My independent reading book was A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. This novel covered many topics, and mainly was a social commentary on the troubled culture and society of post Second World War England. Evil is a very important tool used by Burgess, mainly in the thematic sense. A Clockwork Orange uses Evil in the theme of Good vs. Evil. The question in the novel is if forced good is better than chosen evil. Alex, the narrator, goes through a metamorphosis, from choosing evil, to being forced to be good, and then once again Alex chooses evil. Burgess leaves it up to the reader to decide which is more ethical, even though he does heavily support, with subtle details and motifs, that free will, even it results in a chosen evil is better than a forced good.“Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him”(Burgess 95)? Evil is also used in the novel to show the darker side of humanity, the side that allowed the narrator to rape, beat, rob, and terrorize innocent people in the city, with his band of thugs or so called “droogs”. The novel, because of this evil is repulsive, disgusting, and unsavory, and after reading more than 15 pages, the reader is left with a sick feeling simply because of the content being discussed. Evil is a powerful force, apparent in everything from literature to the nightly news, and no matter how much we try to reassure ourselves that evil will never touch us, it will, and A clockwork Orange is a perfect example of the ever present and permeating nature of evil.

http://www.ugo.com/dvd/a-clockwork-orange

http://www.redeemedreader.com/2011/09/behind-the-bookcase-a-clockwork-orange/

All The Pretty Horses is about three teenage American boys who run away to Mexico. Although this seems odd, considering the fact that many Mexicans go the other way and that their is some racial tension between white Americans and Mexicans, but they boys decide Mexico is the place for them. They do not have racist tendencies towards the Mexicans they encounter and one even falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy ranch owner. Hate is not a driving force in this novel.

One of the main characters, John Grady, falls in love with a Mexican girl named Alejandra. John Grady works with the horses on her father’s ranch. He is respected by the man, until he discovers of their affair. Upon learning of their affair, he has John Grady arrested and sent to prison, which he is eventually freed from. When John Grady returns to the ranch he finds that Alejandra’s father will not speak to him, and that Alejandra herself is not staying at the ranch. He speaks with his lover’s aunt, who tells him he can never speak to Alejandra again, and tells her that he does not hate her or her brother for what they did to him. John Grady does not feel hate in this novel.

Another character who readers may think John Grady would hate is the police captain that murders Blevins. Blevins is one of John Grady’s companions who is younger than him. Blevins had lost his horse in a storm, but found it in a Mexican village. He was forced to steal the horse back and is separated from John Grady and Rawlins, their other companion. Stupidly he returns to the village and kills a few people before he is arrested and later executed after being reunited with John Grady and Rawlins. After John Grady’s visit to the ranch, he decides to get his horse back as well as the horses of Rawlins and Blevins. As he does so he takes the captain hostage, but refuses to kill him, as he does not hate him. He just uses him to escape into the Mexican countryside. Once again John Grady proves his lack of hate.

The one place where hate does appear in the novel is in the prison that John Grady and Rawlins are sent to. John Grady and Rawlins do not hate anyone themselves, but they are hated by most of the inmates, because of their nationality. The inmates attack them daily and one is able to wound Rawlins enough to get him sent to the hospital. John Grady is forced to buy a knife and then defend himself from an assassin, who he kills. The hate that both men experience drives John Grady to do something he never believed he could do: kill a man.

Hate does not manifest itself in any of the main characters of this novel. Most of the lesser characters in the novel show friendliness, or at least hospitality. The lack of hate makes the prison environment even harsher and makes John Grady’s crime seem more justified. Hate is not a major theme in this novel, as it only manifests itself in one location.

Cormac McCarthy covers many big ideas in All the Pretty Horses.  However, one character completely embodies stupidity: Blevins.

Blevins is a thirteen year old boy that decides to run away from home to Mexico and to join a sixteen year old, John Grady Cole, and a seventeen year old, Lacey Rawlins, who he does not know, that are doing the same.  Blevins carries a revolver, which he shoots expertly, hitting a wallet spinning through the air, and rides a very fine horse which his companions envy.  Doesn’t sound too bad yet, but the stupidity is coming!

On their way through Mexico, the three encounter a storm.  Blevins panics, claiming that it is in his genes to be struck by lightning.  He lists a plethora of relatives who have been struck by lightning (it’s worth noting that has evidenced that he can not be trusted completely and that he is drunk at the time).  Against the advice of the others, Blevins tries to outrun the storm.  He takes his horse straight to the base of some mountains.  It floods and Blevins loses his horse, gun, clothes (which had metal buttons he believed would get him struck by lightning), and just about everything else besides his boots.

The three ride into a village with Blevins riding with John Grady.  John Grady and Rawlins tell Blevins to stay in hiding as they search town and find look for the horse.  They find it and come back to tell Blevins, but he has disappeared and only returns after they are asleep.  They decide to steal the horse just before dawn, but it is not where they last saw it.  So, Blevins decides to break into a house, where he finds the horse, and rides away on it, chased by men with guns, endangering Rawlins and John Grady, as well.

Have no fear! Blevins becomes even more of an idiot!  Eventually, he gets away, but decides to go back to get his gun.  He retrieves it and kills several people before getting caught and put in prison.

Stupidity can be found anywhere, even in the works great authors.  Stupidity is persistent, ubiquitous, and powerful.

Sadness can take over a person, sadness can take over a city, sadness can even take over an empire.
A very wise man once said to me, sadness is contagious. This is so very true. When I go home and my mum is upset, my mood is ten affected because I am upset that she is upset and then I go to school upset and my tend become upset. As you can see it is contagious. Sadness takes over the lives if the people around you and then eventually takes over your own.
This is proven in the Middle Ages, the whole world was depressed at the exact same time and nobody could escape it. Every person was dirty and the living conditions were terrible and there was famine and disease, and one of the worst diseases was Sadness. People could not escape the sadness that followed every single person around. When one person became happy for a reason, something bad would either happen to them or to someone close to them. It was a terrible time for the whole world and it’s a miracle that the world ever recovered from it.
Sadness took over the world at that time and I don’t doubt it happening again.
The wise man that I mentioned earlier on, was the great Rory Dezzutti.

The autobiography “I’m Not Really Here” by Paul Lake, is a book about a professional soccer players life and how and injury prevented him from being what he could have been.
Paul starts the book off with his childhood like any other autobiography. He starts to show the sadness in his life when he gets his irate injury. He was the up and coming player in English soccer, he was destined to be the best player of his generation and maybe even generations to come. He was playing in a game like any other when he swallowed his tongue and nearly died on the field.
He slowly recovered and started to play again about a month later, but there was always a fear in the back of his that something terrible would happen again.
And of course it did. He tore his ACL and was out for a whole year. On his returning game after a year of therapy, he tore it again and 6 months later he tore it one last time.
This forced Paul to retire and then the sadness kicked in. He went from being the golden boy of English soccer to a crippled 25 year old with no income. Things had gotten very bad. Paul became depressed and suicidal, he hit rock bottom.
This kind of sadness must be the hardest because he was riding so high and now was at the lowest of lows. Paul knows what life can be like when it is at it’s best and now he sees it at it’s worst.
This is a kind if sadness that takes years to overcome and a lot of therapy. Paul is now a married man and has a family, but he still occasionally struggles with depression and needs a lot of support to get over it.
This is the kind of sadness that I wish to never experience because it is the hardest to deal with.

Losing somebody close to me is the hardest thing that I have ever had to deal with. It makes you feel every single emotion that is possible to the human mind and body. But the emotion that takes over your life is Sadness.
The sadness starts with crying and a very open way of expressing it but then it evolves into this sort of inner sadness that is nearly impossible to get rid of. It builds up inside of you and then one day, after many days of letting it build up, it all comes out.
This happened to me last Friday. I was inconsolable, nobody could get me to calm down or listen to a word that they were saying.
Losing a friend is a experience that I don’t wish on anybody but it is not possible to explain the sadness that goes along with losing a friend. I have lost grandparents and it is unbelievably hard to deal with a family member passing away. But losing a friend is a completely different experience.
When my grandparents passed away, it was sadly expected. They were in there 80s and we knew that it was going to happen soon, as bad as that sounds. But when a friend dies, especially as a teenager, it is unexpected and a huge shock. I’m not sure whether the shock factor that makes it so hard or if it is the question of “what could they have been?” Never being answered.
I hope who ever reads this never looses a friend and never has to go through what I have been through twice now. I wish that no other person has to go through what I have been through. I wish that the sadness that I have felt over the last few years, is never felt by anyone again. But the most painful thing is, I know that those wishes will never come true

In the novel Huckleberry Finn, there are many characters that enact the characteristic Courage. It is about a young boy who runs away from his unhappy, Christian life into the dangers of the Southern wild. Along side him joins a runaway slave, Jim, who sticks by his side in order to go North for freedom. Huck has to deal with his conscious by deciding if the right thing to do is turn Jim in or not.  Huck learns that Jim is a caring man that wants to set his family free from the Slave Owners.  Over the journey Jim explains how Huck is the only white person to listen and treat him as an equal, which makes Huck feel uneasy turning Jim in. They grow a bond that can be entitled, ‘friendship’, because they help each other escape from the societies hands.

The courage that Huck shows is by going against what society tells him. Hucklebery Finn does not like following the rules, and rebels against everything he is told. The biggest insurgent act Huck contradicts is aiding a runaway. He risks his own life to help out a friend even when there is difficulty. “He displays the human virtue of heroism when he decides to free Jim from the clutches of the Phelps family.” (studymode) Just by him going with his gut instinct and not dealing with society means that he is an Upstander. It takes immense amount of self strength to turn your back on society standards. Facing the tough decision whether to help Jim was pressuring Huck. He had to act quick and made a final decision, “All right, I’ll go to Hell! Because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”(pg 207) A little white boy faced a family of Racist whites and whole heartedly stole his friend back.

Jim illustrates the biggest deed of courage in the book. In the end when Tom Sawyer is wounded from the gunshot, he risks his freedom in order to rush the white boy to a doctor. The doctor was surprised by the Slave’s act of heroism and states, “I never see a nigger that was a better nuss or faithfuler, and yet he was risking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he’d been worked main hard lately. I liked the nigger for that.”(page 272) For a white, educated male to state that he found courage in a black slave is very important. It shows that Jim was truly a friend of Huck’s and was willing to give up on what he wanted so badly just to help him. Jim’s honorable move made him receive his freedom.

Tokyo researchers and scientists have developed the EUFI technique (extrauterine fetal incubation), where they take a goat fetus and supply it oxygenated blood through a catheter that is inserted in a large vessel in the umbilical cord. They are placed in incubators that are filled with artificial amniotic fluid heated up. Yoshinori Kuwabara, the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Juntendo University in Tokyo, became interest in artificial placentas after working with premature infants. As of now, he and his associates have been able to keep a goat fetus in the environment described above for up to three weeks. There was however technical difficulties and problems with the fetus. 

Although this idea seems extremely futuristic and perhaps creepy, we are still making unbelievable progress in controlling a pregnancy and making sure a baby comes into this world healthy and safe. Right now we have neonatology which gives infants mainly with health concerns special medical care. We are also able to work surgically on fetuses. There is the technology we have to assist reproduction: “in-vitro fertilization” and
“gamete retrieval-and-transfer”. Overall, its all very new and even more controversial. It’s shocking we have developed the technology to make the artificial womb. Who knows, maybe in a few decades that’s how we will be raising our children…

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/magazine/the-artificial-womb-is-born.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm