TOW #11 - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson

A cigarette ad from the 1950s. Back then, people believed that cigarettes actually were healthy, "by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds" (Bryson 69). Source: www.google.com

            In a chapter in his book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson gives the readers who may or may not know about the 1950s a detailed account of the time period when he was a child. He shows that 1950s was an age full of dreams, endearing innocence, and excitement when people thought about delivering letters via guided missile, people setting fires on the White House were simply released into the custody of their families, and atomic bomb testing areas were the hottest tourist attractions. This was the time period when food, TV, car, and atomic weapon productions started to grow immensely, and when Disneyland was first opened. During that time when Bryson was a kid, he had a father who "was a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America's glorious past, generally involving slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop" (Bryson 79). However, just before Bryson's ninth birthday, his dad decided to go on a winter vacation, something that did not happen so frequently. Stranger still, the vacation is actually interesting to the point Bryson admits that "I had seldom - what am I saying? I had never - seen my father so generous and carefree" (Bryson 84); the family goes to great places like the Rockies, the lush Imperial Valley, Big Sur, Los Angeles, the beach in Santa Monica, and to top it all off, Disneyland. Through the use of humor, the author effectively shows how his kid-self fitted right into the age of excitement and allows the readers to view the time period through his eyes. Because Bryson experienced all these events firsthand and because he explains the time period so vividly, I and the other readers could tell that the author is very credible.

TOW #10 - Animals are not Clowns by Acção Animal and LPDA

"ANIMALS ARE NOT CLOWNS. Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls for the crack of the whip against the animal's stinging wounds. A big round of applause for the flaming hoops, the injuries, and the electric shocks. Come and see the famed number of cages and tightly binding chains allowing no escape from endless training sessions. Laugh, applaud and join in with the repetetive choreographed routines typical of depressed animals under great stress. All the fun of the circus travelling from city to city exhibiting animals as human caricatures. Clowning around that's no fun at all." Source: www.webneel.com

                                                                     

                In Acção Animal and LPDA's advertisement, a lion with a clown makeup could be seen behind the cage bars. On the side, there is a text that says "ANIMALS ARE NOT CLOWNS" and explains the atrocities against animals in circuses. The intention of the poster's creator is clear: to prevent circus and other organizations from abusing animals. The audience, consisting of people who know the experience of a circus, would be well aware of the animals that are used in dangerous stunts and would be willing to look at this situation from the animals' perspective. This advertisement is very effective because of the juxtaposition of the picture and the satirical tone of the text. The lion's happy looking clown makeup goes against the sad expression of the lion, the bars of the cage, and the stark, dark background, ultimately creating the effect that the element of happiness is artificial. The creator of this advertisement uses a tone similar to a ringmaster's, except with a use of satire in order to mock the people who enjoy seeing animals suffering and the people who cruelly trains the animals. "A big round of applause for the flaming hoops, the injuries, and the electric shocks" shows how these torturous actions had become a form of people's entertainments. Because people "Laugh, applaud and join in with the repetitive choreographed routines typical of depressed animals under great stress," this makes humans look no better than the tamed beasts suffering from their masters. As if this isn't bad enough, the creator of the advertisement refers the animals as "human caricatures," implying that they aren't worthy enough to be even treated as living, breathing creatures. I personally believe that the advertisement strikes its message into the audience's hearts effectively because of the creative use of the picture and the text.

IRB #2 - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

            The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is a memoir of growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines, Iowa. The author gives a detailed account of his memories of running around as a superhero named "The Thunderbolt Kid" with a football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a cape on. Using these memories to paint a bigger picture, the author explains all the unique aspects of his native city half a century ago when "automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you" (Bryson). I thought that this would be a very interesting book to read because with all the new technologies these days, a period of time where there were no smartphones seemed unthinkable. I also picked this book because, being a guy and all, I was naturally attracted to the idea of being a superhero when I was a kid too, and I hope that this would help me to relate to the author more easily. By the end of this book, I wish that I will have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of living in the 1950s. I also hope that I would  be able to go through Bryson's memories through the eyes of the author's younger-self and experience every great experiences that he experienced in the past.

TOW #9 - The Boy Who Was Brave By Scarlett Lewis

"Jesse was a first grader with an ever-ready grin whom God had given a warrior's heart." Source: Reader's Digest

            In her writing, Scarlett Lewis gives her personal account of how her son Jesse bravely helped other kids escape before dying in the hands of a gunman. Her last morning with her son was pretty typical: Scarlett playfully waked Jesse up, then Jesse's father Neil took him to school as Scarlett went to work. All hell broke loose when she received a call while working. Two calls. Then another. They all told Scarlett one thing: there was a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary - Jesse's school. The Lewis family quickly reached the school and learned that Jesse was dead from the shooting. Apparently, Jesse was at his teacher's side when she was hiding the children in different areas of the classroom before the gunman came in and shot the teacher. Jesse, his head wounded from a bullet fragment, bravely faced the gunman as he yelled to his classmates to run while the gunman was either fixing his gun or reloading, ultimately saving nine first graders before the killer took aim at the hero. Scarlett recalls that she was not surprised at all to learn that her son did such a heroic act, because Jesse was a kid "whom God had given a warrior's heart" (Lewis). Through writing this, Lewis intends to commemorate her dead son and other victims of the Sandy Hook Shooting with the audience who remember the tragic event. She also wanted to share how she and other parents felt when they realized their kids were dead, and she does this by using similes and metaphors such as in the sentence "Reality hit me like a kick in the stomach. My gut twisted into knots so painful that my knees jerked to my chest and I rolled into the fetal position" (Lewis). I believe that she did an excellent job of describing the pain she felt, but also her pride of her son by appealing to pathos. I could really relate to her feelings throughout the writing.  

TOW #8 - What Makes a Hero by Elizabeth Svoboda

Marjorie Taylor's piece of work titled Warm Glow is based on her husband's and his colleagues' fMRI scans of brains. The colored areas shown represent the brain regions that showed heightened activity that are related to making charitable decisions. Source: www.surfacedesign.org

                In Elizabeth Svoboda's article "What Makes a Hero?", the author makes an attempt to prove that there is a scientific reasoning behind heroic feats to the readers of Discovery magazines. Svoboda shows how characteristics like valor and fearlessness tie with a person's brain. She starts out with an anecdote of a woman named Shirley Dygert in order to hook her readers in and to put them in the shoes of a 54-year-old woman who was saved by a guy named Dave Hartsock. Dygert was skydiving for the first time with her instructor, but as they opened the parachute to stop their free fall, the chute did not open all the way and the backup parachute became tangled. Hartsock decided to position his body so that he could cushion Dygert's fall, and when they landed, he suffered a severe blow on his spinal cord, ultimately paralyzing him from the neck down. Dygert exclaimed that his action "absolutely amazed" her because he had "that much love for another person." "Why?" Svoboda asks, allowing the audience to participate and think. Apparently, when a person does a good deed, a place in the brain called nucleus accumbens releases the pleasure chemical dopamine. While egoists show less activity in this part of the brain when donating their money to charity, altruists show more. Svoboda draws the comparison between the satisfaction of giving money to others  and the satisfaction of ingesting an addicting drug to show how good it feels to do a heroic deed. Recent discovery shows how meditating can help people to train their minds to be more selfless, and the researchers found this out by having some participants to practice meditation while having others to practice a technique known as cognitive reappraisal. When both groups played the game, the participants who practiced meditation helped out unfortunate victims more than the other participants did. By adding all these details about the experiment, Svoboda increases her credibility a lot. I believe that her use of anecdotes, comparison, and descriptive details really allowed me to see bravery in a whole new way.