Flowers for Algernon

           This summer I read the book Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This book is about the 32 year old nice and kind, mentally ill man who is volunteered by his teacher to take part in a scientist's brain opperation to ultimately make him smarter. The scientist, Dr.Strauss, has asked him to keep a journal of his everyday life, which is the format of the whole book. After the opperation, you start to notice the difference in his writing, in comparrison to the very beginning of the book.  His vocabulary and spelling improve greatly and his writing skills in general are much better. Because you are reading from his perspective, you see and feel everything that he is going through. Throughout the book you see how his personality changes. At the beginning he was a nicer friendlier person, but after the opperation there was a sort of arrigance that came with all that knowledge. His boss at the bakery fires him because his co-workers and local custumers do not understand how the man they used to taunt for being dumb is now reading difficult literature they never could, and speaking in a way they never can. And his girlfriend Alice, who used to teach him, tries to break up with him because he is too smart for her. He ends up becoming smarter than everyone he knows, except for his friend Algernon. Algernon is the first mouse that lived and actually became smarter from Dr.Strauss's expiriments. At a science convention, after getting in a fight with Dr.Strauss, he steals Algernon and escapes the convention. Towards the end of the book Charlie finds himself completely alone. He becomes convinced that the Charlie Gordon before the opperation still lives, and is taking over his life. A few months after the convention, Algernon starts acting strange, and doesn't seem able to do things he used to do. When Charlie calls Dr.Strauss, he tells him that the opperation stopped working on Algrenon, which means it stops working on Charlie as well. By the end of the book, Charlie forgets mostly all of what happened while he was "smart." Again, because you read it through Charlie's eyes it is a really emotional and sad part of the book. You watch him realize he can't read certain languages anymore, he doesn't understand papers that he himself wrote, and you can see how sad Charlie is when he found out that he was going to be "dumb" again. I really liked this book, because even though it was sad, it was a very good book with a lot of events and thoughts and feelings which help the book become a lot more meaningful.