43% Off Discounts: Lowest Price The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Review

Are you looking to buy The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Cheapest Deals

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Review

The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, captures readers with her own interpretation of what it was like to grow up as a female Chinese American. As a little girl, she came to America with her family. Despite being in a new country, she had to deal with the old traditions from her homeland. Kingston hears different legends which she pieces together to create her woman warrior. It becomes her source of strength in a society that rejected both her sex as well as her race. The book, divided into five interwoven stories, is at times confusing as it jumps around. Nevertheless she does a great job explaining her life while growing up. The first story, called "No Name Woman," tells of her paternal aunt who bears a child out of wedlock and is harried by the villagers and by her family into drowning herself. The family now punishes this taboo-breaker by never speaking about her and by denying her name. However, Kingston breaks the family silence by writing about this rebel whom she calls "my forebear." The next story is called "White Tigers." It is a myth about a heroine named Fa Mu Lan, who fights in place of her father and saves her village. This story became the Disney movie, Mulan."Sharman" is a story of Kingston's mother. It explores what it was like to study as a woman to become a doctor in China. "At the Western Palace" is about Kingston's aunt who comes to America and discovers that her husband has remarried in America. Finally, the last story, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" is about Kingston's own experience in America when she first arrived. She explains what it was like to be a newcomer in a strange culture. Kingston constantly mentions that her friends and she are ghosts because they are American. All of the people who surround her family are ghosts, except for the Chinese people who live on the Gold Mountain, a section of Chinatown in San Francisco. Kingston feels like a ghost herself, " .... We had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like. The Americans call us a kind of ghosts" (p.183). The interpretation of what ghosts mean in this book is difficult to figure out. It could show how some people view a person from a different culture with ignorance as if she doesn't exist. Kingston's The Woman Warrior has some similarities with The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. First of all, both stories are written by Chinese American authors about their cultural heritage. Both novels deal with major concerns faced by Chinese American women. Living with their traditional culture in American society, Chinese-American women suffer problems of cultural conflicts. However, there are differences that make each work distinct. The Joy Luck Club is fiction and is not personal. It is also more likely to be read for pleasure. The Woman Warrior portrays a first hand view of the cultural differences between the United States and China. Also, Kingston succeeds in combining her emotions with her experiences. The Woman Warrior is a fascinating book. One of the most amazing aspects of this book is Kingston's ability to show how silence is a form of communication and how it shaped her being. Her mother tells her to be silent, yet she goes against her cultural standards by talking about her aunt. This act of will on Kingston's part offers the readers her ancestry. The expectation of silence can be simplified into a symbol of oppression. As a Korean-American, I felt the emotions and understood how Kingston felt for being a stranger to a new culture. Her internal struggle to fit into two different societies is difficult. I personally recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about the experience of one Chinese-American woman. It is not the definitive story of Chinese-American women's experience, but it is a very vivid and well-written account of one woman's life. Pg. 209. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Overview

Want to learn more information about The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

20% Off Discounts: Best Price Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Review

Are you looking to buy Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Lowest Price Offers

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Review

Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the most beautifully written story of a middle-class girl struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, creativity, passion vs. her family/society's inflexible "formed opinions". The story of the persecution of a girl because of her sexual preference (in this case, lesbianism) is not new. It's how Ms. Winterson presents her story. Fresh. Alive. Witty. Funny. Heartbreaking at times. Imaginative. Almost like you were holding a piece of someone's soul in your hands rather than merely a book. I noticed that one reviewer mentioned that the book's sexual nature is vulgar. I do not find this so. Even if it is, so what? Life is vulgar. Only those fond of sweeping the dirt under the carpet so that it stays out of sight (or those who drive lesbian girls from their house/church and pretend they don't exist) will disagree with the innate vulgarity of all life. This book is the antidote for that kind of sanitized thinking. This book exposes that sanitized Christian middle-class thinking is weird, almost alien when observed sanely by a third party standing on the outside. This book celebrates life. Read it.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Overview

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God's elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

Want to learn more information about Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

29% Off Discounts: Lowest Price The Glass Menagerie Review

Are you looking to buy The Glass Menagerie? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Glass Menagerie. check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Great Deals

The Glass Menagerie Review

Amanda Wingfield, the matriarch of "The Glass Menagerie," always tells her daughter, Laura, that she should look nice and pretty for gentleman callers, even though Laura has never had any callers at their St. Louis apartment. Laura, who limps because of a slight physical deformity, would rather spend her time playing with the animals in her glass menagerie and listening to old phonograph records instead of learning shorthand and typing so she can be employable. When she learns Laura has only been pretending to go to secretarial school, Amanda decides Laura must have a real gentleman caller and insists her son Tom, who works at a shoe factory, find one immediately. After a few days, Tom tells Amanda he has invited a young man named Jim O'Connor home for dinner and at long last Laura will have her first gentleman caller.
The night of the dinner Amanda does every thing she can to make sure Laura looks more attractive. However, when Laura realizes that the Jim O'Connor who is visiting is possibly the same Jim on whom she had a crush in high school, she does not want to go through with the dinner. Although she has to be excused from the dinner because she has made herself physically ill, Laura is able to impress Jim with her quiet charm when the two of them keep company in the living room and she finally loses some of her shyness. When Jim gives Laura her first kiss, it looks as if Amanda's plans for Laura's happiness might actually come true. But no one has ever accused Tennessee Williams of being a romantic.
"The Glass Menagerie" was the first big success in the long and storied career of playwright Tennessee Williams. Written in 1944, the drama consists of reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, "The Gentleman Caller." In many ways it is an atypical drama from Williams, with the character of Tom (a role I will confess to playing on stage) serving as a narrator who breaks the "fourth wall" and addresses the audience, which evinces Williams' affinity for Eugene O'Neill (e.g., "The Emperor Jones") at this point in his career. Tom tells the audience that this play offers truth dressed up as illusion, and in his stage directions (which are usually not taken full advantage of in the various performances I have seen because what was cutting edge in 1944 is overly quaint today) he uses not only monologues but also music and projections to enhance the memories on display. Williams also explicitly tells his audience that the gentleman call is the symbol of "the expects something that we live for."
This "memory play" tells of a family trapped in destructive patterns. After being abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield, a woman of the Great Depression, has become trapped between worlds of illusion and reality. She says she wants what is best for her children, but seems incapable of acknowledging what that would be or actually providing it for them. Tom, tired of only watching adventure at the movies, is determined to break away from his dominating mother, but stays only for the sake of his sister. Laura may not be the glamorous belle of the ball her mothers wants, but she has her own inner charm and when confronted with Jim, a visitor from the normal world, there is the chance that she will finally claim her life as her own. This is a poignant drama on the importance of love and it represents a memory of not only family but also of loss.

The Glass Menagerie Overview

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

Want to learn more information about The Glass Menagerie?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Buy Cheap A Passage to India Review

Are you looking to buy A Passage to India? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on A Passage to India. check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

A Passage to India Review

I've read and enjoyed several Forster books, but "A Passage to India" tops them all. The plot concerns the arrival in Chandrapore, India of Ms. Quested and her potential mother-in-law, Mrs. Moore. They come to visit Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny, who is engaged to Ms. Quested. Ms. Quested and Mrs. Moore are the typical new arrivals, and they desire to see more of the "real" India than they can see with their fellow Brits, who tend to gather in the state Club and socialize only with each other. They become involved with Dr. Aziz, a local Indian physician, who promises to show them the famous, nearby Marabar caves. Dr. Aziz is solicitous toward the Brits and craves their friendship, but he clearly has negative feelings toward them also.
At the Marabar caves, an incident occurs (or does not occur) to Ms. Quested that alters all of the characters and their town inextricably. There is a trial and a bit of a mystery, but the focus is always on the characters and their conflicts. In particular, the tension between the English and the people of India is beautifully portrayed. The characters are multi-dimensional, as are their motives, which makes for a fascinating read. I found the book to be quite moving and sad - a true classic.

A Passage to India Overview

Want to learn more information about A Passage to India?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

42% Off Discounts: Best Buy for The House on Mango Street Review

Are you looking to buy The House on Mango Street? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The House on Mango Street. check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers!

The House on Mango Street Review

I read some reviews for this book and I could not believe how underated it is and how many people didn't understand it. Some people say that it is just a collection of random thoughts, but that is not the case. You see, this book a whole story and instead of having chapters of episodes, it contains "vignettes" which the dictionary defines as "a short descrioptive literary sketch". Each vignette contains an important part of the story. The whole story describes the thoughts, feelings, and meories of Esperanza, an hispanic girl living in the poverty corner of the city, with dreams to escape her world. At the same time, she grows up and starts to leave her childhood, while learning about the fears and dangers of the world she never knew of before. Becomeing an adult turns out to be a hard challenge. The first vignette called "House On Mango Street" is meant to describe the setting. The second "Hairs" describes the looks and characteristics of the characters. The third called "Boys and Girls" tells the difference between genders, which is important because the story deals with men and women. The following vignette called "My Name" paints the image of self and the feelings of hope and the future. Therefore, these vignettes are not mere collections of random thoughts and uneducated language, but a poetic story with a well drawn setting, characterization, and gripping tone. Even though the story evolves around hispanics, this is a book for all races. The poverty and dreams of home remind me of the experiences of African-Americans and Chinese, as well as Caucasians. When I was in a Creative Writing class, we wrote many vignettes and if you are a student in Creative Writing you HAVE to get this book and share it with your class and teacher. It will help you understand the importance writing free verses, for this is the best example of vignettes I have ever seen. The voice of the author does not sound profesional or too fancy, but like the ordinary words people say today. it is a story of our time and a tale for all. My only complaint is that it was too short! I wanted to know more about what Esperanza does and her wishes. I also wanted to know what happened to her after the story. Even so, it is pretty plain to see that Esperanza learned how to escape from her cruel world, unlike the people who never knew where she went. I haven't seen such an exquisite story of our modern times since I read the "Joy Luck Club" about two years ago. If you want to read a beautiful story about growing up, living life, and with musical poetry, you must read this book.

The House on Mango Street Overview

Want to learn more information about The House on Mango Street?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...