The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Bradley Homewood

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is about a boy with a very poor and trashy life. If you do not have a lot of patience to read the beginning of the story you might not like Huckleberry Finn other than that I would recommend the book.

 Having a drunk dad that goes around and causes problems whenever he gets money to drink, Huck doesn't know all that much.  He has a friend named Tom Sawyer that always convinces him to do dumb stuff. Tom Sawyer convinces Huck to join his gang and if anyone outside of the gang finds out about the gang whoever let word out about the gangs parents will be killed along with the gang member.

 Huck eventually lives with his dad for awhile and his dad locks Huck in the house and goes out and gets drunk and comes back home and beats Huck. Eventually Huck runs away from his dads home and fakes his death by killing a pig and putting blood from it all over the cabin.

 Miss Watson is a lady that tries to civilize Huck constantly and has fed and housed Huck before. Jim is Miss Watson’s slave and runs away fearing Miss Watson is going to sell him to a plantation down the road. Huck and Jim meet up and work together to stay alive and what not.

Eventually Huck ends up in the home of a family called the Grangerfords who have been stuck in a war with another big family called the Shepherdsons. Huck gets tangled up in the war but he runs away to Jim's hiding place and they escape through the river.

Huckleberry Finn eventually  has a big turnaround in the story with Tom Sawyer again. The Phelpses which are Tom Sawyers Aunt and Uncle have Jim captured as their slave now. Tom and Huck meet up again and Tom makes a very complicated plan to free Jim from his own Aunt and Uncle.

Go Ask Alice ~ Jacey Guy

The book that I read is called Go Ask Alice by Anonymous. This book starts out with a normal young high school girl who is always thinking. Worried about her weight, boys, and having trouble trying to get along with her parents. Along with all of that she just moved to a new town, which means she’ll be going to a new school. She starts to feel like the outcast at school and doesn’t have any friends. But soon after she moves she makes friends with a neighbor of hers, her name is Beth.

As summer rolls around Beth leaves goes to a summer camp so Alice decides that she needs some time away. Alice decided that she is going to go live with her grandparents for a while. While she is at her grandparents she meets up with an old friend Jill. After they get done talking Jill said that she would be giving Alice a call to hang out sometime. “Oh Diary, I’m so happy I could cry! It did happen! Jill called at exactly 10:32. I know because I’d been sitting by the phone with my watch in my hand trying to send ESP signals to her. She’s having a few kids over for an autograph party, thank heavens I brought my year book…” Pg. 30. Little did Alice know it wasn’t just an autograph party. They played a game called “Button, Button, Who’s Got The Button?”. They brought out Coke’s for everyone to drink, “… 10 out of the 14 bottles of coke had LSD in them and, “button, button,” no one knew just who would wind up with them.” Alice enjoying the trip she got, made her want to try more drugs.

Getting into many situations that has led her to run away from home to get a “better life” has simply not happened exactly how she planned. From starvation, to prostitution to get drugs, living in dirty homes, sleeping on playgrounds, Alice has had a pretty bad time with drugs. As many times as she’s tried to quit she ends up going back to it. Once she realizes she needs help she decides to go back home. Always living in fear and promising herself not to relapse.

I recommend this book to anyone. For someone who doesn’t really enjoy reading, I loved this book.  Hearing these little parts of this girl’s life and what she went through is very interesting. You definitely can feel what she’s feeling at the moment in the book.

Marshall Petesch - Catch 22

Catch 22 takes place during World War 2 and is a story about an Air Force squadron.  The main character in this story is Yossarian, he is a captain and the lead bombardier in his squadron.  Through out this story you go through thinking that Yossarian is the crazy one but as you read you start to find out that he is the only sane one left.  In the beginning Yossarian is in the army hospital pretending to be sick so that he can get out of combat duty.  While he is there he is assigned to censer letters that are going home to family members.  he soon finds this to be boring so to make it interesting he starts to blacken out random words or going as far as to blacken out entire letters except one or two words.  When he finds singing his name to be boring he starts to sign his name as Washington Irving, then Irving Washington.  You can quickly see that the whole story is about Yossarian going against the norm or what is expected of him.  It is for that reason that he at first seems to be the crazy one, when all he is trying to do is not die in combat.  This book does contain different points of views so that the reader can better understand the main character and the wear that war can take on you mentally.  Some other important characters include, Doc Daneeka, Colonel Cathcart, Hungry Joe, McWatt, Dunbar, and Major Major Major Major.   I personally liked this book but it is not something I would recommend to anyone.  It is a fairly difficult book to read but has a lot of corny humor in it.  This book does bring a meaning to Catch 22, which is a no win situation in which there is no escape.

Flyboy's By Parker Markham

Flyboys

By James Bradley

In Flyboys, the real horror of the book is war itself, and the nature of war doesn't differ much on either side of the conflict. Horrible things happen in war that's the way war is. Dwelling on the crimes of one side or the other just feeds the fires of conflict, years after the end of hostilities. Even the most terrible of war crimes, like what happened to eight stranded American Navy, Marine and Army Air Corps flyers on the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, must be understood as part of the overall horrors of war.

This is a story of what happened to a group of American naval aviators on the Japanese held island of Chichi Jima was a long-held secret, buried within the flurry of war-crime trials. Chichi Jima was a sideshow in the war, one of the Bonin Islands, near the vastly more famous Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima had room for an airstrip; Chichi Jima only had room for a huge radio station, sending intelligence data back to Tokyo. That made it a secondary target. Were tasked to destroy it. Anti-aircraft fired form the island brought some of the American planes down, and their surviving crew members parachuted to the island as prisoners.

What happened to Jimmy Dye, Glenn Frazier, Floyd Hall, Marve Mershon, Dick Woelhof, Grady York, Warren Earl Vaughan, and the anonymous B-24 crewman who shared their fates is shocking so much so that even their families could not know the whole truth. It was certainly a violation of the Geneva Convention protecting the rights of prisoners of war. It was so awful that most of the Japanese soldiers had to be ordered to participate.

This concludes my blog on Flyboys although I really did not like the book it was just too boring and long for my liking. I felt that draged on about the war and what happened to the pilots.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Tyler Flint

                The book 20,000 leagues under the sea was published in 1870 by Jules Verne.  The book starts off with a mysterious creature that is wondering the sea and damaging ships. The creature is 25 feet long and is appearing at different places across the world in a matter of weeks or days. This gives you an idea for the great speed of this creature. Our main character Professor Pierre Aronnax is a Marine Biologist and assumes this creature is a type of Narwhal that hasn’t been classified yet. She believes this because of the triangular shaped puncture in the side of one of the ships, which could be explained by the Narwhals horn. A ship was specifically designed to go out and hunt this creature down; Ned Land is a very skilled with a harpoon so he was asked to come aboard the expedition, Professor Aronnax was asked to come aboard so that he could classify the creature. When they finally caught up to the creature, the creature had hit their propeller and knocked Ned Land, Professor Aronnax in the water. Conseil (Professor Aronnax’s assistant) had jumped in the water to help professor Aronnax. When in the water they found a platform to stand on. This platform was the top of the creature, it was made of steal. It turned out to be a submarine that was secretly made by a small group of people. The Captain had designed this submarine to be sustainable on only the materials he obtained from the ocean. This way he could stay at sea for the rest of his life and never have to go to land. Captain Nemo hated the corrupted world so he sentenced himself to exile at sea. The ship was all electric that he obtained power through the salt and phosphorus he found in the ocean. He hunted with pressurized air guns that had electric bullets and could kill any mammal with one hit. With everything Nemo had he was self-sustainable at sea for the rest of his life. The Crew let Ned and Professor Aronnax and Conseil aboard with the only rule that they could never leave because they know his secret.

Bleachers - by Branson Vaught

I read the book Bleachers by John Grisham. The book is about a former highschool quarterback Neely Crenshaw who has tried to keep football out of his life until he gets a call that his highschool coach has died and the funeral is this weekend. Neely was a hero to his town and everyone there. In his college career Neely hurt his knee bad and will never be able to play football again let alone barely walk. He is angry at the way his Coach Eddie Rake made him think that football is everything. He meets up with some of his buddies from highschool and the remember all the memories from there senior season. They talk about all the other teams that Eddie Rake had coached, and there former players. Neely gets an inside look how Eddie Rake was outside of football by talking to some of the former players and how he was so different off the field. They talk about how Eddie Ran a kid so hard that he had a heart attack and died and how he was kicked from being head coach after 32 years. This book will take you through the twists and turns with Neely as he tries to forgive his Coach who that he hated so long. I would recomend this for any athlete or anyone who likes a good sports book.

James Taylor Purple Heart

I read the book Puple Heart by Patricia McCormick. This novel is about a soldier named Matt that was fighting in Iraq and was wounded in battle. He wakes up in an Iraq army hospital and the doctors say he is suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury. Matt is awarded the Purple Heart from being injured in combat. During his stay in the hospital he kept having dreams about a memory he had of a young boy being shot. He didnt know who it was or why he was dreaming of him. His fellow soldier Justin visited him once and a while and told him some things that happened to see if he could remember and as days went by he started to remember more. It made me feel more pitty for soldiers that leave their families and go and fight for our country. It also makes me think about all the things that they have to put behind them. "You were under fire..." Matt says. That statement says he was under fire and they most likely had to fire back and who knows if they killed anyone and they have live with that for the rest of their lives. Wether it be the people that they killed or just something they regret doing. This book was a good read. I would suggest this book to those who are interested in the military and like to read about the conflict with Iraq.