So, my last three blog posts have been about the novel 'All the Light we Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr. I have summarized it, connected it to historical events of that time, and even connected it to our world today, but you're probably wondering what the big deal is. Why should you care about this book? Well, before we answer that question, I would like to refresh your memory of how this book ended. As you may recall, Jutta was traveling back to France with her son Max to return the little wooden house to Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure received the object, and all the memories that came with it. The Sea of Flames sits safely hidden in a grotto in Saint-Malo, Werner is dead, Von Rumpel is dead, Etienne is dead, Madame Manec is dead, Marie-Laure's father is dead, and Fredrick sits disabled in his Berlin apartment. Marie-Laure's twelve year old grandson Michel has just left her house after a visit. Now that your memory is up to date, back to the real question, so what? First of all, 'All the Light we Cannot See' was simply a beautiful story. It was well written, thought provoking, and heart wrenching. But more than that, it taught me that sometimes there is no way to escape you're hopeless or miserable state of life. Everyone is always saying that if you try hard enough, or believe enough, or work hard enough, you will find a way out, but sadly that can't always be the case. You see this progress through Werner's part of the story because at first he is stuck as an orphan in a mining town, destined to rot in the mines, with no money or family save his sister Jutta. "Werner Pfennig grows up three-hundered miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coal-mining complex outside Essen, Germany. It's steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slang heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld... Men brawl over jobs outside the Zollverein gates, and chicken eggs sell for two million reichsmarks apiece, and rheumatic fever stalks Children's House like a wolf. There is no butter or meat. Fruit is a memory." Then one day he thinks he has found a way out, Nazi training school where he has dreams of studying science and becoming an engineer in Berlin. But it is only after he gets there that this is no escape. His skills are used to hunt down and kill foreigners. The school tortures his friend, separates him from Jutta, and makes him sick. Everything in his gut is telling him to defy the very system that keeps him alive because it is evil, unjust, and corrupt, but that would mean death for Werner. There is no escape. You see this in a more literal sense towards the end of the book where Marie-Laure is trapped hiding in her attic with low supplies, while blood-thirsty Von Rumpel is in the house looking for her. Because she is blind, she does not stand a chance fighting him off, and if she stays in the attic she will die of dehydration and starvation. She is stuck, both options result in her dying, there is no escape. There is no escape for her uncle Etienne from the ghosts he sees due to his PTSD. There is no way for her father to escape prison. There is no escape for Jutta when the Russian soldiers come for her and her friends. There is no way out of the factory without them seeing her, and so they just wait upstairs for the inevitable. Anthony Doerr is constantly painting the picture for us that sometimes, and especially in war, there is no way to escape death or miserable situations. That really hit home for me because usually whenever I hear about the horrors citizens face in war and other conflicts I just think 'Oh, there's always a solution if you try hard enough for one.' or 'There had to have been a better way.' and things like that. But now I have this new perspective, and I realize that that is seldom the case.
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Some parts of 'All the Light we Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr are still relevant today. For example; at the end of the book when Jutta has to travel to France to return Marie-Laure's tiny wooden house that was given to Werner, she takes a French train. While on the train with her six year old son Max, she is surrounded by French people who can obviously tell that she is German. She catches one man's eye and starts to panic. " 'Maybe he smells the German. He'll say, You did this to me. Please. Not in front of my son.' " She is so afraid of being found German and in turn being blamed, mocked, and hated for everything that Germany did to France. Mind you that this is almost 60 years after the War and French Resistance, (making it 2004), and she is still petrified by it. She was not even in France when it happened, a soldier for Germany, or working for or agreeing with the Nazis in any way, but because there is still anger in France, she is afraid. The book shows that, while France may be free, and Nazis are no longer in power, and World War Two is over, the feelings that it left behind are far from gone yet.
Thus far in 'All the Light we Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr, I am almost at the end, hence, a lot has happened. Mare Laure is a sixteen year old, blind, Parisian girl who lives safely in an apartment with her father, Monsieur LeBlanc, a museum geologist. She lived a normal life, made up of her and her fathers routines of how they dealt with her blindness, accompanying him to work, learning about the wonders of the museum, walking to the park, and reading. Even the puzzle box she receives every year for her birthday remain the same, until one day her father informs her that they have to flee Paris to go live with her uncle Etienne in Saint-Malo, it will be safer there. She is confused an doesn't know why, but obeys anyways. There are two reasons her father insisted on fleeing. One, with the Germans invading, Paris is the most dangerous place to be. And two, her father is carrying The Sea of Flames, the museum's most expensive and prized diamond, said to bring good fortune to whomever owned it, but destroy the ones they love. The owners of the museum want it as far away and hidden from the Germans as possible. Meanwhile in Zollverein, Germany lives a teenage orphan named Werner Pfennig. He is presumably stuck in coal mining, with his little sister Jutta, no way out, and no future. Until one day when he finds a broken radio behind the orphanage where he lives. He quickly learns how to repair it and make it work. Him and his sister are completely enthralled by it and listen to it every night. Their favorite channel is one where a French man discusses science and theories, but little to they know that it is the voice of Marie Laure's uncle Etienne. A wealthy couple in the town soon catch wind of Werner's ability with radios, and ask him to come fix theirs. Once they see him at work, they almost immediately decide that he is to talented and too smart to stay here in Zollverein and rot in the mines, and give him money and an application to the Training School for the Nazi Military Elite. Here he proves superior in all his academics, and befriends Fredrick (a boy who is considered the weakest in the school, and takes a beating for it, he soon contracts a disease and becomes mentally impaired for the rest of his life). Werner on the other hand, invented a new form of trigonometry that allows you to figure out the location of foreign and illegal radio transmissions. This achievement sends him out into the world with a small team, intercepting radio transmissions and eliminating the law breakers that sent them, until he ends up in Saint-Malo, France. All this time Jutta has tried to keep in communication with Werner, to be his moral compass, but her letters arrive to Werner so censored and blacked out they're hard to read. Now, while all of this is happening, Von Rumpel, a Nazi gemologist is scouring Europe to find The Sea of Flames. Their are two decoys, and he has already come across those, Marie-Laure has the real diamond, and he is coming for her. Meanwhile, back in Saint-Malo, Marie Laure's father has been arrested for taking measurements of the buildings and streets in order to help Marie Laure find her way around this new, unfamiliar town. She clings to hope that he will return, but he never does. She helps Madame Manec with the resistance efforts, visits the sea shore, reads her braille copy of 2000 Leagues Under the Seas, and spends time with her uncle (he is too afraid to go outside because of his PTSD from World War One). As time get tougher, and Saint-Malo becomes the last liberated part of France, Etienne shows her his radio in the attic, which he is keeping illegally, and builds a fake wall in the back of the wardrobe that leads to a ladder to the attic. Madame Mannec dies shortly after, but Marie Laure is still eager to help with the resistance, so Etienne works to overcome his fear, and agrees to help. He receives word that his mission is to measure distances between buildings for an attack. He goes out in the morning to avoid being caught, but is not quite early enough, and is arrested, not to the knowledge of Marie Laure. Confused, afraid, and alone, she tries to figure out what happened. Von Rumpel breaks in the same morning. She takes some food, water, a knife, and her novel, and goes up to the attic to hide. From here she turns on the radio twice a day to read and transmit her uncle's old science channels to who ever could be listening, if anyone. And someone is, Werner. Trapped in the basement of a Saint-Malo hotel after it had been bombed and collapsed, he finally was able to get a radio working, and miraculously connects to Marie Laure's channel. He instantly recognizes the French science broadcasts from his childhood, and stays on this channel for days, listening to her read, and the science. When he finally finds a way out of the collapsed basement, he spots a house with a radio antenna sticking out alongside the chimney, and decides that must be the girl's house, it is. He runs through the door, and when he sees Von Rumpel searching for the girl with murder in his eyes, Werner kills him on the spot. He then coaxes Marie Laure out of the attic and they become each others only friends. After staying in the house for another day, Werner decides they must leave because of the constant bombing that has not stopped for four days now. He helps her out of the city and to safety, but he himself is unfortunately caught and put in a prison, where he contracts an awful sickness. Feeling he has nothing left to live for, he gets out of his prison tent and right onto the beach, where he is blown up by a minefield. Years later, Werner's sister Jutta is all grown up and has son Max. She hears that a possession Werner died with ( that she had in her house) belonged to someone living in Paris, France. (This someone will turn out to be Marie Laure, now 86 with a grandson.) While Jutta is on a train in France, she is terrified of the french people and what they might say to her because she is German. She arrives at Marie Laure's apartment, return the object that is hers, explains, that she is Werner's sister, and walks away, not able to bear staying any longer. "Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."- Anthony Doerr
'Wolf by Wolf' by Ryan Graudin was so fabulous! It was about a girl with a scientific mutation that made her capable of skin-shifting, in a world where the Nazis won World War Two. She goes undercover in a global motorcycle race for the Axis Powers with one mission; kill the Führer. There were so many twists and turns, I could hardly put it down, you never can predict whats going to happen next, and I love books like that. In some books you can see a twist coming, plain as day, before it actually happens, and it's kind of disappointing, which was one of the reasons I loved this book. I would recommend this book for so many types of readers honestly. I think people who like, thrillers, action, historical fiction, or science fiction, would thoroughly enjoy 'Wolf by Wolf'. I can't wait to read the sequel 'Blood for Blood', it looks amazing!
For my project I am reading 'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr, about the French Resistance of Vichy France during World War Two. Germany invaded France in August of 1940, hence changing the capital from Paris to Vichy, setting up the Petain regime, and making France embrace Nazi ideology. The French people were repulsed and afraid, they wanted the Germans out. Now the novel I'm reading made it sound like every french citizen was involved in the resistance (publishing and delivering underground newspapers, planning and launching sabotages, gathering intelligence, etc.), and that they were all willing to stand up and join in the fight to liberate their home country no matter the cost. But that could not have been farther from the truth. Out of the entire population of France, only one, maybe barely two percent was actively engaged and fighting in the resistance. "Only another eight percent were passive resisters—that is, they were willing to read subversive publications, celebrate traditional national holidays privately and quietly despite German bans, and provide crucial moral support to active Resistance networks. The vast majority of French people simply tried to muddle through and survive increasingly tough times, while a certain undefined, but uncomfortably large number either supported Vichy in the (forlorn) hope that it would ultimately form a bulwark against German repression, or actively collaborated with the Petain regime." - The Real Story of the French Resistance, The Daily Best. This is very different than the feeling of 'All the Light We Cannot See'. It seemed as if everyone in the town of Saint Malo hated the German invasion, and were involved in a way to stop it. " 'I want to do it. Madame would want-.'
'Tell it to me. Tell me the whole routine.' ' Twenty-two paces down the rue Vauborel to the rue d'Estrées. Then right for sixteen storm drains. Left on rue Robert Surcouf. Nine more storm drains to the bakery. I go to the counter and say, 'One ordinary loaf, please.' " -All the Light We Cannot See, page 322. At this particular point in the book, the sixteen year old blind girl, Marie Laure, is telling her Uncle that she still wants to help with the resistance even after Madame Manec, her guardian, has died. Everyone in Anthony Doerr's novel was fearless and hungry to help, much different from the actual situation. Introduction- We are interested in this issue because we can make it better for everybody else in the community. Everyone should be interested in it because it is an issue of common decency and morality. We won't only help ourselves but we help them as well. If we all take a part and just help, you’ll realize that there is always much more to life then to complain about not having something everybody else has, a homeless person would want everything you have even if you didn't have everything. Having a warm place to sleep and having food to eat everyday is much more than just a privilege. So, therefore, we are trying to make 110 pieces of furniture and home accessories to help out the ones in need. (10 Facts About Homelessness, 2014) We are going to be discussing Homelessness, which is the issue of not having a home or having a place to go after a really long day. This affects our community because not only do the people suffer whether it's because they are cold or they just generally don't have a place to stay, but it affects us because while we have a comfortable place to stay and we sleep great at night. they don't and you can only imagine the horrible things they’d have to go through in order to make it through the day. Habitat for Humanity makes many homes that help many people but when it comes to furniture, they offer little to none. (Wake County Sees Nearly 25% Decline in Homeless Population, 2015) Body 1- Homelessness is one of the biggest issues in the United States.The effects of homelessness on homeless people are large. They range from health issues to personal entrapment. It is believed that many homeless people fail in their lives to cope with their difficulties and this makes them alienate themselves from the rest of the world. This issue is affecting the community because, out in the street homeless people are asking for money, or just walking around to find shelter. This issue started in the early 1980s, approximately 3.5 million people become homeless a year, including children, men, women, and also families. (Top Causes of Homelessness in America, 2017) They have to suffer and beg for money and for food. Some people can do a lot but legally they can't so with this kind of help we are giving maybe we can make a difference for them in their everyday life and show them not everybody is the way they think they are. People can become homeless by some cause like, job loss, personal crisis, or family break-up, etc. When people got nowhere to go they end up in the street. Some homeless people might have health problem like, cold injury, cardio-respiratory disease, tuberculosis, skin disease, mental illness, and some other disease that can be spread out to the other people, and that can affects the community, because people with good health, can get the disease by just passing there or just standing there for a long time. If people don't help with this issue they could become one too. They would have to deal with there health issues as well and if we did help we wouldn't have to worry anymore. Body 2- Because homelessness is obviously such a prevalent issue in our community, you’re probably wondering what is already being done to help it. In Raleigh,we are fortunate enough to have a large supply of organizations and nonprofits helping in a variety of ways. Some help with emergency and transitional housing, such as the Wrenn House, Raleigh Rescue Mission, Helen Wright’s Center, Urban Ministries, and the Salvation Army. Others help to provide food for these people in need, because if the people are homeless, they probably have a hard time finding and affording substantial food. Many shelters provide meals for their residents, but if you are not in the care of a shelter, as many people are not, then where do you go to eat? That is the issue that places like Brown Bag Ministry, the Salvation Army (for men not staying in their residence), Rows for the Hungry, Shepherd’s Table Soup Kitchen, Interfaith Food Shuttle, and other various food banks, are helping with. But that is not all that is being done. Due to the fact that homelessness is such a big issue, affecting nearly everyone in some way, there are still even more places who provide necessary services for living. These include employment counseling, mental health services, referrals, and shower facilities. Speaking of which, in response to the incident in 2013 where a church group was threatened to be arrested for distributing food to hungry people without a permit (although they had been doing so for the last six years), they have decided to open a new facility. The Oak City Outreach Center in Southeast Raleigh, is providing much needed services in a convenient place. This is also one of the first centers to have a partnership between the local Raleigh government, and private organizations. They provide meals on weekends (when most other places are closed), a sense of community, storage spaces, tutoring, and all of the other services I mentioned earlier, to try and end homelessness. Sadly though, despite all the wonderful work being done by these organizations, there is still a need for help. Just because people have access to food and services, does not mean that they are off the streets, with a roof over their heads. Even if someone is in transitional or emergency housing, they cannot stay in these shelters forever, and they still need to find a permanent, safe place to live. Habitat for Humanity is attacking this problem at its roots by building quality, affordable houses. They build approximately fifty homes per year, all for people in need. One thing that I think is neat about this program is that the family or person who will be buying the house, gets to help build it. The houses come with essential utilities (dishwashers, refrigerators, washers and dryers, stoves, ice makers, heating, and air conditioning), but this does not necessarily mean the houses come furnished. The Greenchair Project realized this, and is now upcycling donated furniture, appliances, and other home goods, to sell affordably to the people in need. As you can see, people are recognizing how big of an issue homelessness in Raleigh is, and they are doing what they can to help end it. Not everyone is going about this in the same way, but that is actually a very good thing, if everyone were helping in the same way we would have no variety and get nowhere. Therefore, we have shelters, soup kitchens, food banks, housing, services, community centers, and more. There is so much being done to help homelessness in Raleigh. Conclusion- In order to help with the problems concerning homelessness, we have come up with the idea to build furniture and home accessories. The key part of a house is not only the walls and roof but the commodities inside it. Furniture gives a house a soul, the contents of a house make it home and some nice students made and donated furniture and accessories will give it that feel. Habitat For Humanity builds many homes but does not furnish them. We thought it would be a good idea, for as many families as we can, to make a house, home. Our goal is to make 110 pieces of furniture to take a monetary load off of those who can't afford it. Our timetable will consist of the morning being a safety and construction lesson. In the mid part of the day we will be doing the construction. In the afternoon we will be shipping the furniture to its designated location. The first step would be to get the materials required to build the furniture. In order to do this we thought we would contact local and national chain hardware stores to get wood, nails, tools, and paint. The biggest problem, we can control, we have come up with a solution for. Legal responsibilities and obligations are always a huge concern when discussing events at school, a waiver, confirming permission for the event from the proper authority, and a safety course. This should give complete legal room for our purposes and activities. Our next priority is transportation for the furniture to a donation site. For this we thought we could hold a fundraiser in order to raise money to rent trucks from companies like U-Haul. We will need volunteers to drive the trucks, these could be the same volunteers we thought we could recruit to be supervisors. We would need to coordinate this with administrative power to get an ok. In order to help with the fundraiser and the whole event in general we could make posters, flyers, and maybe one or two videos to get the message out. The next thing we would do would be to contact habitat for humanity. (Habitat for Humanity, 2017) We would ask if it is ok to donate what we are donating and if that quantity is okay. If the event goes well, we will have the furniture transported to a site they designate for that amount of furniture. Once it is transported we would consider the event a success and we suspect we will have over one hundred pieces of furniture donated. Bibliography- James Borden, “Wake County Sees Nearly 25% Decline in Homeless Populations” Raleigh Public Record June 22, 2015. March 20, 2017 <Borden, James. "Wake County Sees Nearly 25% Decline in Homeless Population." Raleigh Public Record. N.p., 22 June 2015. Web. 30 Mar. 2017.> Habitat for Humanity March 20, 2017 "Habitat For Humanity of Wake County." Habitat for Humanity of Wake County. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2017. Solutions, Blue Tangerine. "HomeAid." HomeAid. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2017. <https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-tangerine-solutions-inc.> KVNF, Laura Palmisano, December 1, 2014 <http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kvnf/files/201412/4206572027_798a1277cf_z.jpg> Hollowell, Hugh.”Feeding Homeless Apparently Illegal in Raleigh NC” Love Wins Ministries August 24, 2014. March 20, 2017 <http://www.lovewinsministries.org/2013/08/feeding-homeless-apparently-illegal-in-raleigh-nc/> Oak City Outreach Center March 20, 2017 <http://www.endhomelessnesswake.org/what-we-do/oak-city-outreach-center/> Hey! I finished 'Fairest' (the prologue to the Lunar Chronicles) by Marissa Meyers yesterday, and honestly, I was disappointed. It was very short, I was able to finish it in three days, so I had no time to get attached to the characters and actually care about what they were doing. The author said that the point of this book was to reveal the antagonist's back story, but for me it was only more detail on what I already knew about her past. The things I was dying to know about Levana (the antagonist) were not answered or mentioned in 'Fairest.' I would only recommend this book if you want to be able to say that you have read every book in the series.
Hi guys! I just finished reading 'Winter' by Marissa Meyer last Sunday, and oh my goodness it was so good! Being the fourth in its series, I won't give anything away, but I highly recommend it, and the entire Lunar Chronicles. There were so many plot twists and it was so enthralling to read I could hardly put it down. I finished this book in about three weeks, which is like a record for me, so that should just give you an idea of how amazing it is. But not to say that I was a little sad when I finished 'Winter' because I had become so attached to these characters over these four books, and now it was over. Plus it ended on a sort of cliff hanger, with lots of things unanswered, which is both frustrating and cool. I would recommend this series if you love sci-fi or action.
Hey guys, my personality is kind of weird to be honest. I am introverted and reserved for the most part, but lots of my friends don't really know that. I have been trying to get better about meeting and warming up to new people, but it's kinda scary. But once I get comfortable with someone, you will probably never be able to get me to be quiet. I enjoy having my alone time just as much as I love being out with my friends. So yeah, I guess my personality is a little weird.
As a state, we are 9th in the country in food insecurity, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, with Greensboro and Highpoint being two of the worst not only in North Carolina, but in the US. This article has a lot of good information and statistics on food deserts in North Carolina (specifically the Greensboro area). It also has a story about a 24 year old girl, Mara Richards, who deals with this reality everyday of her life. The nearest 'grocery' (it's more like a gas station) is 2 miles away, and she has to walk there. After you read this story, I think it will better help you understand how real and severe this problem is, and that it's happening right under our noses. The article also talks about a new co-op opening in the area to help with this issue, and while I as a teenager cannot do something that drastic, there are still things you and I can do to help. For example, you can volunteer at a soup kitchen, donate to a food bank, help with organizations such as Meals on Wheels (which delivers meals to the homes of people and families in need), and volunteering at community gardens. We can all play a part in the end of food deserts.
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AuthorHi guys! I am an 8th grade student who loves to dance, read, and do anything outside. This blog might start to look like a hodge-podge of different things (and quite honestly it probably will be) as I will be using this for school projects, my own thoughts, dance, and basically anything else. Archives
May 2017
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