'Killing the Rising Sun': A Book Review by Pat McGurrin

Background

Bill O'Reilly usually gets a bad rep on television by many, usually for his anger and sometimes critical political views. However, what most people don't know, is that O'Reilly has an expansive historical knowledge. He has written over 10 books regarding American history, one of which I had the pleasure to read.

I'm half Japanese, and I have always been interested in both sides of the WWII conflict. So, I thought it was only appropriate for me to read one of his bestsellers; Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan.

Overview

Killing the Rising Sun takes readers on a journey of what it was like fighting Japan in WWII from both a soldier's perspective and a political perspective. Unlike any opponent before, Imperial Japan followed the samurai code of  'Bushido', which meant that the nation would refuse to surrender; as doing so would be dishonorable to their god/emperor, Hirohito. The Japanese forces were also particularly brutal, since they did not have survival as their top priority-only kill. 

The Japanese, being an unusual opponent, helps explain and drive the book's tension. While history has already happened, O'Reilly makes it seem new and exciting, and you are sure to learn more than ever before. In history class, most of us have only been taught about the Nazi party in WWII, but we rarely talk about the brutality of the Japanese. Not only does the book explain the mindset of Japan during the war, but it also helps shape why society in Japan is the way it is now. 

Read It!

This is one of the best books that I have ever read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in history and politics. If you're not necessarily interested in this title, O'Reilly has written many other books discussing American history and political figures. 

The Girl on the Train Summary by Amanda Sangalli

The Girl on the Train is not only one of the new top movies, it also is an amazing book. Paula Hawkins tells the story from three different perspectives; Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Rachel is portrayed as a train wreck basically. She does not have a job but rides the train everyday pretending her life is how it used to be before her husband cheated on her and her life became consumed by alcoholism. While on the train she passes a couple and their house everyday and she becomes attached to them. She names this couple 'Jess and Jason'. In reality Jess and Jason are really Megan and Scott who live down the street from Tom (Rachel's ex husband) and his new wife Anna. Megan babysits for Anna and she is seen as the perfect person to Anna, although Megan is hiding a secret from Anna. She is having an affair with Anna's husband Tom. One day on the train Rachel witnesses Megan (Jess) kissing another guy and decides she has to tell her husband. However, it turns out that Megan goes missing and later on you find out she was murdered!  Rachel tries to team up with Anna (who hates Rachel for previously being with her husband) and tries to solve the mystery of who killed Megan. Because Megan and Tom he is a primary suspect and is later on arrested for the murder of Megan. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and it left me wanting to keep reading more.

Book Review by Nuriel Rozenberg

At the moment, I am reading a psychological thriller titled, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" by Iain Reid. A girl with an unknown name is thinking of ending things with her boyfriend, Jake since she believes that the expiration date on their relationship has passed. To her, Jake is practically perfect. He is very smart working in a lab and randomly spitting facts. She explains that he is tall and kind, but otherwise, the reader is given a little amount of detail. She holds off on ending things with him and travels with Jake to meet his parent's. The time spent at Jake's house is unsettling especially since the reader does not know why they begin to feel creeped out. The couple finally decides to go home and the girl is relieved that they are leaving the discomforting atmosphere. Throughout dinner, Jake beings to appear odd and just off from his usual self. On the way home, they are caught in a snowstorm and Jake decides that he is in the mood for some Dairy Queen. Eventually, Jake takes the girl to an old, deserted high school. During the novel, the girl continually receives phone calls from her own number which only adds to the constant tension and paranoia a reader will possibly feel.

I am usually not much of a reader, but I definitely enjoyed reading this book. While reading, I was in perpetual fear since anything could happen at any moment. Reid started the book with an amount of innocence and calmness escalating to full-blown creepy fairly quickly. Reading this book feels casual until the atmosphere sporadically changes leaving the reader similar to viewing a horror film. I advise readers to not read this book at night unless you don't want to sleep. This book gives off a frightening feeling that is hard to immediately shake off.


http://areadersdiary1.blogspot.com/2016/08/im-thinking-of-ending-things.html

Book/Character Review: The Nightingale | by Samantha Patino

Kristin Hannah, the brilliant author of The Nightingale, creates characters in her book that are hard to forget. This book takes place during the horrendous time of World War II, in France, and vividly describes how each of the characters dealt with the major changes that they were faced with. Some characters quietly accepted the changes, and others spoke out against everything. Isabelle, an interesting, but lovable character of pure fearlessness, was shunned away from everyone she has ever loved, especially her father and yet she still did everything in her power to do the right thing. From handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets, to bringing downed, Allied airmen across the border, Isabelle faced everything without fear to do everything she believed to be the right thing . Isabelle's older sister Vianne, lived a hard childhood, similar to her sister, but she was later saved by her close friends and her future husband. Even though Vianne also felt the pain of being left behind by her father, she still left Isabelle to spend her life with true-love Antoine. Once the Nazis come to invade Vianne's hometown, Vianne accepts the change and keeps her mouth closed. Towards the end of the war, Vianne redeems herself by saving small Jewish children and getting them fake identity papers and putting them into the church's orphanage. Many readers, myself included, find Isabelle an easy to love character since so many aspire to be her, and it is easy to feel sympathetic. Throughout the book, I felt sorry for her, since she is constantly let down by the ones she loves,always forgotten, even though she is doing such great things. On the other hand, Vianne is lovable but I sometimes felt she was not always there for her family. From the very beginning, Vianne left Isabelle behind and throughout the book she pushed Isabelle away. In the end Vianne redeemed herself by trying to nurse Isabelle to health right before she passes away, and following in her sisters footsteps by going against the Nazis.

Captain Beck, a Nazi soldier stationed at Vianne's house, is a very intriguing character. Although he worked for the Nazis, he showed Vianne his good side by helping her and her friends live. Kristin Hannah developed this character by making him miss his family back in Germany, but also falling in love with Vianne. Normally, a reader would grow to hate the enemy, but with Beck he was the enemy but also helped and really didn't believe the Germans were doing the right thing. He helped Vianne and her neighbors and he tried to do the right thing. I grew to love Beck and was very upset that he ended up dying. Overall, The Nightingale is a fantastic book with interesting characters, and I would recommend this book to everyone. This book made me come to love all of the complex characters, and I found it very hard to say goodbye to them when closing the back cover.

Book Review: Fahrenheit 451

Book Review: Fahrenheit 451
By Nick Matkiwsky

Currently I'm reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and I recommend this book for anybody who is interested in classic science fiction novels. Fahrenheit 451, takes place in a futuristic world, where technology controls every aspect of life. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who instead of putting out fires, sets books ablaze for a living. Since technology is used to do everything in life, even thinking, books have been deemed to be the source off all discord and unhappiness in the world. Throughout the book, Guy begins to change and realize that their is something wrong with the job he has. If your someone who is interested in internal battles that lead to change in an individual, then this is a perfect story for you.

Ray Bradbury jumps right into this story and it caused me a lot of confusion in the beginning. In order to make sense of the abrupt start, I found myself reading and rereading the first few pages. However as I kept reading, I realized that the author began this way for a reason. The more I read, the more the plot began to make sense and I discovered that this book requires you to look deeply to find the important messages and themes. Bradbury inspires the idea that if you truly believe in something, then its worth the risk to try to obtain your goals. Overall, I say this is a pretty solid book and is relatively short so it wont take you too much time to read. I give this book a 7 out of 10

Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North | by Kristine Le

Normally, I’m more pulled to the young adult genre but this time, I decided to give adult fiction a try and picked up The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this book because in the beginning I would fall asleep every time I began reading it and was not really into it at all. To really appreciate the story that North was trying to tell, I had to open mind to her style of writing and really think about what she was telling me and why she was telling me these things. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, is a story about a man, Harry August, and how every time he dies he is reborn again and relives his life with all the memories of his past life. The starts with Harry on the death bed of his eleventh life and is told that the world is going to end. The fact that the world is ending is no surprise, what Harry is told to find out is the why.

In my opinion, the writing is perfect to listen to in audiobook form because how it is structured. To compare the writing would be like reading a giant thought cloud. The voice behind the narrator, Harry, is so forward that it’s as if every thought in his head was directly translated onto the paper. Besides the writing, I really enjoyed Harry as a character and the way he approached certain situations. For instances, at one time, he goes to infiltrate a Russian security base and he does so with absolutely no plan in mind only that if he fails he’ll have to die and go through his boring childhood again before he can come back and try again. It is hard to understand without having read it but, Harry has a unique comedic element to him with how he makes his decisions. Another attribute I loved about Harry’s personality is that he is very blunt and forward with people, it allowed me to relate with him on a small scale.

Along with Harry’s blunt personality, I really enjoyed his “ability.” The ability to be reborn but to still keep all the memories of past lives is fascinating. The power and responsibility behind the ability may seem blatantly obvious-- don’t try to change the course of events-- but, the story offers, in my opinion, such a greater depth to the “blatantly obvious.”The complexity of the story was one of my favorite parts because it added some interesting possibilities for themes and life lessons such as: too much too soon is not always a positive, dreams and ambitions can sometimes do more harm than good, and be a good man first before becoming a brilliant one. Everything falls together in a satisfying, yet still shocking, end, which I thought was absolutely amazing.

Some issues I had with the book was the organization and progression the author chose to tell the story. I felt that the plot was very scatter at some points for instance, in the middle of a scene the author would take a break provide some information about his past life and then come back to path of the story. I think that if the organization had been planned out more then it would not have it so difficult to get into. Also, because the main character was an intellect it was hard to comprehend what he was talking about at times whenever he would discuss things within the science field.

In all, I enjoyed by first reading experience of adult fiction and would definitely pick up another one. On a 1-5 rating scale, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North: 4.5

Neverwhere Review by Melissa La Fountain

The book Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman was definitely my favorite of the two books I had to read over the summer for English. It tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a simple London man. It seems that everything about his life is average and boring, until one day he comes across a young woman named Door, who flips his world upside down...literally. Richard finds himself in London Below, a parallel of the London he knew where being abnormal is the norm. Richard spends the majority of the novel longing for London Above, to be ordinary once again. But once he has met a plethora of peculiar characters, defeated an ominous beast, and become a hero, he realizes that being ordinary isn't what he wants after all. I thought that the way that Neil Gaiman wrote each chapter really put a vivid picture into the readers' minds. His writing is thoroughly descriptive, to the point where if you close your eyes you can perfectly understand how each character and each placed looked. Gaiman also used a rotating point of view method to add more dimension to his novel. This allowed for readers to get inside each character's head and really understand who they were. In a lot of books, you only get the point of view of the protagonist. In Neverwhere, you get the points of view of the protagonist, the antagonist, and every character in between.
Usually, I'm not a very big fan of the books we have to read over the summer. I would much rather read a book that I choose and read because I want to read it, not because I am forced to. However, Neverwhere didn't feel like a book I had to read. I enjoyed it and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to read such a good book.

Picture Source: TV, Pond. "News: New Neverwhere Book". Anglonerd. N.p., 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

Brianna Falco- Lone Survivor

I'm not quite finished with Lone Survivor, but this book is extremely interesting and something I would definitely recommend. The book is actually very informational and moving. I find it so interesting to learn about the U.S military and the hardships they have to get through. This book is sure to keep you intrigued the whole time and inform you of things you may not have ever known. Written by Marcus Luttrell( former Navy SEAL), makes the book much more real and interesting because you being told from a Seal's perspective. The setting is in Afghanistan on the Pakistani boarder, the Navy Seals were called in to take out an al Qaeda leader. These SEALs have gone through ruthless specialized training and have to fight like terrorists to beat terrorists. On their heroic mission, all were killed in less than 24 hours except for one, Marcus Luttrell. This was the biggest Navy SEAL loss in all of American history.
Honestly, this book has helped me envision what a Navy SEAL is all about, which is very inspiring. I have realized these people are some of the strongest, most courageous, and live for this country. I would love to watch the movie Lone Survivor as well as Black Hawk Down. There is a quote from the Dallas Morning News, " Every bit as thrilling as Black Hawk Down and unexpectedly, quite moving".