A reticent girl, who has noticeably beautiful eyes (and an even more noticeably deformed jaw), you’ve never seen before comes and sits beside you and your friends at lunch, trying to look nonchalant, even though she is shaking with trepidation. You are wondering why she came to sit with you, when you see them: a pack of recalcitrant teenage boys. “I bet David wants to go kiss her, don’t you David?” “Yeah, right, then I’ll go kiss your mother’s crusty feet.” “How’ll you know which is which?” They laugh and walk away, not caring about the damage done. The little girl is sitting there silently, like she never heard, but you can see the tears welling up in her eyes. You sit there shell-shocked. Autobiography of a Face is the story of Lucy Grealy, a woman living with a disfigured face caused by Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. The story describes her journey in overcoming her struggles with society and herself. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy teaches readers that in order to be successful you must acknowledge your problem and get the most out of it. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a book about war strategies. However, they can really be applied to everyday problems. There are cases in Autobiography of a Face where Lucy could have used some of Sun Tzu’s tactics to overcome her obstacles.

            My definition of success is what you experience after you overcome an obstacle. I have many goals in life; I want to graduate high school and college with honors. I want to then become a teacher and have a family. However, there are obstacles in achieving these goals. Graduating college is going to require a lot of money and dedication. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu concludes that, “many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat” (Tzu 1). This makes me want to make an intricate plan that will get me to accomplish my goals. The book Autobiography of a Face tells us to make the best out of a situation. Since I cannot change the cost of school, I will just have to find a way to pay for it.

            Lucy Grealy writes Autobiography of a Face in chronological order. The prologue is set in her teen years. It shows us how she is being treated because of her face; it also gives us insight on what the book is going to be like. However, once you hit the first chapter, the real story begins, starting with the first incident with her jaw.  All of the chapters have names that seem like they have no significance. Nevertheless, at the end of each chapter, you can see why Lucy picked the names for each chapter. The writing is very powerful. It really makes you think. Lucy Grealy asks a lot of questions in her writing to get a point across. An example of this is shown after Lucy received a bone graph to fix her jaw. She was really looking forward to seeing herself in a mirror. However, she wasn’t quite satisfied saying, “Wasn’t my fear just supposed to fall away, wasn’t life supposed to work now? Where was all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty?” (Grealy 204). At points in the text, it got pretty repetitive. However, I really appreciated her points of understanding in the book. I also loved the way she incorporated her heartbreaking anecdotes related to how people treated her because of her face. They really opened my eyes to how myopic and cruel some people can be. Throughout the book, Lucy keeps a very formal yet personal language. She uses mother and father when she talks about her parents; never mommy or daddy. She does a great job of recreating scenes from her childhood. You can feel the pain through the pages. The Art of War is completely different. It is built like a guide. There is no kind of order, just facts. It is very straight forward and has no emotional connotation at all.

            Reading Autobiography introduced me to Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare and very serious form of cancer. Lucy Grealy was lucky; there is only a 5 percent survival rate for this disease. In reading The Art of War, I learned many different ways to overcome a problem.

            I would not recommend The Art of War to others. It is pretty complex and you have to be the kind to see obstacles as mini-battles to appreciate Sun Tzu’s work. On the other hand, I would definitely recommend Autobiography of a Face to anybody. It is a great text that is the paragon of human nature on both the victim’s side and the offender’s. Reading this book leaves you with either a new outlook or more cautious outlook on life and how to treat others. That way, the next time a girl is teased at your lunch table, you will be able to stand up for her; you will be able to show her that somebody cares.

Autobiography of a Face is the life story of Lucy Grealy: a lady living without part of her jaw . In the first chapter of the book, she describes her jaw colliding with a girl named Joni's head during a game of dodge ball in the fourth grade. Joni did not have a belligerent nature; she was simply going for the same ball as Lucy when the accident occurred. The collision caused something to go terribly wrong in Lucy's mouth. The doctors first thought that her tooth was just pushed back into her gum, but it would end up being something much, much worse.

So far, the book is pretty entertaining. The prologue was kind of boring, but the actual book after that is interesting. Lucy Grealy has a type of dry humor that I appreciate a lot. My favorite part of the book so far  - the part that actually made me laugh out loud - was right after she ran into Joni. She describes her experience with a teacher, Ms. Minkin, asking her if she was okay. The passage goes as follows:
""Are you all right, dear?"
Interrupted in my twilight, I looked up to see Mrs. Minkin, who was on playground duty that afternoon. She fell into the category of "scary" adults, and from there into the subcategory of adults "with cooties." In her plaid wool skirts and thick makeup, luridly ugly to schoolchildren's eyes, Mrs. Minkin was not someone to whom I was willing to admit distress.
"I'm fine, thank you.""

I think that the theme in the book right now is be who you are. If Lucy, who described herself as a "tomboy par excellence", had been herself in the game, she probably would not have gotten hit in the jaw. "...I was my face..." is a statement Grealy made in the book. I agree with the theme. You might as well be who you are; there really isn't a way you can change it.

The movie “Il Postino” was pretty good for an old movie. However, if I didn’t have to do an assignment on it, I think I would have missed the messages that they were trying to get across when they made it. It had its cute moments that made me smile and then there were the corny moments that made me laugh.  It was a sweet movie and I’m glad I got to see it.

I feel the movie “Il Postino” is saying that feelings do not care what class you are in. In the movie, Pablo Neruda always wore light colors which showed he was higher in class than Mario, who wore a dark postman’s uniform. However both of them experienced love: Pablo with his wife, and Mario with Beatrice. Mario was sad when Pablo left the island to go back to his home in Chile. Apparently, Pablo did not care about Mario that much after he left. When he wrote about visiting Italy, he did not talk about his “good friend, Mario Ruopollo.” He didn’t even write him a single letter! This made Mario feel very inferior to his once friend, Mr. Neruda. Mario’s mother-in-law described Pablo’s fleeing by saying “The bird that has eaten flies away.”  Mario says that he was the one who benefited from Pablo, not vice versa. He said Pablo was a great poet loved by all the women, and that he was just a poor fisherman that asked him to write him a poem. However, when Pablo finally returned, it was too late. Only at that point, it seemed that Pablo showed real emotion towards his poor, fisherman friend.

I feel the movie is trying to say that poetry is made to make people appreciate the small details of life. I saw this in the movie when Mario was developing his metaphors. When he said, “Your smile spreads across your face like a butterfly,” it made me smile because that is something so simple that he made beautiful. I also saw this after Pablo left and Mario finally could think of things that were beautiful on his island. Something as simple as the wind coming off the cliffs, or the sad nets of the fisherman, was made so beautiful in his tape. A quote from the movie that shows that poetry is meant for other people is “Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but those who need it.”

The movie says a lot of things about love, but I think the over all theme about love says that if you truly love somebody, they are the only thing that matters. This was shown through many different types of love in the film. Mario loved Pablo Neruda as a friend. He helped him win over his wife, Beatrice. Beatrice and Mario loved each other in a romantic way. When Mario was describing all of the beautiful things on his island, you could tell he had a great love for where he lived. Before Mario died, he said that he wanted to name his son Pablito. This showed his love for Pablo in a major way. Even when Beatrice said that she didn’t want to name her son that, he still insisted. Mario actually ended up dying trying to make Pablo Neruda proud. Now that is true love.