Anthology Project

Theme: America

Poems: "America" by Tony Hoagland

"God Bless America" by John Fuller

"America" by Allen Ginsberg

"America" by Walt Whitman

"From America, America" by Saadi Youssef

"America" by Claude McKay

Action List: 3 May 2011

After reading "Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden" I was surprised at how flawless the operation had been to get him. After 10 years of avoiding the United States, Bin Laden went down without much of a fight. I think it's mostly due to the extreme professionalism and skill of those 79 American commandos that we were so successful. It was really cool to see the pictures of Americans gathering around the White House and the site of the 9/11 attacks to celebrate the downfall of such an evil man who was the number 1 enemy of the United States. I wasn't sure if we would ever catch Osama and i find myself feeling emotions of happiness and relief that he is now dead.

Action List: 3.15.11

While looking through the timeline of childrens' books i noticed a few that were familiar and that i remember my mom reading to me when i was a kid. "Where the Wild Things Are" was probably one of my favorite books to be read to me. I also liked "The Very Hungery Caterpillar" and remember bringing it to school one time for some project that we did. The book "Frog and Toad Are Friends" was the first chapter book that i ever read. I'm pretty sure that I started reading it in first grade. I think that it's cool to see classic books that i remember from when i was a kid to be organized into a timeline and being able to find out a little more about them.

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3.1 Diction Exercise: Poetry

a) gristle, flesh, aorta, synaptic, adrenaline, inexorable, puncture, triggering, esophagus, rifling

b) Sound - Jagged, Bitter
Connotation - Imaginative, Anapestic

c) Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet" has a jagged intonation mixed with bitterness which makes for anapestic implications that could be described as more imaginative rather than scrupulous.

David Bellavia -- House To House -- Book Video

House To House pages 1-20

David Bellavia, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, begins this book by giving the reader extremely vivid images of the conditions that soldiers in Iraq had to endure on a daily basis. He tells about the unbearable heat, the unimaginable exhaustion, and the floods of local bacteria that they are exposed to. Not to mention that they are shot at by Iraqi extremists regularly. He goes on to talk about how their job is nothing like a regular U.S. citizen's job and that they hate almost every minute that they are out there in the desert. But, they also love what they do because it brings "nobility and purpose in our lives," and because every day is a test for them. In the words of Bellavia, "If we measure up to the worst days, such as this one, it proves we stand a breed apart from all other men." Later on, Bellavia's flashback tells a story that took place a few days before the start of the book in which he was forced to choose between taking the life of a teenage boy aiming an AK-47 in his direction, or risk losing his own. In the same chapter, Bellavia tells about an enemy engagement in which his platoon had become divided and cut off from each other resulting in his friend, and fellow staff sergeant, being shot three times before the end of the battle.

At this point in the book, I could not put it down. Before even starting my blog, I had read the entire thing straight through. David Bellavia and John R. Bruning wrote this book in such a way that every word and sentence creates an image in your mind. The images aren't usually very pleasant either, but they are definitely capturing. I would not recommend this book to anyone faint of heart or easily disgusted. House To House shows you what war is really like down to the last vivid detail of real situations and scenarios that real soldiers go through. I have really enjoyed this book and that's saying a lot coming from someone who is not a book reader.