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Showing posts from October, 2023

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

Recently, I reread the book  The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power  by Daniel Yergin. It starts off by following the story of John D. Rockefeller, and how he, his business, and his competitors used and manipulated unethical strategies to gain an upper hand in the rapidly growing market of oil. In it, there were so many examples of loopholes, blackmail, and even murder as horrible crimes that were committed all for the sake of profits.  Rockefeller's oil company dominated the oil market for a while, with it being the monopoly. Following this, the book goes into detail about the dangers of having a monopoly of a product, and even discussed the consideration of government intervention and how it might affect the United States' status as a capitalist country. Eventually it died down, and split into multiple branches, one of which, Shell, still exists today. It also followed other stories of how the oil market grew, starting from the first ever oil well to millio...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

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                 We all know and hopefully love the Harry Potter books; I know I certainly do. It tends to be a common theme when you begin on the adventure of this 7 books series the topic of movie, or book first. I personally think book first because I think that background information is important and helps me understand the context of the movies more. But the less common topic in the world of wizards is the Script of   Harry Potter and the Cursed Child  or the Broadway show.     I was lucky enough to have had the chance to go see the show during a trip last September and was complete blown out of the water how fantastic it was. At the time I hadn't read the script and all the stage directions that were in the book version, but to see something so lively on stage, I couldn't wait to find out how it was described.      As I started to read, I was able to see the character...

Maus by Art Spiegelman Review

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This is probably one of my more favorite books during my later grades. This book is called Maus and I was first shown it by my previous English teacher last as for the banned book project and I can safely say that I enjoy this book even though it is seen as controversial for some viewers. Which I can understand due to the suicidal topics as well as the propaganda put into this story. I never read the other books so I will do the first one written by Art Spiegelman who is in the story itself but not the main character/ To grossly oversimplify, the Book Maus stars a character Named Art or Artie as he is nicknamed by his father, trying to write a story for his upcoming book. But the problem he doesn't have a subject to base it on so he goes to his now sickly father and stepmothers house and he asks if his father Vladek could tell the story of how he and his late mother met and also about his now deceased elder brother, and he tells him about his travels around Europe during the phase ...