Spring Raiding

For my spring reading book, I read The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak. The book takes place in Nazi Germany, during WWII, and follows a little girl living with a foster family, all the while being narrated by Death. As the little girl, Liesel, grows, she learns to read and write, and starts amassing a collection of books. She starts to steal them from book burnings, and saving them from fires.
Personally, I liked this book, and found the premise interesting. It was great to read it from Death's perspective, something I had not expected to find. The story touches on a very interesting subject, that of knowledge control and information transferal. In Nazi Germany, like many other totalitarian regimes, books were burned to keep the population in the dark, or to prevent the spreading of unwanted information. Censorship was rampant, and people would be none the wiser to what was being kept from them. Liesel makes a statement to go against this grain, to try and prevent those books from being destroyed. She shares a hunger for knowledge and the preservation of it, a trait which I admire and share as well. I heavily encourage others to read this book as well.

Civil Lefts

How did black power differ from mainstream civil rights?

Black power, while not different from mainstream civil rights, took it to a whole new degree. There were never before seen numbers of movements and protesters, and the black power movements took the country by storm. There has never been another movement in America that took racial equality to the degree that black power did. Eventually, it even broke off and formed its own genre of protesting. While mainstream civil rights typically was aimed towards gaining equality among races and having everyone being treated equally, regardless of skin color, black power instilled a sense of pride in African-Americans, and created a culture. They were not simply trying to achieve equality, they were proud of their race, and wanted to show everyone else that they should be as well. The slogan "Black is Beautiful" spread around quickly too, and in arts and culture of the time, black pride shone through. Soul music embodied the beliefs of black power, and spread it as well. While mainstream civil rights was concerned with the equality of all peoples, black power instilled a sense of pride among African-Americans, and united them to a degree that mainstream civil rights could not, while having a significant and lasting impact on today's culture.