Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck Is there a word for killing the poor? There's homicide and suicide and regicide and fratricide and genocide. But is there such a word as paupricide? I doubt it, because the poor aren't important enough to worry about killing. The poor exist to pick our lettuce and sweep our floors and dig our ditches and anything else we don't want to do. Who cares if they die? This is a story about the poor tenant farmers in the 1930s who could not make the payments on the small plots of land that kept them alive in Oklahoma and other states tormented by bad weather. They were evicted, their houses plowed under by tractors. Many of them fled to California, where they were told there was plenty of work as farm laborers. The Joad family – Tom (just paroled), Ma, Pa, Grampa, Granma, Noah, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon (pregnant wife of Connie) – is only one among many thousands that crowded into the state, competing after to

Book report: The Luck Factor, by Richard Wiseman Read this book! We all know lucky people, whose lives sail along on a sea of good fortune. They get into the right schools effortlessly, meet and marry their perfect mate, move from triumph to triumph in their jobs, enjoy good health, have many friends, and receive gifts from the world. They're lucky, and it's tempting to dismiss this as fate or happenstance. Richard Wiseman has gone far beyond this, however. He has studied both lucky and unlucky people, and has made the amazing discovery that lucky people behave differently from other people, usually without realizing it. They unconsciously act in ways that bring them "luck" constantly. What's even better, the less lucky can learn these behaviors and make their own lives luckier. You can't escape random misfortune: no one can do that. But you can change the way you are in the world and reap many benefits. The author is a scientist, an experimental psyc