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In this story, written by John Grisham, the eleven-year old Mark Sway unwillingly makes the acquaintance of a Mafia - lawyer. The man, before killing himself, tells Mark where a "hot" body is buried. His client, a killer of the Mafia, shot a US senator and hid the body. Only the lawyer knows where it is hidden and fears that the killer would also want to murder him, now that he knows everything. On the other hand, also after him is the FBI, who ... mehr
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The young lawyer, Mitch McDeere, who is straight out of collegeis interviewed by a big law firm. They offer him a lot of money, a company car, a high salary and so on, so the young man from a rather poor background is highly pleased with their offer.
As he was one of the best law students in his year, he was offered a job by several good law firms, but with an income normal for a young man fresh from college. Then eventually this law firm fr ... mehr
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America is horrified by the murders of two Supreme Court Judges, though they were political very active there is no apparent reason for these two killings.
Soon the young law student Darby Shaw starts to work out a brief - "the pelican brief", as she calls it - where she sets up her theory why the judges were killed.
She works on her little plot, a shot into the dark and then throws it away, because even to her it seems unreal.
Her profe ... mehr
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This book, written by Mario Puzo, describes the life of a Don of the Mafia, how the Mafia proceeds and which influence and powers they have.
Don Vito Corleone, is also known as "the Godfather" and even called this way by most people. He is known as a very just and reasonable man, very affectionate and helping everyone who asks him a favour.
When someone asks him a favour because he has no chance to straighten his problems out within the exis ... mehr
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It is the biography of Henry Hill, written by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi.
Henry is a half-Italian, half-Irish. His father was an Irish worker who came to America before the Second World War. Henry is living with his family and his mother, a woman from Sicily, three sisters and four brothers, one of them physically handicapped, in a very small flat in a working district of New York.
In order to earn some money beside school Henry starts w ... mehr
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John Knowles was only 33 years old when A Separate Peace was published, in 1959, in England (see The Critics section at the end of this book for a good idea of how popular the book was there) and then, in 1960, in the United States. The book was an immediate and stunning success, receiving the William Faulkner Foundation Award and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
But John Knowles had begun writing seriously ... mehr
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Fifteen years after graduation, Gene Forrester, the narrator of A Separate Peace, returns to his old high school in New Hampshire, pursuing the roots of a memory that has left an indelible mark. As Gene walks around the deserted campus of the Devon School, we realize that something tragic and terrible happened there. When he comes to rest at the foot of a huge tree overhanging a riverbank on the edge of campus and pauses to reflect, our story b ... mehr
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Gene is the narrator of the story. He tells us what is going on; we see everything through his eyes. But because he is telling us what is happening, step by step, he must be the kind of person who has the ability to get involved in situations and then to step back from them and view them impartially. Gene is observer as well as participant, and that dual role can create problems for him. Occasionally, as when his friend Finny is in trouble, Gen ... mehr
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Finny, Gene\'s best friend through good or ill, rests securely at the center of the story. Right from the start we know Finny is unlike any other person we\'ve met, or rather, he\'s an extreme form of the most incredible person we\'ve ever met.
Like a tragic hero, which Finny certainly is, the boy is daring. Finny\'s daring is as natural to him as breathing. He thrives on challenges, and when none presents itself, he invents one: the tree-ju ... mehr
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Gene is the commentator, Finny the transcendent leader; Leper is the tagalong--with a twist. How incredibly wrong first impressions can prove to be! When we meet him, Leper\'s one of the boys standing at the base of the tree, refusing to jump into the river, \"bidding for an ally.\" He wants to be liked, but he doesn\'t want it badly enough to move an inch from his rooted, stubborn disposition. Gene gives a hint of the general opinion of Leper ... mehr
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Brinker beautifully balances out the other three boys\' extreme characteristics. He seems the most \"typical,\" the most representative of the Devon students we meet. He goes out for extracurricular activities; he\'s good in sports and average in the classroom; he\'s big and personable and popular, in the best sense of that word, the kind of guy you\'re bound to like immediately, not too smart, not too crafty.
Brinker\'s room is just across ... mehr
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The setting of a novel is, quite simply, where and when the story takes place. Another way of describing it is \"spirit of place,\" the atmosphere generated by descriptions of the environment and the characters\' relationship to it. In Devon School, John Knowles has created a setting rich in evocative detail. The school figures almost as if it were another personage in the story, coming to life when Gene encounters it, existing while he\'s ther ... mehr
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The themes in a novel are the main issues and ideas the author grapples with and addresses, the questions posed by the actions of the characters, the concerns raised in our minds as we read. Some themes are easily identified, perhaps even articulated by the characters themselves, so we can\'t miss them. Others are presented more subtly and may be open to a wider variety of interpretation. Still others may form themselves within you, regardless ... mehr
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Another word for an author\'s style is his voice, and that\'s an appropriate term when you think of an actual person telling a story, unfolding it before you, speaking to you one-to-one. Thus the style of A Separate Peace is most simply characterized as the fictional person of Gene Forrester, created by John Knowles, talking to us through the pages of the book.
Gene has a low-key, almost diffident manner. Because he is subtle in his observat ... mehr
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We think of point of view as the angle from which the story is told, the perspective from which we receive information. Sometimes an author will use the third person \"he\" or \"she\" throughout a book; this tends to remove us from the work rather than draw us in, to put and keep us outside it. In A Separate Peace, where one of the central characters is the narrator, we see everything through his eyes.
Gene Forrester happens to be a quiet, s ... mehr
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The form of A Separate Peace can best be described as cyclical. The book begins with the narrator\'s revisiting the scene of the story after 15 years, retracing his steps for us, preparing us for the sequence of events to follow.
From the words \"The tree was tremendous\" (middle of Chapter 1), we are back in high school days during the summer between Gene\'s junior and senior years. Each succeeding chapter is chronologically arranged, movin ... mehr
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Have you ever in your life gone through an experience so intense, so joyful, so painful, or just so important at the time, that you could only understand much later what truly happened? Isn\'t it a fact that when we\'re in the middle of an experience, we are often unable to think clearly about it because we\'re too busy feeling the moment\'s thrill or sadness to stop and come to sensible conclusions?
Our high school years are just such a tim ... mehr
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One of Finny\'s great thrills, a part of his daredevil personality, is getting away with such acts of defiance as tree-jumping. But authority wins out time and again. Gene\'s natural way is to bend with the rules--and school days are full of rules. Thus, when Mr. Prud\'homme, one of the summer substitute teachers, stops by their room the next morning to reprimand the boys for missing dinner again, Finny is ready with a breathless speech of excu ... mehr
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You\'d think Gene would be grateful, but he isn\'t. He realizes it was Finny\'s fault in the first place that once more he found himself out on a limb. It\'s worth considering that expression as a description of a risky state of being, in addition to its literal meaning. Finny thrives at being \"on the edge.\" He loves to be tested by every situation. Part of his friendship for Gene is based on his urge to draw Gene into the same kinds of tests ... mehr
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Notice the vocabulary Gene uses to describe Finny sleeping on the beach the next morning as dawn breaks: \"he looked more dead than asleep... gray waves hissing mordantly... gray and dead-looking... the beach... became a spectral gray-white... Phineas... made me think of Lazarus.\" John Knowles likes to set a mood by painting a background portrait of nature\'s face.
Sometimes mood is as simple as our feeling cheerful on a sunny day or mournf ... mehr
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