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In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that race influences policing in a variety of ways. She points to several Supreme Court cases that have greatly strengthened police discretion,...

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights attorney and the author of The New Jim Crow. Before writing her book, Alexander was the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU. Despite being an...

Poverty is a major theme in Evicted by Matthew Desmond. Nearly all of the individuals Desmond speaks with are struggling with poverty. Some of the individuals in the story who are not impoverished,...

Sherrena Tarver is the landlord of several of the individuals in Evicted, including Matthew Desmond, the author. Sherrena was originally a teacher, and she met her husband, Quentin Tarver, when he...

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance identifies the move to a rural area as a major turning point in his life. When his mother moved the family away from Middletown, young Vance was separated from his...

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander looks at several laws and court cases to analyze the ways in which the United States legal system disadvantages African Americans. Alexander identifies...

Gender is a major theme of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. Adichie says that “gender as it functions today is a grave injustice.” She tells the story of one of her female...

Adichie begins We Should All Be Feminists with a story about how, when she was fourteen, her good friend Okoloma called her a feminist. Adichie didn’t know what the word meant, but she...

In We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses growing up in Nigeria. When she was younger, she attended a primary school in Nsukka, a town in southeastern Nigeria. At the...

Liem is the main character of “The Other Man” from The Refugees. He is eighteen years old and grew up in Long Xuyen, Vietnam. When he was seventeen, his family sent him to work in Saigon. While he...

Immigration is a main theme in The Refugees. It is immigration that brings the refugees of the story to the United States. Most of the characters are either first- or second-generation immigrants,...

“Black Eyed Women” is the first story in The Refugees. It is narrated by an unnamed thirty-eight-year-old woman who immigrated to the United States from Vietnam when she was a teenager. She is a...

In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay brings up The Help in the chapter titled “The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help.” In this essay,...

In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay explores many pop culture artifacts through the lens of feminism. One notable example is her essay about the “Prince Charming” figure, in which she examines how popular...

As the previous answer provides a good overview of both characters, this answer will focus primarily on Raskolnikov. The very name “Raskolnikov” comes from the Russian root “raskol,” meaning...

One of the major themes of Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” is that appearances can be deceiving. The story opens on what appears to be a scene of domestic bliss. Mary Maloney is six months...

As The Metamorphosis abruptly begins with Gregor’s transformation, it is a bit difficult to discern exactly what his relationship with his mother was like prior to the transformation. We know that...