Power Point Presentation

Jessica Street

May 19,2008

Mr.Abner –1st period

Romeo and Juliet

• A boy and a girl, from families who hate each other bitterly, fall in love, but everything goes wrong for them and they kill themselves rather than be parted.

• Most of the play takes place in 'fair Verona' an attractive little city in the north of Italy. The action moves quickly from the city streets to the hall of old Capulet's house, then to the orchard below Juliet's balcony, to Friar Lawrences' lonely cell and finally to the vault where the Capulets and the Montagues view their dead children.

• The play starts on a Sunday morning in the middle of July; less than five days later - just before dawn on the following Thursday - it is all over.

The House on Mango Street

• In lyrical language, a young girl discusses growing up in a poor, Latino neighborhood. She tells her story in short vignettes, describing her friends, her family, her neighbors, and her dream to have a "house all my own... Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."

Tears of Tiger

• "In one horrifying night, Andy''s life changed forever... Andy Jackson was driving the car that crashed one night after a game, killing Robert Washington, his best friend and the captain of the Hazelwood High Tigers. It was late, and they''d been drinking, and now, months later, Andy can''t stop blaming himself. As he turns away from family, friends, and even his girlfriend, he finds he''s losing the most precious thing of all -- his ability to face the future.

Great Expectations• Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel

sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.

The Clay Marble

• Minfong Ho's fine novel The Clay Marble tries to answer these difficult questions. Written for young readers, and set in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980, Marble tells the story of Dara, a young Cambodian girl who is forced out of her village by war.

• Ho, who was a volunteer at the camps in the spring of 1980, clearly understands her subject well. Her description of a conversation between strangers arriving at the camp bears the stamp of authenticity:

• 'Welcome to Nong Chang,' the girl said. She looked around Sarun's age, eighteen or nineteen, and had a broad face with high cheekbones. There was a bright checkered kerchief wrapped around her hair, and her eyes were friendly and curious. For a moment there was silence. I had heard enough of such conversations not to interrupt. First there were the greetings, then the terse tally of the dead, then the pause. Only after that, it seemed, could there be talk of other things."

• Dara soon finds a friend in Jantu, another refugee. Jantu has a special gift: she can make toys from clay. Soon the Border begins to feel like a home. The war, however, is not over, and it will once again overtake Dara, Jantu, and their families in unexpected ways. Perhaps it is fitting that the final, critical battle isn't be fought with guns. It's a battle for a heart and mind.

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To Kill A Mocking Bird

• To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Alabama during the Depression, and is narrated by the main character, a little girl named Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer with high moral standards. Scout, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill are intrigued by the local rumors about a man named Boo Radley, who lives in their neighborhood but never leaves his house. Legend has it that he once stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors, and he is made out to be a kind of monster. Dill is from Mississippi but spends his summer in

Maycomb at a house near the Finch's.

The Diary of Anne Frank • In 1933 the Franks moved to the Netherlands to escape Nazi persecution.

The family lived in relative peace until 1940, when Germany occupied the Netherlands and imposed stringent anti-Semitic laws. These new measures

prohibited Jews from riding streetcars, forced Jews to attend separate schools, imposed boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, and required Jews to wear yellow stars to identify themselves as Jewish. The quality of life of even highly assimilated Jews, like the Franks, became precarious. Within two years after these anti-Semitic laws were imposed, many Jews in the Netherlands were harassed, arrested, and sent to concentration camps where they were herded together and killed. The Franks and other well-

connected families were able to heed warning signs in time to make arrangements to go into hiding. This decision put their own lives and the

lives of those who cared for them at great risk.Anne was thrilled to receive a diary on her thirteenth birthday and expressed hope that it would

become her one trusted confidant. She immediately began filling her diary with details of her life, including descriptions of her friends, boys she liked,

and events at school. Less than one month after she began documenting her relatively carefree childhood, Anne and her family were suddenly

forced into hiding. Margot, Anne’s sixteen-year-old sister, had been “called up” by the Gestapo, Germany’s brutal secret-police force. It was common

knowledge among Jews that being called up meant eventually being sent to one of the notorious concentration camps. The Franks were relatively

prepared, since they had been sending furniture and provisions to a secret annex in Otto’s office building in anticipation of the Gestapo. The Franks

and another family, the van Daans, had arranged to share the annex while some of Otto’s non-Jewish colleagues agreed to look after the families. The

Franks later invited one more person, Mr. Dussel, to share their annex.While they were in hiding, the Franks used a radio to keep up with news from the war, and Anne frequently wrote in her diary about events

that caught her attention. These bits—speeches by Winston Churchill; the advances by the British—provide a vivid historical context for Anne’s

personal thoughts and feelings.The Gestapo finally arrested Anne and her family on August 4, 1944. Two secretaries who worked in the building

found the books containing Anne’s diary entries strewed over the floor of the annex. The secretaries handed over the diaries to Miep Gies, an

assistant in Otto’s office. Miep held the diary, unread, in a desk drawer. When the war ended in 1945, Miep delivered the diary to Otto Frank, who had survived the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anne and

Margot died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March of 1945. Their mother died of hunger and exhaustion in Auschwitz in January 1945. The van Daans and Mr. Dussel also perished in

the camps.