"The Road"

As I have written in an earlier post, we have all been reading a book. The book I have red is “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy which I think appeared as a boring book in the start, but after a while it got better.

The book is a story about a father and his young son who walks through destroyed America heading for the coast. We do not get to know what has happened to the world, but it is clear that something has destroyed all civilization and almost all life on earth. On this journey, the father and his son doesn’t have much except from the clothes they’re wearing, a cart of scavenged food, a gun for protection and each other. The father has understood that they will not live trough the winter and leads his son to the coast in the hope of finding warmth, food and other good people like themselves. The other people they see on the road, which are referred to as “the bad guys”, are people that has no problem killing and eating other people to survive, and therefore the father and the son has to hide and watch out at all times. Sometimes we follow the father’s memory back in time to meet the boy’s mother. She was pregnant when the nature disaster hit and committed suicide when the boy was born, leaving the father alone to take care of the son. The reason the father is taking the son to the coast is because he is sick and he know he is going to die soon. In the end of the book, they reach the coast, but the fathers attempt for seeking warmth and food is a lost cause. He has thought his son how to protect himself from “the bad guys” and then he dies. In the end, the son sits with his father’s body for three days until he meets a man who promises to take care of him.

Personally, I think it took a while for the book to get interesting, because there was a lot of walking and description of the landscape. I felt that I had to concentrate a lot to not start thinking about something else when I read, but when I came halfway through it got more interesting. There was a lot more situations that caught my attention and I have to admit that in the end when the father died, I started to cry. So I have to say that the last half of the book was good and exciting and I wish that the whole book was like this. 

Question Time

In todays class we got some assignments to work with. Pauline and I worked together, and this is what we wrote:

In question time Wednesday February 24, Gordon Brown had to answer though questions. He appeared engaged, interested and sincerely concerned with the issues that were presented. His body language projected that he was restless and at the same time very focused on answering the questions in the best way. Any how, the Prime Minister did not answer all the questions as correctly as others, maybe because he did not have a good enough answer prepared for those questions. The debate started calmly, but after a while the temperature was raised to a higher level. It’s not hard to see that the MP’s are involved in the topics that they are presenting.

The ongoing election that takes place in Britain gives the politicians the opportunity to have TV-debates with question time. This occurs when MP’s ask questions of Government Ministers which they are obliged to answer. The questions that are asked in these TV-debates are usually pre-arranged by the organizers of each party and are intended to allow the Minister to discuss the virtues of government policy, or to attack the opposition. Skilled Ministers will often attempt to turn around the opposition’s question, but there is not allowed to lie or providing misleading answers to Parliament.

In the USA they do not have Question Time for the President, but he shall from time to time give the Congress information of the State of Union.