his expedition up Mt. Everest in the spring of 1996, and the storm that occurred near the top, that killed six people and left two people missing still to this day. The character we follow is the author, and how he changes during the climb. The reader get an up close and personal account on the physical perils of the climbing Everest and how they affect Krakauer, both mentally and physically. He writes about a night they stayed in a lodge full of smoke from the stove heating the room and its' affects on his health during the climb, saying "By morning my eyes were burning and bloodshot, my nostrils were clogged with black soot, and I'd developed a dry persistent hack that would stay with me until the end of the expedition. (Krakauer 52) He also suffered a major bout of guilt and greif after the deaths of his fellow climbers in the disaster. Near the end of the book, he talks about how he couldn't save anyone stuck out on in the storm, even though he was in his tent, totally unaware to the people stuck in the storm, saying "And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 359 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of greif and guilt-ridden aelf-approach. (Krakauer 271). The whole theme of this book, I feel, is that risks are in everything that we do, and, as in this disaster, the people perished doing for what some had dreamt of doing there whole lives. We all are mortal, and we should all go out there and take risks, but we have to realize, like Krakauer did, that some things that we do are dangerous and we have to accept those dangers as a part of our existence.

The article that I have chosen is a New York Times book review of my book. Appropriately called "Fatal Attraction", it explores why so many people pay so much money (up to $70,000) to climb an extremely dangerous mountain.

Into Thin Air Article

The video I have chosen is a trailer for the 1998 IMAX film "Everest". I chose it because the author of Into Thin Air mentions seeing this crew filming a climb up Everest, but not the authors

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PafBF3mpckE