The World's Best Book Summaries
Who is Dave Jensen in The Things They Carried? What are the defining moments for his character? Dave Jensen is a soldier in Alpha Company, a unit of the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, in The Things They Carried. Jensen breaks fellow soldier Lee Strunk’s nose and then lives in fear that Strunk will retaliate. We’ll cover the most important scenes involving Dave Jensen in The Things They Carried.
Can checklists help you be more efficient in your life and avoid careless mistakes? How do you create a great checklist? Look no further than our ultimate “checklist checklist”–everything you need to know to create an effective checklist. Take a look at our checklist for checklists, then learn about how to create a checklist and how checklists can improve your life.
Walmart’s Hurricane Katrina response is legendary. The large company did something the government wasn’t able to do at the time–provide help on the ground. We’ll discuss what made Walmart’s Hurricane Katrina response so successful and why it depended on the empowerment of employees.
What is a chaotic system? What are some examples of chaotic systems, and how does the fact that history is a chaotic system affect our ability to explain the past? A chaotic system is a dynamical system that’s highly influenced by its beginnings. A chaotic system can’t be explained because it’s impossible to see how all its variables interact. There are two kinds of chaotic systems: level one chaotic systems and level two chaotic systems. We’ll cover how chaotic systems work, why they’re unpredictable, and the difference between level one and level two chaotic systems.
What happens in “In the Field” in The Things They Carried? How does “In the Field” demonstrate how soldiers deal with blame on the battlefield? We’ll look at the basic elements of the chapter “In the Field” (The Things They Carried) and look at why death in war is simultaneously no one’s fault and everyone’s fault.
Brenda Zimmerman and Sholom Glouberman, who study complexity, defined three kinds of problems: simple, complicated, and complex. What’s the difference? Particularly, what’s the difference between complicated problems and complex problems? A complex problem is a problem that has many variables and for which the outcome is uncertain. An example of a complex problem is raising a child. You learn from raising one child, but the next child may require a different approach. We’ll look at the nature of complex problems, how they differ from complicated problems, and how to solve complex problems in the workplace.
What happens in the The Things They Carried “Love” chapter? How does the “Love” chapter set the tone for the rest of the novel? We’ll look at the basic elements of The Things They Carried‘s “Love” chapter and look at how love ties in to both hope and shame on the battlefield.
What is hindsight bias? How does it influence how we think about not only the past, but also the present and the future? Hindsight bias is the human tendency to believe that events that have already happened were more predictable than they actually were. Looking back, we think we could have predicted how history would unfold—it seems obvious in hindsight. But while today we can describe how history has unfolded so far, we can’t say why it’s turned out the way it has. We’ll go in depth into the hindsight bias definition above and cover hindsight bias examples.
What happens in the chapter “Field Trip” in The Things They Carried? How does “Field Trip” demonstrate how soldiers seek closure after the war is over? We’ll look at the basic elements of the chapter “Field Trip” (The Things They Carried) and look at how the narrator attempts to bring the Vietnam War to life for his young daughter.
Is there truth in fiction? How do we identify the truth of fiction? In what ways is fiction actually truer than nonfiction? We’ll look at Tim O’Brien’s treatment of the theme of truth in fiction in his classic The Things They Carried to see how in war depictions, what’s true may not be best represented by a series of facts.