The Secret
The Secret
The Secret Life of Bees is a book that deals with racism in the 60s from the perspective of a white teenager in the US. It highlights the stupidity of racism as a major theme. It is important to understand some of the disadvantages of this narrative approach. We see everything through the eyes of a white girl.…
When looking through book titles, somehow people’s eyes just jump to a specific title without any rhyme or reason. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd was the title that jumped out at me. I knew that there is no way that the book is actually about the lives of bees. I wanted to find out what it really meant. I read that it was set in South Carolina and was about a 14 year-old girl named Lily.…
Laura Hillenbrand,best selling author and highly esteemed writer of Unbroken, was born May 15, 1967 in Fairfax,Virginia. Hillenbrand was raised with three other siblings and learned to love reading and riding horses. As a young girl, she loved to listen to her parents and swim coach tell her stories, which sparked her interest in writing; this new hobby soon grew into a passion which took up most of her time. After high school, Hillenbrand attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where she continued her love of reading and writing and met her first husband Borden Flanagan. Before she graduated, however, Hillenbrand became very ill when she was 19 and had to spend almost all of her time in her dorm room, when soon after she was forced to drop out of college and go back home.…
When Judee Norton expressed how she felt about reading and writing she stated, “When I read, I was somewhere else. I was no longer the oldest child in the most dysfunctional family in the universe. Writing was magic and I wanted to be a magician, to take people out of what was awful to another place” (Chevigny). Born in Arizona, in 1949, Norton was raised in a poor family with five children. As a child she took on the responsibilities of taking care of her siblings.…
Margaret Sanger was a huge contributor to making birth control a necessity today. In the last 100 years things have been much different. 100 years ago a ‘natural’ family size would be 11-18 children per women. This rapid and social change can be traced back to the life work of Margaret Sanger. Sanger used her own strategies, by becoming a public nuisance, by interfering with the Catholic Church, the United States judiciary, and the Marxist party.…
Progressive reformer Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860. She was raised in a prosperous family, although her mother passed away when she was young, her father was a very successful man, he worked as a banker, landowner, and an Illinois state senator from 1854 to 1870. Jane was very deeply inspired by her father, who believed in philanthropy. She contributed to the Progressive Era, when she became an activist for the poor, and founded the most famous settlement house, called the Hull House. She was the voice for reform, leading many reform groups.…
Stephen King Stephen King is an author of horror fiction that has made a significant impact on the horror genre with his novels. In his childhood, he was introduced to horror in various medias and developed his own fears. In his years of education, he became more and more interested in horror novels and his determination for success was inevitable. His work throughout his life gave horror a new standard. King is known for his career, his novels, and his influence on the world with his love for horror.…
In the novel, The Secret Life Of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily Owens is a teenage girl that decides to run away from her abusive father and moves to Tiburon. She experiences a journey where she tries to learn her mother’s history and more about her mother’s death. South Carolina to search for someone who she believes to know her deceased mother. Lily learns to forgive others and herself in order to become independent and live her life the way she wants to live it.…
Since her death, many people said that Emily Dickinson was the greatest american poet ever. She was born in 1830. She spent most of her life hidden away in her massachusetts home. She wrote her poems in style for herself. She fell in love, but the love fell apart .Emily wrote her sad poems in her room.…
Sue Monk Kidd always asks herself, “What does my character want?” and she makes those wants and desires the purpose of her characters’ stories. This applies strongly to her characters Handful and Sarah in her novel, The Invention of Wings. This novel closely follows Handfuls’s desire to be freed from slavery as well as Sarah’s desire to both be treated equal to men and to have a voice. Handful’s primary desire is to be freed from slavery.…
It was a cold night on February 15, 1820 that Susan was born. Her parents were Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Her family was a Quaker family, which believed women are equal to men and learning is necessary. She could read and write at the age of three. At the age of six, their family moved to Battenville, New York. As a woman, Susan B. was not allowed speak in public at a convention since she was a woman and she realized that in politics, no one would take her seriously unless women could vote.…
Most literary works are shaped primarily upon the personal experiences of the author and are written as a result of important insights that the author deems important to share. Throughout various time periods in this nation’s history, there have been many social variations that have altered the values of this country. Often these eras spark great controversy and literary criticism. That said, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was greatly influenced by her personal experiences with postpartum depression, isolation and the domination of men over her life in the midst of the women’s movement of the 1800s; experiences that drove the plot of her story.…
Author: Jane Austen Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, England to well-respected members of the community who valued learning and creativity. Her father was Oxford educated and was an Anglican rector. Jane and her many siblings read from their father’s library. Jane and her older sister Cassandra went to boarding school for a more formal education. However, they both got typhus and returned home for financial reasons.…
Depression is another one of those “first-world” problems us humans face as a society. Although it seems like a deathly globe-renowned issue is in mainly todays -mostly in teens- current society, Sue Monk Kidd demonstrates how depression may have affected those over fifty years ago- especially the South-American colored people of the Civil Rights Era in 1964. In The Secret Life of Bees, May, an oddly complex character, changes in the novel because of her depression. May is often portrayed as a very gentle, compassionate and selfless character, who immensely feels the suffering and pain of others on an emotional level because of the death of her twin sister. She changes into a character who is selfish and neglectful as she isolates herself,…
Chick Corea is an American jazz and fusion pianist, keyboardist, and composer. Chick Corea received the privilege to be part of the electric jazz fusion movement back in the 1960’s along side Miles Davis. From 1941 until today Chick has recorded a total of eighty-eight albums alongside some of the greatest musicians of his time. Chick Corea has become a master of his craft being nominated sixty-three Grammy Awards, and out of which he has won twenty-two. Out of his eighty-eight albums he’s recorded, fifteen of those albums have been Grammy award winning albums.…