There are 3 super states in the whole world.  Oceania, East-Asia, and Eur-Asia.  The story takes place in Oceania.  Winston works in the Ministry of Truth.  There are 4 ministries that are the government.  There Is the Ministry of truth, the Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Peace, and the Ministry of Plenty.   The Ministry of truth works with entertainment, news, education, and fine arts.  The Ministry of Love consists of maintaining the law and order.  The ministry of peace worked with war, and the Ministry of Plenty was responsible for economic affairs.  The citizens in Oceania are treated poorly.  There are the Proles who are like lower class people in the book and in present time now.  There are also the Party Members who were not wealthy (some were) but they made more money and had better living conditions than the Proles.  The Party Members worked in the different sections in the ministries.  Then there was Big Brother.  He was on Posters everywhere!  No one had actually seen him in real life so they did not know if he was an actual person or not but if they doubted that then they could most likely been vaporized or thrown in a labor-camp.  All Party members wore blue jumpsuits. 

Winston’s part in the Ministry of Truth was to take documents and alter them so that they were correct.  Winston loved his job.  It made him think and he liked making up stories when he had to for some articles such as when he makes up a person so he can make an article true.  During his job there was a thing called the 2 minutes hate which is when Goldstein (the supposed “bad guy” who tries to sabotage Oceania) gets on the Telescreen and talks and shows his army killing people from Oceania.  The Telescreen is in every building o every wall and it allows the government to watch and listen to your every move so that they can monitor that you aren’t doing anything wrong or trying to betray the government.  Anyways during the 2 minutes hate one day Winston has 2 things happen.  He catches O’Brien’s eye and somehow he tells Winston through the eye contact that he to hates the government.  O’Brien is a higher ranking person in the Ministry.  The second of which is when he sees a young girl in her 20s that is seated next to him and at first he hates he and wants to kill her in many ways and rape her but then afterwards he finds that he is in love with her. 

One day as Winston Is going to the bathroom the Girl is walking in the same direction as he and trips.  Winston helps her up by grabbing her hand and as she did this she handed him a slip of paper.  Winston later reads and finds out that she said that she “Loves him.”  They meet one day and talking through clenched teeth so it appears as though they aren’t talking to each other they make a meeting place on Sunday out in the country.  Winston goes to meet her    and they fall in love.  They kiss and hug and then have sex.  They meet each other occasionally having a couple of weeks where they are to busy with work to meet.  Then as a month or so passes they start renting the attic of a Prole’s shop who knows what is going on but is fine with it and says he won’t rat them out.  One night as Winston is going to work O’Brien meets with him and as they walk he O’Brien make up an excuse for Winston to come to his penthouse and meet him.  Winston and Julia (his beloved partner) go and see O’Brien.  They find out that O’Brien is the leader of the brother hood that wants to tear down the government.  They receive a book made by Goldstein himself and is to read it to fill there minds with the knowledge about the governments.  One Morning as Winston and Julia wake up from staying in the attic of the Prole’s house they are told to get on the ground and to not move.  Then a Telescreen pops out from behind a picture and they hear a bold Strong voice coming from it.  Then the thought police come up the stairs and arrest them.  The prole who owned the little antique shop comes walking up the stairs in a thought police suit.  He had been spying on them for months and they hadn’t even known.  In fact they had been spying on Winston for 7 years! 

   They torture Winston and Julia but they never see another during the time they spent in The Ministry of Peace.  During the time being tortured Winston finds out that O’Brien is the one torturing him.  After around 2 years of being tortured they let Winston go.  He then got a new, higher paying job, and sits in the Chestnut Tree Café all day drinking gin and playing chess with himself.  In the end he loves Big Brother.

The collection consists of 18 short poems, none of them written in verse, but mainly subdivided into stanzas of 3 lines each. There are only 5 exceptions to this rule, more precisely in "The God Fit" (p. 40), "The God Coup" (p. 41), "God's Beloveds Remain True" (p. 47), "God's Mother" (p. 48) and "God's List of Liquids" (p. 52). Both in "God's Mother" and "God's List of Liquids", the formal differences seem to hint on the idea of structure and order. Both poems contain a list, which could be interpreted as an allusion to God's habit to organise, to set up a framework or even a divine master plan. "The God Fit" ends in one single line, "The God Coup" is a four line poem and "God's Beloveds Remain True" is not subdivided into stanzas at all. The underlying connection between these three poems is the desperation that lies in feeling abandoned by God. People try "to escape God who is burning" (p. 40, l. 6) while they feel "untended" (p. 40, l. 7). He is described as "a grand heart cut" (p. 41, l. 1) and while "man surges" (p.41, l. 2), he does nothing more than "tarry" (p. 41, l. 4). In contrast to the descriptive address of "The God Fit" and "The God Coup", the voice of mankind expresses itself in "God's Beloveds Remain True", bewailing the status quo. The irony of feeling helpless and forsaken while "Chaos overshadows" (p. 47, l. 1) and not having the option to leave God behind because they "have been instructed to call this His love" (p. 47, l. 29) clarifies the forlorn position of God's beloveds. The term "beloveds" itself bears a sarcastic undertone when the speaker tells about them being "strangled by bitter light" (p. 47, l. 3), even "slit and drained out" (p. 47, l. 20). "The God Fit", "The God Coup" and "God's Beloveds Remain True" form a trilogy of misery, leading from God's infernal terror over God's indifference regarding mankind to God's tyrannical leave-no-options policy.

Another aspect of God is discussed in "God's Woman" (p. 46) and "God Stiff" (p. 46). These two poems ostensibly deal with the role of women in the process of creation. God asks "His woman" (p. 46, l. 1) whether she is "angry at nature" (p. 46, l. 1) without making clear what exactly he means by the term "nature".

The woman replies that she does "not want nature stuck / up between" (p. 46, l. 2f) her "legs on" (p. 46, l. 3) his "pink baton" (p. 46, l. 3). Furthermore, she does not want it "ladled out like geography whenever" (p. 46, l. 4) his "buckle needs a lick" (p. 46, l. 5). The image of God suddenly undergoes a change from supernatural fiend without a cause to a sexist male creator, who formed man after his image but forgot about the humiliating position of women in creation altogether. The idea of devising a reproduction process in which one (the male) has to penetrate the other (the female) in order to soil the female body with the actual semen and, thus, secure the species' population is portrayed as unnecessary and degrading. His possibly uttered excuse does not convince the woman of the necessity of the human spawning procedure and God is cornered with the question "what do you mean Creation" (p. 46, l. 6). This negative image is underlined in "God Stiff" by the fact that for the woman, "His zipper going down" (p. 46, l. 6) sounds like the word "Treachery" (p. 46, l. 6). If God really created man after his image, all negative and sexist behavior patterns of men must originate from God himself. He is part and root of all sexist male behavior.

The portrayal of God is completed in "God's Justice" (p. 49) when the reader is told that "in the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks" (p. 49, l. 1). One of those days was reserved for God to create justice, but instead "God got involved in making a dragonfly" (p. 49, l. 3). Watching his new creation, he "lost track of time" (p. 49, l. 4) and completely forgot about his actual plan to bring justice to the world. In deep fascination, God beholds the dragonfly, every little detail catches his eye and his attention. He is described as the stereotype human male who just found a new toy, be it some sort of electronic entertainment device or some other trivial matter. All his effort and all his devotion rests with something that can, objective, be seen as far less important than e.g. the concept of justice, yet there is no Sign of God being about to take notice of this antagonism. He is characterized as being rather unreliable, and assuming that there are at least 2 million[3] different species of animals on this planet to fascinate him, expectations for justice to be created are sure to be disappointed.

One intriguing fact is the textual connection between "God's Woman" and "God's List Of Liquids". In the latter, the list of liquids ends with the substantive "Time" (p. 52, l. 16). The context of this list is that "God had the book of life open at pleasure" (p. 52, l. 3) and was arranging terms under the headline "For I made their flesh as a sieve" (p. 52, l. 6). However, the noun "Time" also appears in "God's Woman" when God urges his woman to choose between "Fire. Time. Fire"

(p. 46, l. 8) Taking into account the contents of "God's Woman" and "God's List Of Liquids", it seems probable that God lets his woman choose between pleasure (the term "Time" appears on the page "PLEASURE" of God's book of life) and desolation (the desolation of fire when God "is burning" as on page 40, line 6 of the poem "The God Fit"). It remains uncertain what his woman chose, but the idea of both concepts having the potential to negatively alter the "flesh" (p. 52, l. 6) of man, one by burning, one by aging, leaves the conclusion that even the items considered as pleasure by God carry a foul side effect for his creation.

Carson describes God as not being compatible to the human nature. What God considers a pleasure is considered a curse by man. God is differently minded than we are, and due to this fact, he lost interest in us a long time ago. "Our blind gestures / parodied / what God really wanted" ("My Religion", p. 40, l. 27ff) and God reacted by retiring from his business of taking care and pursued his ambitions and hobbies such as creating more simple, but also more beautiful things such as dragonflies. What for us feels like God's anger or the impression that we were abandoned could just be the frustration and resignation of a God who created a being that is unable to conceive him. Carson appears to pity God and she intends to hold up her faith to support God until "all the people in the world" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 8) find out just "how simple it would have been" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 5) to give God "this simple thing" ("My Religion", p. 40, l. 32) that he really wanted. God is not there to help us, he needs our help until we have learned to see and listen, or as Carson says it "my religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 1ff).

[1] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paperbook, Fifth Printing. "The Truth about God", 39-53

[2] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paperbook, Fifth Printing.

[3] Nisimov, Felix. The Physics Factbook. Edited by Glenn Elert. 2003. "Number of Species"

When the draft notice arrives, O'Brien states “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it” (O'Brien 41).

This describes the emotional truth that O'Brien is going through at the time that the draft notice arrives. Although this does not fit with the definition of truth supplied above, O'Brien attempts to instill empathy in the reader. At the border between the United States and Canada, O'Brien struggles with himself, “I tried to will myself overboard. I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, now. I did try. It just wasn't possible” (59).

Given the choice of whether to go to Vietnam to be a soldier and possibly die, or flee to Canada and be a solider, he is not physically able to run away. There is no verification for the story “On the Rainy River”, because only O'Brien has written about it, and there is no Tip Top Lodge on the Rainy River, bordering Minnesota and Canada.

However, it shows the inner struggle between many men who were drafted during the time of the Vietnam War. which shows the emotional truth of this story. O'Brien, by altering his own experiences, is able to give the reader an idea of how soldiers felt going into Vietnam.

During Mary-Anne's stay in Vietnam, Rat comments, “What happened to her, Rat said was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterwards it's never the same” (114).

O'Brien stresses in this book, that people were different after they have come back from Vietnam, which meant that something changed their mental states in Vietnam. A perfect example is Mary-Anne, in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, where she enters Vietnam and never comes back. When O'Brien first joins the Alpha Company he is shown how the fellow soldiers treat the dead bodies, “One by one the others did too. They didn't disturb the body, they just grabbed the old man's hand and offered a few words and moved away” (226).

This shows lack of compassion on the part of the soldiers in Vietnam which is another example of emotional truth. “They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. Story truth is what O'Brien uses to enhance the happening and emotional truths by making the reader feel sympathetic towards the young O'Brien and the dead bodies.

After seeing the countless rotting corpses they have found a way to deal with the anguish. Making the dead man seem alive by shaking his hand helps to relieve some of the pain of seeing a lifeless body felt by all of the soldiers.

After his tour of Vietnam, he heads back to the States a changed person from all of the experiences during the war, “I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war” (155). Some people were not able to integrate into society as well as O'Brien, such as Norman Bowker. The strain of re-entrance into a changed society caused Bowker to end up committing suicide (160).

O'Brien says at the end of this, “Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own” (161). O'Brien admits to the reader that he has made up the ending and perhaps this is designed to show the emotional truth of the soldier's lives after Vietnam. Some were able to adapt, and some could not handle the strain.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien is filled with what some people call truth, and others, lies. O'Brien must lie about events in his life to show the emotional and happening truth of the Vietnam War. He explains why he does this by saying, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head” (230).

The straight facts of a story are very boring. If there is not an emotional side to the re-telling of the event or the history, it will just seem like reading a history textbook, long and boring. Tim O'Brien has the ability to evoke feelings from his audience, and this is why this book is such a success.

Budd Schulberg, the son of the Hollywood movie mogul, Benjamin Schulberg, was born in New York on 27th March, 1914.

After attending school at Dartmouth College, he worked as a screenwriter at Paramount. Schulberg was known for his left leanings and was formerly a member of the Communist Party (1937-40). His biases and affiliations however were not apparent in the first two screenplays, Little Orphan Annie (1938) and White Carnival (1939) he wrote. g

When White Carnival did not fare well in the box office, Schulberg was booted out of Paramount. With plenty of time in his hands, he ventured into writing novels. His very first novel was What Makes Sammy Run? (1941). The book was a satire on Hollywood's power and corruption.

Aside from Hollywood themes, Schulberg also tackled pressing issues relevant to his times even now like racketeering that happened in the union, misuse of public trust and the moral implications of success enjoyed by Americans.

The screenplay "On the Waterfront" (1954) tackled the corruption of organized labor unions on New York docks. His novel The Harder They Fall (1947), heacquainted the reader on the pitfalls of professional boxing. Another screenplay "A Face in the Crowd" (1957) examined the dangers of television. His memoirs Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (1981) detailed his roots.

In a 1965 article in Los Angeles magazine, Schulberg reminisced about his Hollywood childhood. "If life is a series of disenchantments through which we prepare ourselves, then I was richly endowed, for our castles were built on glamorous quicksand," he wrote, referring to the success and failure of his father who by the time of his death in 1957 was reduced to begging for employment and compulsive gambling.

'What Makes Sammy Run?'

BOOK SUMMARY

'What Makes Sammy Run?' centers on the career of Sammy. Sammy's life is described as a continual "Blitzkrieg against his fellow-men." Sammy came from bottom ranks. His ability to double-cross people, betray his friends, lie to his own family and many other selfish, unscrupulous acts helped him rose swiftly to the top. He first used his wiles in a New York paper. It was there that he first started to work. Then he invaded Hollywood, wreaked havoc as he snaked his way to the top.

Sammy came from the slums, hence his dog-eat-dog outlook in life. His humble origin had contributed to his ruthless character. The pacing in the novel was fast as it examined Hollywood in great detail. It presented Hollywood as a place where one could gain or lose all in an instant. Hollywood was also the place to witness victorious parties at the club of the season, rumors that spread magically on the fate of its dwellers.

In the story, Sammy came from Rivington Street. He was a hardhearted person who had quick wits about him. He started as a copy boy on a newspaper. By the time he was 19, he became a radio columnist. Not contented with his lot, Sammy stole a manuscript to be able to penetrate Hollywood. He had no writing abilities but was able to exploit the system of collaboration in Hollywood.

Sammy's life was for all to see. Mr. Schulberg spared no detail when it came to Sammy. Sammy's portrait is acerbic but was never dull. This made the book What Makes Sammy Run? an important piece of document.

Book Review

In the book What Makes Sammy Run? Schulberg wants to portray the truth of his life, the way he sees it. It is almost hard to distinguish when the truth begins and the imagination ends in his story because of his journalistic approach. One can read a disclaimer before all his fiction: "only the names of the characters are changed to protect the innocent." But the story about Sammy does not revolved around innocence. As a matter of fact, it is the opposite. Sammy's cunning, ruthless way to approach life is simply unimaginable. Schulberg presents a very grim depiction of Hollywood's skeletons in the closet. Stories about success and failure, a person's maltreatment to others, greed leading human misery abound in the novel. All these plots intertwine to make a very interesting read.

What makes the novel brilliant is its honest depiction of the beliefs and hopes that are apparent during the time. The story flows easily, as if it is not forced. The dialogues among characters are less reserved.

Schulberg's life revolved around the motion-picture. As he brilliantly weaves the story and leads us deeper to the search on what makes Sammy run, Schulberg unmasks his own views about the place. The product is a book which stings Hollywood in its honesty and provides an intimate portrait on the life of Hollywood.