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".