Study guides - Page 11 | Just Great DataBase
It’s worth reading “The Alchemist” just to see what Paulo Coelho is capable of writing in just two weeks of time. It didn’t happen immediately after publishing, but like many of the other author’s creations, the book became a bestseller and is now available to read in over 70 languages. It has even found its place among the self-help book sections due to its content...
No matter how rigid and defined the setting is, “The Ambassadors” is a book about emotions and emotional freedom. We meet the main character, Lambert Strether, a middle-aged and very ordinary man, who decides to marry a very proper woman. But his fiancée-to-be sets a condition: he shall find her delinquent son in Paris and return him home, preventing him from a scandalous...
“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin is an American novel that focuses on the confrontation of developing women’s views and outdated society attitudes towards it. The fact that even today in some communities the book still provokes confrontation means that the feminism still has a long way to go. The protagonist of the story is Edna Pontellier. And while her husband thought too...
Barbara Kingsolver is an American writer and poet. Her first novel “The Bean Trees” was published in 1988. The book denotes multiple symbolic meanings about shared motherhood, life and death, and beauty. The narrator Taylor Greer, who is also the main character of the novel grew up among the tobacco fields of Kentucky and suddenly realized that she had no choice, no future. It is not...
Sylvia Plath wrote only one novel and it was enough for her to make a name for herself as a great writer. “The Bell Jar” is in part an autobiographical book that talks about the mental state of the protagonist who tried to take her own life. The novel concerns the life of Esther Greenwood, who is a student living in Massachusetts. At the beginning of the plot, she is in New York...
“The Bluest Eye” by Tony Morrison is a novel that is set in 1941. Is it a book written in an easy and airy narrative that dwells upon topics that leave everyone uneasy. The eyes of a person. They can tell so much. They are the history, they are the character, they are the ocean and the universe. And for some people like Pecola, they are the sign of being a chosen one. Pecola, an...
It’s high time to get a taste of Australian literary creations with the best novel of Markus Zusak. Since 2005 “The Books Thief” sold millions of copies and became a world-renowned bestseller. The events of the book are happening around the times of the World War II. Thus the unusual choice of the narrator of the story doesn’t strike as weird as it could have &ndash...
“The Brothers Karamazov” is the last book written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1880. It is a rare case where the philosophy of the content is successfully mixed with the excitement of the plot. One of the protagonists of the novel, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is a cold and rough man. He gets the joy in life while making money and sleeping with women, two of which he married. His children...
“Call of the Wild” is a short adventure novel by American writer Jack London published in 1903. The novel relates to Jack London's early work. Often it is classified as children's literature since the main here is a dog. However, the maturity and depth of the ideas of the novel make it relevant to adult readers. This animated story reveals such problems as survival of the...
Prepare to explore the culture, life, and people of Middle Ages in these 24 stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer. The author was close to the King and wrote the text while being at the height of his career in the justice of the state. His experiences are reflected in the stories. If you think that this is a boring book to be used for bedtime reading – you couldn’t be more wrong. So...
The father of detective genre, Edgar Allan Poe, is known and loved for his short stories that keep the reader in suspense till the every last page. “The Cask of Amontillado” is surely one of the most popular among one of them. In 1846 it was published in a lady’s magazine but was highly acclaimed by the audience of all genders, ages, and ethical origins. The master of...
For an offspring of a wealthy Family, Jerome David Salinger didn’t go through a very typical career path. He went to many colleges, but didn’t finish any of them. After that he chose for a military career and combined it with his writing talent. He managed to stir the trouble with his works that are still being mentioned in the context of literature censorship and ethics. “The...
The deeply touching novel by Potok tells us the story of the two boys, their friendship, family issues and their coming of age they go through together. Danny and Reuven are both boys from Jewish families, but while Danny is the son of an ultra-orthodoxical rabbi, Reuven is a descendent of the more modern family. The boys befriend each other on the baseball match between their schools and this...
“The Color Purple” is a story about the social position of African-American women, written by Alice Walker in 1982. The book talks about pretty sad and explicit events in the lives of the most vulnerable members of the nation. It is a known fact that it used to be okay for white people to think of themselves better in comparison to those of other skin colors. But that’s...
The Contender is a debut novel by Robert Lipsyte that tells us the story of a black young man who lives in Harlem with his aunt and cousins. His harsh life is urging him to take the easiest way of criminal life and becoming a thug, but the main character named Alfred Brooks struggles and tries to use his destructive impulses for good. The story of Alfred Brooks is the story of silent rebellion...
Alexander Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo” in 1844 and it instantly became hugely popular among the public. Together with his other famous book, “The Three Musketeers”, it won a place in the world literature heritage forever. The events of the book happen in Italy and France during the Restoration area of the beginning of the 19th century. A young Edmond Dantes is...
Arthur Miller is a strong name in the history of American drama performances. He was always good with words and knew how to see through the American society. He also had a strong political opinion and disagreed profoundly with an unsound anti-communistic agenda of the 1950s. In his plays he showed how different kinds of obsessions can be picked up by the population and lead to unreasonable...
The Day of the Locust is an interesting example of portraying the realistic events through the eyes of the main character - an artist, who sees them as an inspiration for his painting. The novel plays with Hollywood stereotypes, showing the full range of them: from young starlets who appear to be gold-diggers and to greedy and lusty producers. The painting that the protagonist - a young graduate...
As other famous works of Erik Larson, “The Devil in the White City” is based on the real historical events that the author studied carefully. He filled them with a new sense and perspective and turned the dry historical facts and personalities into living, breathing characters. Two plotlines - one of the Devil and the other of the main architect of the White City are tightly...
