No Ordinary Lives -- Four 19th Century Teenage Diaries

The diaries in this collection include the writings of four young people between the ages of twelve and twentya boy growing up on a lake in Maine, a sea.
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We had four warnings yesterday, but heard nothing. It is dreadful to think of what is happening in London. You too must take care of yourself for me and our precious baby for I do not know how I could endure your loss.

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I pray that all or none of us survives this war. From November , the Luftwaffe extended its bombing campaign to industrial towns, cities and ports around the UK. Every building seemed to be on fire and in the distance flames were lighting up the cathedral. A warden dragged me to the ground as the scream of another bomb came, but he left me to run to a woman who was on fire.

He rolled her on the ground to put out the flames and took her to a shelter. I looked around to see if I could see any of the girls I had come with, but more bombs were falling and I needed somewhere to shelter. I heard another screaming bomb and threw myself behind a hedge and covered my ears against the bang. There were so many buildings burning that the firemen were helping people rather than trying to put them out.

How I wished I had my old boots and breeches on instead of a dress and these silly shoes.

No Ordinary Lives: Four 19th Century Teenage Diaries by Marilyn Weymouth Seguin

I tried to get to the station to get back to the Land Army base, but had no idea which way it was. There were several other occupants. One poor lady had completely lost her mind; she was screaming and trying to get out, saying that her son was somewhere in the city. How I got back to base is still a mystery. I had a ride in a car, a tractor and the last transport I remember was a horse and cart. Now when I see people in films or on TV falling out of windows with their clothes on fire I wonder how many like me remember that it really did happen during the Blitz.

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It will stay with me for ever. People were streaming out of Portsmouth, with cases, bundles, prams and bicycles — all carrying as many belongings as they could muster. The reason was clear — terraces of houses, pubs, shops, were all in smoking ruins. The people had no homes any more, so they were on their way to the country. It was important to spot incendiary bombs quickly.

The Fire Watchers Order, introduced in September , compelled owners of businesses to ensure that someone on the premises was responsible for fire watching at all times — if you dealt with the fires quickly you could limit the damage. On 29 December , incendiary bombs caused massive fires across the City of London. Baskets and baskets of incendiaries clattered on the roofs and streets of the City of London. Fire bombs fell on the cathedral roof but all were cast off and the cathedral was saved. The water supply of London failed, important mains being shattered by high-explosive bombs.

Only by dragging heavy suction pipes across the mud from the fire boats in the Thames could water be brought to the bank. In the river bed firemen toiled, coaxing slimy pipes into a battery of lines for vital water supply.

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Two officers and 14 men were killed. Across London officers and men were injured in fighting the 1, fires that blazed that night. Friendships formed in childhood often defy explanation — they exist because quite simply they do. Such is the case in the moving story of Amir and Hassan in Afghanistan in the Seventies. They might come from different social classes but friendship is blind in these salad days. Set against the tumultuous episodes the country experiences — not least the Soviet invasion of — The Kite Runner is an heroic tale of childhood friendship against all the odds.

His novel takes in the nascent scene that would evolve into the mod youth culture of the early Sixties, and his interpretation of this milieu is unerringly accurate. The hipsters, the coffee bars and the people who frequent this clandestine world are drawn superbly, in particular the year-old unnamed narrator who aspires to be a cool photographer. Can Antietam Andy Brown possibly survive his environment and progress into something approaching adulthood? Legendary writing renegade Hunter S. Thompson wrote that he thought Nick McDonell would do for his generation what he did for his upon the publication of Twelve.

And Twelve certainly caught the imagination of those post-Millennium kids who lived for hedonism and damned the consequences i. Telling the tale of White Mike, a drug-dealing drop out in New York, Twelve captures that time when teenagers still think the real world will never catch up with them. Now approaching the mid-point of his teenage years, Adrian is still no closer to understanding life, women, school, and, crucially himself.

A brilliantly observed account of the early Eighties, The Growing Pains… will register with both current teenagers and anyone who was ever one. Bored, but never boring; pretentious, but interesting; and searching for some meaning in life, when meaning is what happens all around him, Caulfield lives on to this day. Although teenagers — culturally in any case — are a relatively modern concept, that gap between childhood and adulthood has long been associated with great change. The notion of potential transforming itself, or not, into reality is one of the concepts Dickens masterfully weaves into Great Expectations.

Will Pip transform into a man of great expectations? Will Estella rid herself of the malignant influence of Miss Havisham? As ever, only time will tell. Dissecting the book for this evolution is a fascinating exercise — the backdrop may change but the leap into adulthood is still a jump into the unknown for many. Ruth, Tommy and Kathy develop a close friendship while attending a boarding school in bucolic East Sussex in the late-Seventies.

However, the school is no ordinary educational establishment; instead clones populate it, whose job it is to provide vital organs for the outside world. As a love triangle emerges, the truth begins to impact on any future the three of them might possess. In this sense then Never Let Me Go is the quintessential dystopian coming-of-age novel. Written when the author — a woman, despite the purposefully neutral use of initials — was still a teenager herself, The Outsiders is a classic tale of teenage gangs in high school.

Sparks was involved in a similar controversy regarding the veracity of her second diary project, the book Jay's Journal. It was allegedly the real diary, edited by Sparks, of a teenage boy who committed suicide after becoming involved with the occult. Sparks went on to produce numerous other books presented as diaries of anonymous troubled teens including Annie's Baby: By an Anonymous Teenager or edited transcripts of therapy sessions with teens including Almost Lost: Some commentators have noted that these books use writing styles similar to Go Ask Alice [34] and contain similar themes, such as tragic consequences for spending time with bad companions, a protagonist who initially gets into trouble by accident or through someone else's actions, and portrayal of premarital sex and homosexuality as always wrong.

He identified Linda Glovach, an author of young-adult novels , as "one of the 'preparers'—let's call them forgers—of Go Ask Alice ", although he did not give his source for this claim. Following Sparks' statements that she had added fictional elements to Go Ask Alice , the book was classified by its publishers as fiction and remains so classified as of and a disclaimer was added to the copyright page: Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Despite the classification and the disclaimer, Go Ask Alice has frequently been taught as non-fiction in schools and sold as non-fiction in bookstores.

Go Ask Alice has been a frequent target of censorship challenges due to its inclusion of profanity and references to runaways, drugs, sex and rape. Some challenges resulted in the removal of the book from libraries, or in parental permission being required for a student to check the book out of a library.

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Decades after its original publication, Go Ask Alice became one of the most challenged books of the s and s. The likely authoring of the book by one or more adults rather than by an unnamed teenage girl has not been an issue in censorship disputes. Stand-up comedian Paul F. Tompkins ' comedy album Freak Wharf contains a track entitled "Go Ask Alice" in which he derides the book as "the phoniest of balonies" and jokingly suggests it was authored by the writing staff of the police drama series Dragnet.

The album title itself comes from a passage in the book in which the diarist refers to a mental hospital as a "freak wharf". American metalcore band Ice Nine Kills included a song related to the book, entitled "Alice", on their album Every Trick in the Book. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Archived from the original on Retrieved — via Proquest.


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Urban Legends Reference Pages. Glovach is a co-author of Go Ask Alice. Retrieved — via Newspapers. A History of Literary Hoaxes. San Mateo County, California. A Full Length Play. The Dramatic Publishing Company. Diary of a Young Drug Addict". The book's subject we are never given her name, but assume she is Alice comes from a normal, middle-class family Go Ask Alice Avon Books paperback ed.

If I don't give Big Ass a blow he'll cut off my supply Big Ass makes me do it before he gives me the load. Everybody is just lying around here like they're dead and Little Jacon is yelling, 'Mama, Daddy can't come now. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous". Then I talked to Alice, who I met just sitting stoned on the curb. She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home. Go Ask Alice Mandarin Paperbacks ed.

Arrow Books published Go Ask Alice First paperback ed. Avon Books published For Alice was real and could have lived next door; her parents Overdose Victim Leaves a Diary". Retrieved — via Scribd. Mother Fights for School Ban on Book". The Globe and Mail.

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The True Diary of Mary Rose". The Horn Book Magazine. The Horn Book Inc. Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s. The University of Georgia Press. The New York Times.