Tuesdays with Morrie Bucket list, Stanley.

         What is on your Bucketlist? You can write a paragraph leading up to a bulleted list of what you would like to do/accomplish in your life.

        I obviously do not want to spend my life without purpose or in vain, so below is what I would like to do before I "kick the bucket." These are items that I hope to do in the next couple of years, but I would still like to have them completed by the time I die. I would like to feel the thrill of falling from thousands of feet in the air because I've heard it's phenomenal. I want to go completely beast mode in a Ferrari because it's just amazing, and one of my highest life goals is to be able to slam dunk. At Nazareth we may be looking at an oppourtunity for another state championship in baseball or football next year, so we really never know. Heavy Metal Concerts are crazy. 

Bucket List-

-Skydive
-Blow too much on a nice car.
-Cross-Over slam dunk.
-Win a state Championship.
-Go to another Heavy Metal concert.

"Life is Beautiful" Blog, Stanley Suter

         There are many similarities between "Night" and "Life is Beautiful." This starts with the "Father-Son" bond, both father's death directly before liberation, and the hope that they would both in fact leave the concentration camp alive. You can really see the father-son bond in the movie because Guido goes to great length to cover his son from the evil that surrounded him. Even on the way to his death, he was brave and looked his son in the eyes to insure him, he was going to be all right. Just like in night, Guido dies almost directly before the liberation and hope stays with Guido that he will find his wife and son, to escape the concentration camp.

          Some of the differences between "Night" and "Life if Beautiful" are really just the mood and tone. If you generalize the plots of both stories they are basically the same, Jews are being separated into concentration camps and a family is divided. A man struggles to keep both himself and his son alive. But when you get into the atmosphere of the movie you find that "Life is Beautiful" is a much lighter tone, having many jokes and the main character being a sort of jester. When you look at "Night", you find that it is very solemn.

           Life is beautiful throughout the book because even though Guido knows that they are being taken away to a camp, he stays happy and makes a game to protect his son. He knows they are likely to be hurt, but he says that the ride to the train station and the train ride itself are both birthday gifts for his son. He also tells his son that he got the last available tickets. At the beginning of the movie, the color of everything was amazing. It was bright and fast, however you can see as the movie progressed to the final scene exactly how destroyed everyone was. The Jews were just limping out of the camp slowly, and there was very little variation in the colors until the end. When Joshua reached his mother, you could see the field behind them, and life seemed to be "Beautiful" again.

American Sniper, by Stanley Suter (4/22/15)

          Prompt-How well does the title fit the story?

          This week I have continued reading "American Sniper" by Chris Kyle. It is very well written in the sense of accuracy and detail, considering while these events took place Chris was in the middle of a war zone. The main setting of the book is in Fallujah, where Chris was stationed for three out of four rotations in his career and the place he met his best "buds" from the Marines. He is currently near the end of his rotation on one of the biggest missions of his career, ground sweeps. He provides watch for the patrolling marines with searching for the highest ranked sniper in Iraq at this point. This is where he obtains the highest kill amount of his entire career.

          I actually have a couple of problems with the title. First, the name is way to general. I feel like if I bought this book not knowing what it was about, I would think it was a complete fiction about some unknown average sniper. The writher was a living legend, and I think the book about his days of glory should reflect that. Titles that could replace "American Sniper" could be "American Legend" or "Lethal." It would be better just to show he was a successful serviceman. 

          The title fits perfectly in the sense of Chris being both American and a sniper, even though he was so much more than that. I feel like he could have based it off of both his career in the Navy (he was in both technically the Marines and Navy, Marines being a sub-group below the Navy), and his life at home. He had two growing children and a wife during his time in action, and I felt like they could have used that to say he had a double identity of sorts. Maybe "Working man" or "the Soldier with a family", but "American Sniper" is just fine.

"Night" Wiesel's Changes, By: Stanley Suter

 How has Wiesel changed through the book?

          In the beginning of the book, Wiesel could be seen as a perfect person. He was religious, devoted to his family, and dedicated to education. Proving both that he was religious, and that he was dedicated to school, "By day I studied Talmud, and by night I would run to the Synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple." The Talmud being a religious teaching, religion was his life. His father supported him in his studies, but when Elie want to study the Kabbalah, his father explains that "First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend." Regardless of what his father tells him in the beginning of the book, he finds a master to guide his studies.

          The middle sections of the book are really where we see change in Wiesel's personality. He had just arrived at Birkenau and he sees the German cruelty through the crematorium, "Never shall I forget the small faces of those children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky." This first camp was when Wiesel started to lose hope. He practically gave up on his religion and turned on a mindset of only his survival. Wiesel explains that an SS officer "was striking my father on the head: 'Be quiet, old man! Be quiet!'" Wiesel had stood still, afraid of the blows and angry at his father . He had a mindset that he was alone, there was no God and that he had to fend for himself. Still, he is very ashamed for abandoning his father.

          Towards the end of the book, Wiesel seems to regain many of his morals and values back. I think this is because he learns to cope with the constant abuse in the camps, and he no longer can only fend for himself. "Elizer, my son, come here... I want to tell you something... Only to you... Come, don't leave me alone... Elizer..." Elie even pretended to be sick, and gave his dyeing father his rations so that he may live longer. Even when an SS officer said that he should be receiving his father's rations, he dismissed the idea and continued to aid his father. Over the course of the book, Wiesel lost his morals and religion. He only managed to regain his sense of charity and life, but his religion was lost to him after he discovered the cruelty that humans could commit against one another.