Book Review:Kane and Abel

This story by Jeffrey Archer is the start of a series of book with the main characters being Abel Rosnovski,William Lowell Kane and Henry Osborne. This story is about two man, one Polish and one American, from totally opposite backgrounds. William Kane had inherited a bank from his deceased father who died in the Titanic while Abel had inherited a castle from his father,a baron, but it was destroyed. Subsequently, he took over a hotel group known as the Richmond Group, consisting of 11 hotels. Henry Osborne was a unemployed man who was in search of a spouse when he met William's mother, Anne. He then married Anne and made Anne pregnant. He then slowly drawed on Anne's inheritance of 500.000 dollars to fund his outings with his friends, claiming them to be discussions with potential customers of his made-up company.William found out and kicked him out of the house, but not before Anne passed away. William then grew up and took over the bank of his closest friend's father, Lester bank, while Abel developed the renamed Baron Group into a hotel empire,both parties trying hard to topple each other from their seat. After Henry Osborne convinced Abel of William's guilt, Abel made use of Henry Osborne to destroy William.

I believe that this novel shows something very important that students fail to see. In our environment,we see that life is easy, that repenting helps to erase your mistakes, but this as a sheltered and enclosed environment, where there are mostly students and therefore minimal contact with the real world. In the world out there, people are not what it seems, not as trustworthy as friends. In Kane and Abel, a truth sets in, that a dispute had come between Kane and Abel, but Henry Osborne had made them enemies to feed his hatred towards Kane for kicking him out of the house. This shows that the world is not so simple, and that simply being ignorant about the outside world is not an option, and if you realise it late,it might be too late to do anything.

Russian ship capsize

A half-century old Russian tour boat named the Bulgaria had capsized in the Kuibyshev reservoir of the Volga river, two miles away from the shore. 188 people were on board when it capsized, and 101 people are still missing and 85 survived and 3 others were found dead in the reservoir. A few ships had came to their rescue, yet other ships simply avoided them. Emergency teams and divers from the neighbouring regions headed to the wreck site to search for survivors. It is claimed that the ships sunk within a minute due to its lack of partitions and that it had not been inspected and retrofitted since many years back. This resulted in an inability to release lifeboats before the boat capsized due to the lack of time.

I believe that no matter how much these companies are trying to cut cost, they should not do such fatal actions that could cause such terrible accidents to occur, resulting in a loss of many lifes. Why should all the people who have died in this tragedy sacrifice their lives for the money saved in not upgrading or replacing this ship.

Mississippi Burning

When it comes to serious crimes, is it right for the justice system to pursue criminal charges several decades after the crime is said to have occurred?

I believe that even though the criminal might only be recognised a few decades later, it does not mean that justice cannot be done for all these victims. Even though the victims of this crime has already been killed, this still reduces the presence of one cold-blooded murderer in the US. By allowing them to get away scot-free after so many years of evading the government, it would just signify that you can get away with crimes by hiding for many years, thus encouraging them to continue commiting the crime, therefore i beieve that it is right for the justice system to pursue criminal charges several decades after the crime was commited.

What do you think: was the state’s image “rehabilitated”?

I do not really believe that the Mississippi's state's image was rehabilitated. Even convicting the murderer of this criminal would not make much of a difference ever since the racial barriers were torn down and that the arresting would not make a significant improvement to the state's image. Furthermore, This just reminds people of Mississippi's past of being a state full of racism and therefore would not rehabilitate its image but cause it to worsen.