Author Archives: duncanwijnberg

“How To Be a Poet” is a poem by Wendell Berry. The poem is supposed to be about reminding himself how to be a poet, but when you really read into it you find it’s really about being an apt human being. He speaks about a few abilities which human beings can have which inContinue reading “How to Be A Person”

“Today, When I Could Do Nothing” is a poem by Jane Hirshfield about her experiences not being able to go outside for the first time. Specifically, it’s about her rescuing an ant and returning it back to where it belongs. To me, it speaks about the loneliness of staying at home because of the factContinue reading “Lonely in Quarantine”

“Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes is a poem about continuing through life even when there is an obstacle, using a staircase as a metaphor.  Specifically, it’s a mother telling her son that her life wasn’t easy and neither will his, so he must persevere and keep going. To be precise, it’s about the strugglesContinue reading “Stairway to Heaven”

Kindness is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye detailing how beneficial it is to experience kindness and how useful a tool it is for us humans. Also, she tells how, to experience the importance of kindness, we must also experience the negativity sorrow can bring, before we can truly understand the value of kindness. InContinue reading “Empathy”

In Into Thin Air, there are many passages which tell the somber, tragic, story of each of the some 12 climbers who died on May 10, or the days after. Using sensory details Jon Krakauer is able to describe the ferocious storm, as well as the extreme conditions of simply climbing Everest in general. SimplyContinue reading “Somber Tales”

In “Into Thin Air”, Krakauer uses foreshadowing to create lots of suspense, even though we have a basic understanding and what will happen, he is still able to create suspense through foreshadowing. Krakauer writes that they began to talk about the different groups of climbers that had came this season and how there were manyContinue reading “Worried Mountaineers”

Into Thin Air is a nonfiction account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster by Jon Krakauer, which details what was at the time the deadliest season of all time on Mount Everest. There are many flashbacks in the writing, Krakauer starts off in an intense, high-energy situation near the summit of Mount Everest, but usesContinue reading “Supernatural Mountain”

A Long Way Gone is a memoir by Ishmael Beah based on his experience with civil war, and child soldiers in his home country of Sierra Leone. At 11 years old, he and his friends are avid dancers and love to sing and dance to rap music from the US. He is on his wayContinue reading “War Crimes”

Eventually, the boys got to a village named Kamator, where people knew them and they were welcomed and allowed to stay, finally. Even though it was relatively close to Mattru Jong, which was still rebel occupied they decided to stay there. Everyone knew that the rebels would eventually attack, but no one thought anything ofContinue reading “Stripped of Boyhood”

Ishmael and his friends had arrived in a government-occupied village called Yele, and said they finally felt safe in that village. However, the longer they spent in the village the more they began to feel unsafe again. Eventually, the lieutenant of the group in the village announced that all the boys and men in theContinue reading “Cassettes”