The Catcher in the Rye Webquest
"Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. Salinger's classic coming-of-age story portrays one young man's funny and poignant experiences with life and love." (Barnesandnoble.com)
Click here to begin The Catcher in the Rye Webquest!
Click here to begin The Catcher in the Rye Webquest!
Inherit the Wind Webquest
"One of the most moving and meaningful plays in American theatre—based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was tried for teaching evolution—now on Broadway starring Tony Award® Winners Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, and Directed by Tony Award® Winner Doug Hughes
The accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American.
“Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . . . Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . We’re still arguing this case–all the way to the White House.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Powerful . . . a crackling good courtroom play . . . [that] provides two of the juiciest roles in American theater.”
–Copley News Service
“[This] historical drama . . . deserves respect.”
–The Columbus Dispatch
(Barnesandnoble.com)
Click here to begin the Inherit the Wind Webquest!
The accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American.
“Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . . . Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . We’re still arguing this case–all the way to the White House.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Powerful . . . a crackling good courtroom play . . . [that] provides two of the juiciest roles in American theater.”
–Copley News Service
“[This] historical drama . . . deserves respect.”
–The Columbus Dispatch
(Barnesandnoble.com)
Click here to begin the Inherit the Wind Webquest!
Milkweed Webquest
"He’s a boy called Jew. Gypsy. Stopthief. Runt. Happy. Fast. Filthy son of Abraham.
He’s a boy who lives in the streets of Warsaw. He’s a boy who steals food for himself and the other orphans. He’s a boy who believes in bread, and mothers, and angels. He’s a boy who wants to be a Nazi some day, with tall shiny jackboots and a gleaming Eagle hat of his own. Until the day that suddenly makes him change his mind. And when the trains come to empty the Jews from the ghetto of the damned, he’s a boy who realizes it’s safest of all to be nobody.
Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli takes us to one of the most devastating settings imaginable—Nazi-occupied Warsaw of World War II—and tells a tale of heartbreak, hope, and survival through the bright eyes of a young orphan" (Amazon.com)
Click here to begin the Milkweed Webquest
He’s a boy who lives in the streets of Warsaw. He’s a boy who steals food for himself and the other orphans. He’s a boy who believes in bread, and mothers, and angels. He’s a boy who wants to be a Nazi some day, with tall shiny jackboots and a gleaming Eagle hat of his own. Until the day that suddenly makes him change his mind. And when the trains come to empty the Jews from the ghetto of the damned, he’s a boy who realizes it’s safest of all to be nobody.
Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli takes us to one of the most devastating settings imaginable—Nazi-occupied Warsaw of World War II—and tells a tale of heartbreak, hope, and survival through the bright eyes of a young orphan" (Amazon.com)
Click here to begin the Milkweed Webquest