Category: Book Review

According to the Dalai Lama, “all religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.” The need for love, compassion, justice, honesty, and most of all contentment is emphasized in Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab, and characters with…

The narrator in the story “Volar” is a young girl who is facing various challenges associated with growing up. Some young children may struggle with the reality that they do not have as much power in the world when they are young. They are physically smaller than adults, and they also rely on their parents…

Identity is not something that can simply be explained in a few words. There is a variety of factors that can make up someone’s identity – family, friends, culture, environment, hobbies, interests, and gender are just a few. Many people use these factors to self-identify. For example, someone might refer to themselves as a parent…

In Artificial Paradises, Baudelaire writes this of hashish: “Enthusiasts who would procure the magical delights of this substance at any price have continued to seek out hashish which has crossed the Mediterranean—that is, hashish made from Indian or Egyptian hemp”(15). Only hashish from the “Orient,” i.e. most of Asia and Northern Africa, is intoxicating enough…

Even before Thomas De Quincey fully expounds upon the mental and physical effects of frequent in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he states that “…if no definite boundary can be assigned to one’s power, the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite” (8). Far from delivering a simplistic commentary on opium through…

Color is a major issue of focus in discussions about America’s dynamics, because an individual’s color can influence his experiences in various realms of life including participation in sports and success. Abdelsamie and Abdallah article “The Image of the Afro-American in Fences” opines that during the 70s and 80s, black footballers in America were frequently…

Judith Plaskow is one of the leading scholars of feminist theology. Her book, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a , was the first book of Jewish feminist theology ever written.[1] She has also written an additional book, a collection of essays, has co-edited three books, and published numerous articles in edited volumes and journals.[2]…

In The Color of Water, Ruth, a Caucasian young woman, gravitates toward Black men because of the rejection, lack of love, paternal neglect, and sexual abuse she encountered at the hands of her own father, and because of the first love of her life Peter, was a black man. Fishel Shilsky, Ruth’s father, repels his…

God is in the River The novella A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean is a fairly straightforward book to read, and because of this, the quiet beauty of its writing can be easy to miss. Maclean’s soft-spoken style lays the story out clearly and succinctly, and draws parallels that can only be seen…

In western culture, it is taboo to be covered head to toe, excluding the face, in the middle of the summer heat, but this is a reality that Muslim women are quite familiar with in their everyday lives. The Muslim religion is very strict and governed by the Quran. Many view it as oppressive but…