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psychobillygrrl 's review for:
Flowers for Algernon
by David Rogers, Daniel Keyes
"It's lonely at the top" seems like a trite cliche, but this book pretty much proves it.
Charlie, a retarded adult, becomes an experimental subject in an intelligence-augmenting experiment and records his ever-changing impressions of the world in diary format. With promising initial results seen in Algernon, a lab mouse, the doctors go ahead with using Charlie as a human subject. At his least intelligent, Charlie trusts everyone around him to the point where he believes people are his friends even when they are laughing at him. When he realizes what is really going on, he becomes very alienated and becomes even more so when his intelligence exceeds all the doctors and university professors who hate being contradicted.
Charlie imagines his old, retarded self as a separate person watching him from doorways and mirrors, waiting for his chance to return to his body.
Around the time I was reading this, I read a cracked.com article about people's suspicion of others that points out the average person in NOT out to get you, but most people think so anyway. It made me realize that maybe trusting people a little more than you think you ought to is really a way to enrich your own life... Sure, something bad might happen in the future, but constant vigilance wears you down.
Charlie, a retarded adult, becomes an experimental subject in an intelligence-augmenting experiment and records his ever-changing impressions of the world in diary format. With promising initial results seen in Algernon, a lab mouse, the doctors go ahead with using Charlie as a human subject. At his least intelligent, Charlie trusts everyone around him to the point where he believes people are his friends even when they are laughing at him. When he realizes what is really going on, he becomes very alienated and becomes even more so when his intelligence exceeds all the doctors and university professors who hate being contradicted.
Charlie imagines his old, retarded self as a separate person watching him from doorways and mirrors, waiting for his chance to return to his body.
Around the time I was reading this, I read a cracked.com article about people's suspicion of others that points out the average person in NOT out to get you, but most people think so anyway. It made me realize that maybe trusting people a little more than you think you ought to is really a way to enrich your own life... Sure, something bad might happen in the future, but constant vigilance wears you down.