Final blog for American Author Reading

As of right now, I have finally finished the book The Cobra Event. The final pages were about the overall look on the Cobra virus and all the people that died from it. It showed how all the deaths had something in common and that they all related to the same thing. It describes how they all died the same way. First, they started eating themselves up like vicious kinds of animals. Then they went into crazy mood swings and ended up squirting blood out of their systems. On the third to last chapter, the scientists Hopkins and Austen, and Lieutenant Commander Mark Littleberry go to a street in Manhattan called Essex-Delancey to discover the background on the cobra event. They go underground to a tunnel called the BJ 1 tunnel where it is said that the cobra virus came from a rat that was infected with it. That rat then, somehow, bit a person and the virus jumped out of the rat race and into the human race.

"Captain Dorothy Each, who had been bitten by Hector Ramirez, died on Governor's Island. Of a total of 19 cases of cobra in New York resulting from the bomb blast, 18 victims died. One 8 year old girl survived but ended up with chronic Lesch-Nyhan disease and permanent brain damage. All of the patients were given anticonvulsants and the experimental anti-smallpox drug cidofovir, but the treatments had no effect. The overall toll of infections in the Cobra Event stood at thirty-two cases, including the index case of Harmonica Man, Kate Moran, and many others, and also counting Thomas Cope...". This quote could potentially lead me to a thesis statement about describing the different cases that the cobra virus hit. It could also lead me to talking about how the different people that died from it had a connection to the infection.

I have already started my second and final book called The Hot Zone.The book is divided into four parts and I already read all of part one. This is a total of 153 pages which I began yesterday and finished today. From what I have read, the book is about a killer virus that stalks the human race. This virus has "supposedly" originated from Kitum Cave in Mount Elgon. People that have gotten infected with this virus would burst out in bleedings from the nose and from the mouth. They would first start out with massive headaches and backaches and muscleaches. This all would happen on the seventh day. Then, on the tenth day that they would get infected with it, they would explode in huge headaches and their eyeballs would also ache and they would spike a fever, become nauseated, and most of them even die. They would also burst out in vomit called vomito negro or black vomit. It really isn't just black it is also red. It is highly infective, very hot, loaded with a virus and smells like a slaughterhouse.

A man named Charles Monet got infected with this virus when him and his woman friend went to Mount Elgon on New Year's Eve to celebrate a new year. Him and his friend went inside Kitum Cave to see what was in there. The next day he went to work at the sugar factory. On the tenth day, he broke into the serious conditions and went to go see a doctor in Nairobi. There he burst out in black vomit and infected the doctor that was attending him. The doctor's name was Dr. Musoke. The story goes on with other people that got infected with it including Nurse Mayinga N., Sister M.E., Mr. Yu G., and Peter Cardinal. Another possible thesis statement could be the use of drama. As I read this book and read the other book, I noticed that Richard Preston likes to use drama to explain science fiction. His horrific story that can give people nightmares is the kind of writing he portrays in these books. He likes to describe things using a lot of detail to paint a picture in your head and that is something I would like to write about and explain his use of language. I don't necessarily want to base the ten page paper on one thing. I'd like to explain different things about this author and include some of his biography.

General Info.

I am still on my first American Author book. Like I said before and I keep saying it now, the writing is very difficult to understand so it's hard for me to read fast. I can't keep up with the pace of the class. I know I said that I would finish by last week but I most certainly will finish pretty soon. It's just that last week I didn't get much time to read. I'm on page 351 as of right now. There are 422 pages in the book so I'm almost done. I read from page 305 to 350. It is the beginning of Part Six. It was very complicated to try to keep up because so much information was thrown to you at once in these pages. All I really remember was that it talked about a boy named Hector Ramirez who also died of the same act that the others died and the scientists tried to continue their search on what is killing these people. It talked about gene therapy. Gene therapy is where a damaged gene in a human tissue is replaced by a working gene. It also talked about another person who got infeced with this virus. A person named Bobby Wiggner who started eating his face up as well. It sort of relates to Kate Moran's story. This is all I got through these pages.

Thematic or Stylistic Threads Through the Texts.

Unfortunately, I still haven't completed my first American Author book. So, I can't really say anything about thematic or stylistic threads through the writing. I plan to, however, end my first book by the end of this week. Like I said before, in my previous blog, this book is hard to understand. It is very interesting and disgusting, but challenging to read. That is why I am taking so long to finish. My second book, however, will go by quicker because I already have a taste of what it is about so it will be less challenging and faster to complete.

In my first book, I read from page 275 to 301. The chapter was called Invisible History (III.). It is also the last chapter of Part Five. Through these pages, I read that somehow the Cobra virus could potentially be related to AIDS. The scientists, Littleberry and Masaccio think that the Cobra virus has a little bit of everything. Some of the things it could be made up of are smallpox, Black Death, and Anthrax. Throughout these pages, it goes off into detail of what else it could consist of.

Symbolism, Stylistic, or Literary Devices.

In my book, The Cobra Event, I haven't really seen any type of symbolism used to describe a bigger idea. I don't think I will see any now because I'm alrady more than halfway done. Yes, I haven't done my transition from my first book to my second book. But that's only because my first book takes me a while because there is a lot of science words that are complicated to understand. My second book, I've already started reading it a while back, so I think that one will go by fast so I don't have to take a long time on that one.

My author likes to use fiction to describe real situations in life. He uses fake characters to express true events. This is the only type of literary device that I've noticed that my author uses. Throughout the weekend, I read from page 204 - 274, a total of seventy pages. Through these pages, I read that the virus that Kate Moran got infected with, other people also got infected with it. Those people were named Glen Dudley and Suzanne Tanaka who were technicians in the Army Medical Management Unit. Scientists called the virus the cobra virus. This infection was a mixture of a butterfly virus and the common cold virus. They call it the cobra virus because it hits a mucus membrane and zooms for the brain. " Cobra is a biological missile designed to take out the brain... Cobra is the ultimate head cold".