Book of the Dead Summary

Book of the Dead begins by throwing the reader right into a torture scene. We enter through Sandmans point of view torturing and killing Drew Martin in an apartment in Rome. Drew Martin is a U.S. tennis star who was in Rome for a vacation after a big tournament. Book of the Dead then fast forwards ten days and Scarpetta and Benton, since they are consultants for International Investigative Response, are in Rome investigating Drews death. Drew Martins nude, mutilated body was found near Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome with her eyes gouged out and filled the sockets with sand. Benton and Scarpetta end their trip in Rome with a romantic proposal. Scarpetta accepts and she flies back to Charleston, South Carolina while Benton flies back to McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. After the near fatal strangulation that Scarpetta suffered from at the end of P.R.E.D.A.T.O.R., Scarpetta starts over with a private forensic pathology practice with Pete Marino, Lucy and Rose at her side. Coming back from Rome, Scarpetta has to deal with another case. A body of an abused, emaciated boy was dumped in a desolate marsh. The identity of the boy is not known until the very end of the book. Scarpetta coming back from Rome engaged had a very bad effect on Marino who has always loved Scarpetta. He buys a motorcycle, gets an extremely bad and trashy girlfriend and begins talking to Dr. Self again. Dr. Self is a crazy, self-absorbed psychiatrist who manipulates people into doing the opposite of what is best for them. Dr. Self was also in touch with Drew Martin before her death. Dr. Self checked herself into McLean Hospital because she received an email with a picture attached from The Sandman which scares her into hiding. We later find out that The Sandman sent Dr. Self a picture of Drew being tortured. Dr. Self, being her usual manipulative self, realizes Benton is working at McLean and tries to get into his program so that she can write bad things about him. The plot thickens when Dr. Maroni is introduced to the story. He is a investigator that always knows way more than what he lets on. He hints around to information that he wants people to know but keeps other information to himself that people shouldnt know quite yet or at all. He is the mastermind kind of pushing people all towards the ending where we finally figure out the truth. We find more out about Will The Sandmans life as the book progresses. He hates his mom and strongly dislikes his father as well. He went to war over in Iraq and came back a changed person. He was traumatized with what he saw over there and uses torturing techniques that he learned over there on two of his victims. His next victim is a woman who lives in a beach house in Hilton Head. He tortures and kills her similar to what he did to Drew Martin and sends another picture to Dr. Self. Scarpetta and Marino have not been on the best terms this book and their entire relationship comes crashing down when Marino shows up at Scarpettas house extremely drunk and they argue. Marino ends up grabbing Scarpetta, ripping her blouse off and almost rapes her. Marino eventually stops attacking Scarpetta and Scarpetta is severely traumatized from the event. She attempts to talk to Marino about it though and tells him that she forgives him for it. Marino is on self-destruct mode after this and the book ends with Marino hating himself and disappearing and possibly committing suicide. Rose, Scarpettas secretary, finds out that she has untreatable lung cancer and will die before the book is over. Lucys brain tumor begins to be contained in this book. It shrunk some but the drugs that she is on will not make it go away. She will eventually have to get surgery to remove it. Scarpetta, Benton and Marino find out in the end after following a string of clues left by Dr. Maroni that the identity of The Sandman was Will Rambo. Will Rambo was not always his name though; his real name is Willard Self. Dr. Maroni and Dr. Self had an affair years ago and Will was the result of the affair. The reason The Sandman was sending all the pictures to Dr. Self was because he was her son and he wanted to pay her back for never really caring about him. Dr. Maroni revels to Benton that he knew that Will was a bit crazy. Each time he got deployed for war he got a lot worse. He raped and killed tourists in various locations and finally came into the picture as a serious murderer with the public death of Drew Martin and from there on the deaths got more gruesome. Scarpetta and Lucy find Wills hiding place on a sandy beach, the same sand that he put in all of his victims eyes. They also find dead bodies, but they do not find Will. Will is found later when he attempts to capture and kill Scarpetta, but a police officer intervenes and saves Scarpettas life. The book ends with Scarpetta and Benton sitting at Scarpettas house relaxing and talking about all the traumatic events that have happened. Marino is still missing and no one has heard a word from him.

The Arabian Nights (The Thousand and One Nights, or The Thousand Nights and One Night) is a collection of Arabic short stories. The story starts with a king, Shahzaman, whose wife has committed adultery with a kitchen boy. He kills both of them and declares that he shall leave immediately for his brothers kingdom in India. Shahzaman gets to the palace of his brother, Shahrayar. While he is in his brothers home, he grows sickly and pale because of his internal demons. He is king but he cannot protect or keep what is his. His brother invites him on a hunt, but he declines, staying in the palace with his grief. Then he witnesses his brothers wife, paramours, and concubines fraternizing with the black slave boys. He realizes that his misfortune is not uncommon, and he finds consolations in his own affliction and forgets his grief. After Shahrayar gets back from the hunt, Shahzaman eventually tells him about his wife, and he would like to see this with his own eyes. They sneak out, under the guise of another hunt, but go back into the city to catch his wife with the black slave. Realizing the truth of the matter, the brothers decide to go on a journey. On this journey, they cross the path of a demons wife, who commands them to sleep with her, bringing her total to one hundred men she has slept with while entrapped in the horrible marriage of the demon. She showed the brothers that a womans cunning will get her what she wants. They travel back to their cities, and Shahrayar has a plan in mind to outwit a womans cunning wiles. When Shahrayar returns he puts his wife to death, then he orders his vizier to find a daughter of a prince. He marries her, and then kills her the next morning, before any harm can befall him. Shahrayar continues this for many days, until the people call for a plague upon the head of their king. However, the vizier has two daughters. Shahrazad has been well educated and is knowledgeable. With a plan in mind, she requests that her father marry her to the king. Her father, the vizier, tells her the story of the donkey and the ox, stating that her miscalculation will be the end of her. Then when she insists to be wed to the king, he threatens with the story of the Merchant and His Wife to beat her. She still requests. The vizier goes before the king, telling him that his daughter would like to marry him. They are wed, and that night Shahrazad requests that she say good bye to her sister before her death in the morning. The king agrees and sends for Dinarzad, who requests a story from her sister before she sleeps. With the kings permission she starts the story of the Merchant and the Demon, but does not finish due to sunrise and sleep. As morning overtakes her, her audience is intrigued by her story. She states What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the king spares me and lets me live? Due to his curiosity, she is not put to death, but the next night continues the story. She does this for one thousand and one nights. At the end, the king accepts her as his queen, having learned many lessons about life from her stories.

Stevan Javellanas Without Seeing the Dawn was all about the village and the man who lived on the farm but became a rebel when one of the land owners betrayed the farmers. He tried the life on the city, but it was never easy for them.As we go through the summary of the novel, one is able to see how Stevan Javellana portrays the society of the Philippines many decades ago. Those periods were both before and during the war. We all know that the Japanese occupation of the Philippines remains as one of the darkest times in our history.If we analyze the characters in this novel, one can see that most of them belong to the lower class, particularly the working class and the peasantry, and their experiences definitely corresponds to the everyday realities of Filipino lower class life. For example, Javellana skillfully portrays the oppression suffered by the Filipino peasants through the characters of Tatay Juan and his son, Carding. As poor peasants, Tatay Juan and his family own a piece of land but this is utterly negligible as they depend for their livelihood mainly on their tenant status They generally have insufficient funds for both their daily living and agricultural expenses and often use their crop to guarantee debts from the landlords and money lenders. Another financial hardship is seen in Tatay Juans initial reluctance to agree to Cardings early wedding to Lucing, not only because of Cardings education but also because the wedding expenses were usually shouldered by the grooms family. Cardings despair after the flood that destroyed his crops in Badlan also reflects the peasants dependence upon the land for survival. The characters belief in luck and superstition reveals the backward nature of our educational system, where the majority of the population did not have proper education that they led them into thinking that the oppression that they are suffering are due to the bad luck.The patriarchal system in the Filipino families is also present in Javellanas novel, especially in Cardings relationship with his wife, Lucing. For example, Lucing was condemned as a whore when Luis, the tenants son attempted to seduce her and almost succeeded, whereas Carding was hailed as macho and as a ladies man when he had an extramarital affair with Rosing. Carding is portrayed as a strong, outgoing, capable male who fights for what he believes is right, while Lucings silence, meekness and inability to protect herself is seen by many readers as a virtue rather than as a liability. A few reviews of the novel even praised Lucings decision to stay behind in Manghayang to wait for her husbands corpse and fulfill her wifely duties to Carding, despite the countless times that he took her for granted and abandoned her and the sure death and torture that awaits Lucing when the Japanese find her in the village. Meanwhile, Rosing, the only outgoing woman in the novel is portrayed as an immoral whore who used her charms to seduce a married man like Carding. Such a relationship affirms the observation that in a third-world country like the Philippines, women are doubly oppressed: first by poverty, secondly by patriarchy. Another facet of Filipino life that is ably reproduced in Javellanas Without Seeing the Dawn is the Filipino peoples struggle against Japanese imperialism. Like Carding, a lot of other Filipinos stayed in the mountains. Their decision to remain in the hills was due to various reasons. People were not sure what the Japanese would do next. Some members of a family were unsurrendered soldiers; some families had beautiful daughters; there were those who loved freedom more than life under the Japanese; and they were convinced that the Americans were coming back. These people endured the hardships, trials like spreading of diseases such as malaria, unfavorable weather such as cold and most of all, the risk of being captured by patrolling Japanese. Despite the defeatist conclusion of the novel, Javellanas account of the Filipino resistance against the Japanese remains as one of the most touching ever written. The similarity of the experiences of Carding and all the other characters of the novel with the experiences of the typical Filipino citizen confirms Stevan Javellanas statement that his characters in the novel are representatives of the Filipino people, an assertion that solidifies his novels importance in the Philippine literary field. Furthermore, Stevan Javellanas novel, Without Seeing the Dawn retains its importance in the study of Philippine literature and society not only because of its unforgettable characters and realistic portrayal of Philippine society before and during the Japanese occupation but also because most of the trials in the society described in Javellanas novel is still evident up to the present and a study of such challenges is necessary to a deeper understanding of Philippine literature and culture.

Carlos Bulosan's writing, especially his semiautobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, had a special significance in Asian American and ethnic studies for a wide variety of reasons. First, and perhaps most important, Bulosan developed a race and class perspective on behalf of his compatriots, the generation of Filipino migrant workers known as the Manongs (or "respected elders") who worked in the fields, fisheries, and canneries up and down the West Coast during the 1920s and 1930s.America Is in the Heart, especially, was widely used in Asian American studies courses across the country because many of the field's founders thought that this book, in particular, most explicitly exposed the racial prejudice and discrimination that the Manongs faced before World War II. What differentiates Bulosan from most other prewar Asian immigrant authors is that, along with race, Bulosan was highly focused on the local and global class dynamics that also shaped the Filipino immigrants' labor experiences and tribulations. In this same sense Bulosan was also able to position the Filipino laborers' plight within an international context, rare in terms of nonfiction Asian immigrant authors of the time. In America Is in the Heart, specifically, Bulosan spends chapters developing the portrait of how American colonial intervention in the Philippines created the macrodynamic that forced peasants from the collapsing agrarian sector in the northern Philippines to consider international migration as a possible solution to their constant cycle of poverty and debt. (13 plays) While many Filipino families of the time embrace change, Don Ramon (played by Joel Lamangan) maintains a severe hold on his family, specially his children. He forbids them from going out with friends yet does not welcome the idea of entertaining visitors at home either. He distrusts their peers and dictates what they can and cannot do in life. Though having only his childrens best interests at heart, his unyielding will to wield control over their lives spur a series of events that led him and his entire family spiraling uncontrollably towards an ominous fate. And such fate unfolds in unexpected and heartbreaking proportions. I would like to compliment what the play established; that although the Filipino family is patriarchal, dominated mainly by an authoritarian father, the children still maintain a high regard and respect for their father, no matter how loathing the circumstances are.Regardless of my misgivings on trying out in a stage play, by simply watching an excellent play with an outstanding storyline and characters, I already feel content.