What is Wes Moore's reason for writing the book The Other Wes Moore?

The coincidence of two men from the same neighborhood in the same city sharing the same name is not extreme. What initially caught the attention of the author is that within a short period, his hometown newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an article about him and a series that included the "other Wes Moore." The author had finished his undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University and been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England. The young man who shares his name had participated in an armed robbery that resulted in his brother killing off-duty police officer Bruce Prothero.
The vast disparity in their experiences and the future to which they would lead—as the other man, once convicted, would likely be incarcerated forever—would not leave the author alone. The differences that led him down one path and the other man down another are, the author claims, very small. He hopes that his analysis of their two stories will show how alike they are despite their separate lives:

The tragedy is that my story could have been his. Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points in every life, the sudden moments of decision where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed.

What advice did Polly give to Jerry?

Polly advises Jerry to follow what's called The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Polly tells her husband about poor old Dinah Brown. She's just received a letter informing her of bad news: her mother is dangerously ill. Naturally, Dinah wants to go off and visit her sick mother, but as she lives ten miles away, it would take her a long time to get there. Even if she took the train, she'd still have to walk some considerable distance. Polly doesn't think that would be fair given Dinah's weakened condition.
So she asks Jerry if it'll be alright for him to take Dinah in his cab. At first, Jerry's quite reluctant; Sunday's a very special day to this deeply religious man, and driving Dinah all the way to her mother's house will take the better part of half a day. That's when Polly reminds Jerry of The Golden Rule. As Polly's managed to convince Jerry that he won't break the Sabbath by driving Dinah to her mother's house, he agrees to take her.

Is cloning moral and useful in The House of the Scorpion?

On the whole, you'd have to say no. In The House of the Scorpion, cloning allows a notorious drug lord to extend his natural life, which of its very nature cannot be anything other than morally indefensible. If that weren't bad enough, this highly dubious procedure creates an entire group of people deliberately handicapped from the start of their lives and who will never be able to reach their full potential.
Cloning may be useful in the sense that it keeps a reliable partner of the United States government alive. But in moral terms, the continued renewal of El Patron's life is problematic, to say the least. For as long as he is alive, the vast opium fields of Dreamland will continue to be cultivated, thus leading to even more drug addiction, with all its attendant miseries, for millions of people across the globe.

What terrified the pirates?

In Chapter 32 of Treasure Island the pirates are absolutely terrified by the sound of a strange voice singing "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest/Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum." They think it's a ghost. Even the normally fearless Long John Silver's pretty spooked out by the weird-sounding voice. But he stands firm, nonetheless, and refuses to let his petrified crew turn back, not even when he hears the strange voice call out Flint's last words "Fetch aft the rum, Darby." Silver tells his men that the voice can't be a ghost's because it's echoing and ghosts' voices don't echo. They soon realize that the voice doesn't sound like Flint after all; it sounds more like Ben Gunn, and Silver's men aren't afraid of him.

Identify the metaphor and connotation in the poem "Those Winter Sundays."

A metaphor is a direct comparison between two unlike things for effect. Connotation is the meaning suggested by text, in contrast to denotation, which is its immediate or literal meaning.
The speaker refers to “hearing” the cold “splintering, breaking,” which gives cold a metaphorical usage; it cannot be heard. Cold here stands for the objects that are thus affected by it, such as tree branches. In his making the fire, having “driven out the cold” metaphorically represents his father’s love.
The connotations in the poem include those of individual words or passages and the large meaning of the poem as a whole. The weather has connotations of emotion. Cold is contrasted to warmth as an emotional tone. Before the fire is lit, the house is cold, but after it warms up, the speaker mentions “the chronic angers of that house.” Warmth thus connotes anger. At the end of stanza 1, the speaker says “No one ever thanked him.” The connotation of this can be gained from the beginning of the last stanza: “Speaking indifferently…” This implies that the speaker is that “no one,” the person who never thanked his father—until now, with this poem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

Many of the words in this poem have very negative connotations: "blueblack cold," "cracked hands," and "ached," from the first stanza, for example, seem to convey the pain that the narrator's father endured. Also, "splintering, breaking," "fearing," and "chronic angers" from the second stanza are all quite negative. The narrator's father essentially tries to protect his family from these harsh and negative experiences of the cold; this is why he gets up early, even on Sundays, to make up the fires so that his family can wait until it's warm to get out of their warm beds. The words that have positive connotations, like "banked fires blaze" or "warm," are the effects of the father's work, the way he seems to show his love. It does not seem as though the narrator's father is very affectionate or loving in a warm and obvious way; instead, he shows his love by making his family more comfortable, by enduring the cold so that they do not have to.
The narrator says, "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking." Cold describes the temperature, and cold itself cannot splinter or break, so we know that this line must be figurative. What does splinter? Wood splinters, especially when it is burning in a fire like those fires the father has made. Therefore, the cold that is breaking up, as a result of the fires the narrator's father made, is being compared to the wood that is breaking up in the fires themselves.

The poem contains quite a bit of both metaphor and connotation. Consider the way the writer is using associations to describe the combination of cold and warmth in his home growing up. The repeated contrast between the cold of the situation and the warmth of his father's nurturing and care creates an exaggerated sense of a two-fold existence. It suggests a troubled love between the father and the son, because the son can't understand the father's sacrifice. The metaphors help to build this idea: the "blueblack cold," the "cold splintering and breaking," the father "driving out the cold," the "angers of th[e] house," and "love's austere and lonely offices" all contribute the sense that the kid doesn't quite get it. All the difficulties are projected into the house and the weather. He doesn't get his father's sacrifice, because he doesn't see it beyond his own comfort.

Describe the theme of animalism in The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

One of the key themes in Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel is the thin line that divides human beings from other animals. The man repeatedly assures the boy that they will remain on the right side of this line: "we're the good guys."
Because the unidentified catastrophe has wiped out flora and fauna except for humans, the remaining people eat almost exclusively canned food when they can find it. Other surviving humans, however, have resorted to cannibalism to survive. To the man, this behavior would be worse than death. The boy agrees—if the situation arises and their gun has a bullet—to kill himself rather than eat another person.
Although they escape a close call, escaping from a strange man who grabs the boy, they are elsewhere confronted with gruesome evidence that other people have descended to cannibalistic behaviors. Entering a house to scavenge inside, they discover that cannibals have been using it as a kind of human livestock pen. Rather than kill and eat a whole person, the captors have kept their victims imprisoned and alive, but they have cut off and eaten some of their limbs.
This sort of premeditation and planning show that these predators are all too human, not simply another type of animal that hunts and kills.

What is irony used for in The Importance of Being Earnest?

Oscar Wilde, like many writers of the late 1800s, was an iconoclast bent on the deconstruction of Victorian values. Much of the irony in The Importance of Being Earnest serves this purpose. Wilde said that the philosophy of the play was to "treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." This irony had the effect of satirizing the things that the Victorians held dear.
It's ironic when Gwendolen speaks of the "age of ideals" that they live in and follows that up with her personal ideal "to love someone of the name of Ernest." Much of Lady Bracknell's interview with Jack is ironic: things she should find inappropriate she embraces, and things that shouldn't really matter are deal-breakers for her. She approves of his smoking and the fact that he acknowledges his "natural ignorance," but she heartlessly condemns him for having lost both his parents. This is a way of mocking the high-society method of seeking favorable marriage matches for children.
Wilde doesn't only poke fun at parents. Cecily represents youth, and her ironic fascination with the wayward "Ernest" is a critique of the fickleness of women who should value integrity in men but often don't. Wilde isn't above ridiculing his own profession: Miss Prism switched her three-volume novel with the baby in her care, and both Cecily and Gwendolen keep diaries since "one should always have something sensational to read in the train." The madcap ironies of the false identities of Ernest and Bunbury are a way of exposing the hypocrisy of polite British society.
Wilde uses irony expertly to expose the faults of his society and to question the values of Victorian England.

Irony is created when what one expects is different from what happens in reality. It can be dramatic (when the reader knows more than the character/s), verbal (when someone says the opposite of what they mean), or situational (when what actually happens is different from what we expect to happen). Irony is used in the play in order to create humor and draw attention to the vagaries of the upper class. For example, we know, while Aunt Augusta does not, that Algernon has created his invalid friend, Bunbury, in order to escape precisely the kind of social obligations to which she invites him. We know, while she does not, that Algernon has actually eaten all of the cucumber sandwiches that were prepared for her. It's even ironic that he prevents Jack from enjoying them while Algernon eats them all himself, saying that they were ordered for Aunt Augusta (who never actually gets to have one because Algy eats them all!). These ironies are comedic, certainly, but they also show how, for the upper classes, it is more important to keep up appearances than it is to actually develop relationships that feel meaningful. Lying is preferable to honesty when it permits one to appear proper.