Second Quarter Book Review

Eric Pouliot
12/12/08
Mr. B-G
Second Quarter Book Review
The Lost Boy.
The Lost Boy by Dave Pelzer. Harper Collins Publishers, 2007.Genre: Fiction.
The Lost Boy is the sequel to A Child Called It. The protagonist in this excellent story is Dave Pelzer, the author. This book is about Dave growing up and living with his alcoholic and brutal mother. Dave has to put up with harsh and cruel beatings that are delivered from his mom. He experiences a stab in the gut and horrific gas chamber punishments in the first book. In The Lost Boy Dave Pelzer eventually gets sick and tired of his mother and walks out on her and the rest of his family. Throughout the book, Dave experiences foster homes, around thirteen of them. Dave moves from one foster home to the next because he gets in trouble too many times. Dave sometimes will steal food from convenience stores, and occasionally gets into fist fights with kids from school. Since no foster parents will deal with this, they decide to give him away to another home. This book is about the hardships he endures from moving, and mostly about him trying to find a family to love him as he is. The setting is all of the foster homes, and the conflict is him trying to find a foster home that suets him.
"The Lost Boy stands shining as the premier book on the unique love and dedication that social services and foster families provide for our children in peril. Dave Pelzer is certainly a living testament of resilience, personal responsibility and the triumph of the human spirit-" John Bradshaw, the book jacket. I believe that this quote means that this book shows how good social services and foster families can be for kids like Dave. It also talks about how Dave Pelzer is like a hero for surviving and going through these hard obstacles in his life.
The Lost Boy reminds me of the other book from Dave Pelzer, A Child Called It. I think that they are similar because they both talk about Dave's horrible life. I also think that The Lost Boy is similar to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because in the beginning of the Harry Potter book, the author, J.K. Rowling, talks about how Harry;s life is horrible and he hates his aunt and uncle. This is similar because Dave hates his mom and he talks about how he wishes to have a better life someday. They are also similar because Harry's life gets better because he goes to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. Dave's life gets better because he ends up in a foster home with a family that loves him instead of living with his abusive mother. They are different though because Harry is a wizard and Dave is a normal kid living in a foster home.
"Weekends are worse. No school means no food and more time at "The House". All I can do is try to imagine myself away-somewhere, anywhere-from "The House". For years I have been the outcast of "The Family", pg. 4 I think from this excerpt from the story, you can see that Dave Pelzer likes to emphasize that he is really not part of the family. That is why he uses phrases like "The Family" and ""The House". Dave also writes in a depressing way and a optimistic way too. He says that his weekends are bad and he gets no food, but he also says that he dreams of going somewhere nice and relaxing.
I really liked this book because it shows how Dave was able to overcome horrible things in his life and live to tell his story. I also like how Dave wrote the book. I liked how he wrote it because he tells everything as real as he possibly can. He talks about how his life sucked, but also how he never gave up and thought of one day that he would be loved. He allowed me to live his life for a little and really put me in his shoes. Even though I will never experience how bad it must have been for Dave I can say that I was able to catch a glimpse of his life. This book affected my life because now I know a little bit about how horrible it is to be a child that is not loved by his parents and how hard and difficult it is to be a foster child. I would recommend this book to people that like to read about heart-warming stories and things that happened to people in real life.

The Musical Enjoyment of a Grand Slam

Eric Pouliot
Mr. B-G
9/30/08
Value Essay
Most people value their expensive cars, big screen televisions, and their expensive Rolex watches, diamond necklaces, and other fine jewelry. People in America range from billionaires to people who are happy when they have food to eat that day. This means that different people value different things depending on what they have and what they can afford. What is it that is considered valuable? Is it something that cost a lot of money, or is it something that they truly cherish?
I grab my thin slender ipod and press the button in the center. I hit the button again to go to my fascinating songs. I move my finger in a clockwise formation to scroll down to one of my favorite songs. I press the button one more time to listen to it. Listening to my ipod is one of the things that I like to do most.
At the end of the day, I enjoy relaxing by lying down and listening to my music. All of my music is stored in my black ipod nano. It holds hundreds of the songs that I like to listen to when ever I please. I mostly use my ipod when I get home from school because it wipes away all of the stress I get between homework, tests, and anything else that happened that day. It allows me to block out the rest of the world and lets me not think about anything else that is going on for about half an hour.
Bases are loaded, I walk up to home plate with my baseball bat over my shoulder. I know that this a clutch situation, I can either win the game for my team or possibly lose it in a matter of minutes. The rain beats down on me as I take my first step into the batter's box. I look at the pitcher and grip the bat as I wait for the pitch. He gets the sign and coils up like a snake, then the ball comes spitting out of his hand at a high velocity. The ball is venturing down the middle of the plate, and I decide to take a swing at it. I see the ball leave my bat and journey off out of sight. I drop the bat and start running as fast as I humanely can.
Getting a grand slam was one of the most exciting days of my life, not to mention that it ended up winning the game for my team. I was extremely nervous when I found out that I was up with bases loaded and my team was down by three. After I hit the ball, I knew that I had to run as fast as I can. At first I thought that maybe the ball has a chance of going over the fence, but as I rounded first base, I knew that it was going to stay in the park. I was pretty disappointed, but I thought that I could maybe still have a chance of scoring.
As I almost reached second base, I saw the right fielder pick up the filthy baseball covered in mud from the horrible rain. I hear my couches telling me to head for third base, so I start running faster. At this point I did not want to stop running, I wanted to go home and score. I am relived as my third base couch is swinging his arm around as fast as a propellor on a airplane, telling me to go home. I took a glance to see where the ball was at. The last person in the relay has it in their drenched baseball glove and is ready to rocket the ball to the catcher at home plate. I was very worried and thought that my chances of scoring after all were being diminished rapidly.
It felt like forever for me to run home, but I made it. I was safe. I could not believe what had just happened, I got my first grand slam in a baseball game. I was ecstatic. My whole team came out of the dugout and surrounded me. It felt like a dream to me, I never expected to get a grand slam. My team and I were up by one now, the other had their at bats . Luckily they did not score a single run that inning. At the end of the fifth inning, the umpire called the came because it was lightening out. An official game has to go five full innings. My team and I ended up winning the game. The grand slam that I had hit ended up winning the game for my team.
I value my ipod and my game winning grand slam for different and actually similar reasons. My ipod allows me to relax and listen to my favorite songs. My ipod cost about 150 dollars but is not the most expensive thing that I own. My P.S.P. is about 170 dollars, not including games. I do try to get care of my ipod but after years of having it, time takes a toll on it. Having an ipod is very important to me even though it is not a necessity to life. Without it I would not be able to relax and release my stress at the end of the day.
My grand slam made me feel great and I felt like playing baseball all day long. A game winning grand slam is something that does not happen often in your life time. It gave me a feeling that made think that I could do whatever I wanted to do. Playing baseball is what I do in my spare time; it is my favorite sport to play.
Both my ipod and my grand slam allow me to do the two things that I like to do the most than any other thing in the world. I like listening to music because it relaxes me and I like hearing my favorite songs too. I love to play baseball on teams or with my friends at each other's houses. Hitting a grand slam is one of the greatest feelings to me because it is a great accomplishment. I love hitting grand slams wether it is in a game or playing waffle ball in my front yard with my friends. Relaxing and playing baseball both make my happy in different ways. Listening to music makes me happy because I am by myself and get to unwind. Playing baseball makes my happy because I get to play with my friends and I love the game.

First Quarter Book Review

Eric Pouliot
10/13/08
F Block
"The End book review."
The End by Lemony Snicket, Harper Collins Publishers, 2006. Genre: Fiction.
The End is Lemony Snicket's thirteenth and final book of the series, The Series of Unfortunate Events. The protagonists of this story are Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Three of them are washed up on an island from a brutal storm that is inhabited by other castaways. A person named Count Olaf is also stuck on the island with the Baudelaires. Count Olaf is an evil villain who is after the large amount of money that the Baudelaire's parents left behind. Throughout the book, the three kids learn how to live on the island that is hundreds of miles away from civilization. They have to adapt to the customs of the island's facilitator, Ishmael too. They have to learn new and different things with an evil person trying to kill them on the same island.
" Like a covert mission to turn their readers into slightly dark-hued sophisticates, New York Times-Henry Alford.." I think that the quote from Henry Alford means that the people who read the book The End or other books by Lemony Snicket, learn more about the dark sides of life and other bad things.
This book reminds me of the other books that Lemony Snicket wrote. All of the other twelve books that he has written in the series have the same writing style and talk about the horrible lives that the Baudelaires live in. This book also reminds of the book, The Pearl. I think that The End and The Pearl are very similar books because Count Olaf is try to get the fortune that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny's parents left behind when they died, and the doctor and other people are also trying to get the huge pearl that Kino has found that is worth tons of money. The End and The Pearl are also very different because The End is a novel while The Pearl is a novella.
I think that the writing style of the book makes it seam redundant, depressing, and confusing. At other times is sounds pretty good because of the big words that he always uses. A part of the story that is redundant and confusing is, "The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now." (289,290) This shows that Lemony Snicket does write things that are repetitive, like end, and things that are confusing. When the writer writes things like this it makes you stop and think for a little to see what is going on or what just happened. Sometimes I like it when he does this though.
I like how the author gives each character different personalities and characteristics throughout the book. Violet, the oldest of the three, always ties her hair up with a purple ribbon so that she can think better when she makes inventions. Klaus, the chid that is in the middle, writes down notes in his commonplace notebook so he can remember things better. Klaus always carries this notebook around. Sunny, the baby of the three, likes to cook and bite on objects. Sunny bites on items when she is bored or curious. She caries around a whisk with her to cook things. She is very smart about cooking too, she can