Read either Philip Caputos Rumor of War or John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath, and write an essay about the book that you choose. This essay must be between a minimum of 500 and a maximum of 750 words. In your essay, provide enough information to establish the factual framework of the book, i.e., the who, what, when, why of the book, but concentrate your paper on your personal response to that which you have read. How did the book make you feel? What message do you think the author was trying to convey? What is the most powerful impression that the book made on you? What do you think you know and understand, having read the book, that you did not know before? What does the book say about the period of history with which it is concerned? These are general guidelines for your essay. Feel free, once having digested and analyzed that which the author is saying, to express your own opinion. Caputos Rumor of War is a very personal memoir, written by a person who joined the U. S. Marines in the 1960s in order to fight communism in Vietnam. It is not a history of the war per se, but rather an account of Caputos own experience of war and the impact it has on the people who fight it, and the impact, particularly of the type of war that was Vietnam. It follows his experiences through basic training, his deployment to Vietnam, his wartime experiences there, his evolving attitude toward that conflict, and his life after his term of service. John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath is a fictional story of one of the families forced to leave their homes in the dust bowl states, in order to try to find a means of survival in California. Although these families came from various Midwestern states, the Joad family, fictionalized in the book, came from Oklahoma, leading to the characterization of all who migrated to California as being Okies. This book is a classic of American literature, having won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for literature. His book earned the eternal ire of the people in Oklahoma (who must not have read the book!) for portraying them as Okies, and that of California fruit growers who considered him a communist for portraying them as people who exploited the desperation of the migrants in order to increase their personal wealth.
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