A Dry White Season

A few words of explanation would seem to be necessary at the beginning of this book in order to define its specific intention and to distinguish it from other works dealing with the same material. When I first started reading this book, I didn't know what to expect. Having never read Andre Brink before, otherwise any work of fiction story about South Africa, I wondered what the tendency would be. I was also uninformed as to the full level of the violence taking place in the country at the time the book was written. By book's end, however, I found that not only is Brink a luminous writer, but that the issue of political system is about far more than just a racist system of government. Like a nasty swelling in the body of the country, its injustice, its suspicion, its oppression has developed to include and transmit a disease to every individual person in it, black and white.
A Dry White Season is truthfully an immense work, equally in style and in material. Since finishing read this book I would like to recommend it to everyone in the world who wants to know about the open-mindedness attitude of the South African government. I cannot facilitate but consider that anyone who reads it will come away somewhat more open-minded. You must read this book if you want to know the truth about the fairness of the South African government. At any tempo this is the only way true social change will ever come about: one person at a time. This book is a powerful novel that you will not easily put down or forget what you read. Also it gives you knowledge and courage to leave with those who corrupt or discriminate other in the society. A Dry White Season is an unwavering and extraordinary look at ethnic fanaticism, the human condition, and the heavy price of integrity or morality.

“A Dry White Season”. By Andre Brink

A wonderful and moving novel will trap you until the last page. In the context of Apartheid, a simple white teacher, Ben Du Toit, is caught up in the search of the causes of two deaths: Jonathan Ngubene and the apparent suicide of his father, Gordon.
Gordon had been the black janitor from the school where Ben worked. They were acquaintances and also Ben supported the scholarship of Jonathan. When the boy was in the Soweto riot, he was apprehended by the police. After a short time, he died under suspicious circumstances. First, Gordon started with the investigation until he was also detained by the Special Branch of government. That was the same organization which followed nearly the Ben’ steps. A racist system nurtured this group of security which closed all the ways of the investigation.
Vanished witnesses, silenced lawyers and doctors, and threats, make the investigation more difficult. Not only that, Ben finds more difficulties; he gradually loses his family support, his friends and social status as a well-known and supportive teacher.
The narrator sequentially tells the story how Ben opens his eyes and sees the critical and wrong system at he belongs to and from which he will be one more victim. This well-written novel has many political, historical and South African social elements that make it an interesting and remarkable book which you should read.

Reading about the Financial Crisis

We are living an important moment right now. Our world financial system is in a crisis and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. Already the US market has dropped more than it did in the Great Depression. What does this mean for you? Find out by reading a story about the crisis in one of our newspaper links or in the new ESL BBC link below.

The British/Icelandic dispute over banking

The US rescue plan

After you finish, we'll take fifteen minutes to share some of the information we've found.

Book Reviews

Enjoy the reviews below. They were written by some of our Reading Workshop students reading longer novels in our class. Offer your constructive criticism in the Comments section below each.

chris

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Spokane Indian Reservation’s life can be unknown for us. Maybe we can think that they live with all their traditions like us. However the author, Sherman Alexie, tells us how miserable and hopeless is the situation there.
Children without enough food go to the school where a white teacher teaches them lacking a minimum of charity. Youngsters spend time in bars drinking a lot and dreaming to join the basketball team which can give them a new future. Unemployed parents get refuge in the alcohol, thus they open the way of a “new tradition” for their children. However, the imagination, an Indian resource, can help children and young people as Thomas Builds-the-Fire, to reread their lives in the context of Indian traditions. All those tales are dynamically interweaved with creativity and a strong sense of truth in the same time.
Irony and sense of humor are the elements that change a sad story into bearable one. And the author gets to use those elements very well in this book. In addition, he tries to approach to critical issues between “Indians and Whites” which can do us to think deeply about our historic responsibilities.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

In this mysteriously comedian short story Collected works, written by Sherman Alixie who truly explained about life of the Indian Reservations. The life of the Indian Reservations were very complex beacuse of the discriminations. The Author used different kinds of brilliant weaves momery, and fantasy to tell us what life was like in the Indian Reservations.



The life of the Indian Reservations was not typical because they did not have opportunity to make a living. The Indians were filled with passion, affection, and dream. Most of the parents were unemployed and they did not have enough money to send their children in private school. Even though, the children did not eat anything in the early morning they still go to school. They were living their life drinking everyday because they did not work. They were a big distances between Indians and Writes. Lets get along with each other like equals because nobody is better than anybody else everybody is equal. This book gave us a lot of lessons about how you must live our lifes in the Reservations. If you want to know more about life, we need to read this book.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are an important part of every culture. They help shape the way we think about the world, how we explain why things are and how we should act. Two important sources of traditional tales come from the greek storyteller Aesop and the german Brothers Grimm.

Read a few of the fairy tales from Aesop and the Grimm brothers and then post a comment about what you read. Are the tales you read similar to ones from your own culture? Do you agree with the moral of the story?

Some of the stories have an audio link. Try it out, but keep the sound down!

Grimms' Fairytales

Aesop's Fables

Online Dictionaries

Here are some useful tools to help with your reading and your vocabulary. Online dictionaries are easy to use and offer things like pronunciation help and pictures. Try these:

• Merriam Webster Online
• Dictionary.com
• The Free Dictionary
• Longman Dictionary Program

Remember to keep a list of your new vocabulary in your notebook. Another trick is to use a pad of sticky notes for your new words.

Happy Reading,

chris

Welcome!

Welcome to the new sustained reading class and lab at Divine Word College. My goal as the instructor of the class is to help foster a love of reading while giving you the opportunity to improve your reading ability in English.

We'll do that with a variety of reading materials: graded readers, some with audio cds to accompany them; electronic sources of text and audio support; trips to the library and reading room to learn about the wide assortment of materials available there and much more.

This will be a low stress environment. The only tests we'll have are those to place you in the right reading level in our graded reading program and small quizzes checking your understanding and helping you practice what you've learned. You'll pass the class if you read. The only failure possible is if you fail to participate.

That said, let's have some fun this semester!

And read!