Good morning class, my name is Joshua Dsouza and today I will be talking to you guys about the book I choose, The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch. Before I begin to explain and talk about the finer details about this book, I would like to say that this novel was honestly a very mind opening, extraordinary and a new experience for me. This is because as I have never really taken on the challenge of reading a non-fiction book before, but to my luck this was quite interesting. I do encourage many of you guys to read this book, as it not only helped me understand a little bit more about myself, but it also enabled me to understand the key concepts about the teenage brain in general. This book is not very long, it is around 220 pages and was published around 2003, which is quite a while ago, but I will later elaborate on how this negatively affects the book. It answered some questions that I have been curious about, because teenagers are very curious. We want to know things, but when we get the answer, we are not satisfied. We love sleep, but we stay up for extensive hours doing absolutely nothing, yet wake up at 11am and wonder why we are up so early. We are indecisive and we let society perceive our perspective on the world. We turn to drugs and alcohol for fun and take risks even though we know the consequences. This helped answer most of these questions, but the advantage the book provides us with, is arranging fourteen chapters according to each topic. The chapters that stood out to me the most were chapters two, five and nine, as it showed the negative as well as the positive factors of Strauch's writings. The first chapter which I would like to discuss with you guys is the second chapter, “The Passion Within “. This chapter consists mostly on what the inside of the brain does, scientifically. It explains how the teenage brain goes through a variety of changes around puberty and adolescence, and says that the gray matter, the outer layer of the brain thickens and then dramatically thins, a level change which was supposed to be over in kindergarten. Along with this came many other scientific conclusions from experiments, some explain the frontal lobes as well as synapses, which is the brains density and development. Even though this may be interesting, the key point that I would like to identify is the fact that in the beginning of the chapter, the author is highly descriptive and uses words that allow the reader to have a mental picture, which she does not really emphasis on throughout the rest of the novel. She says, “Nora loped through the clinic door, her long brown hair with a wide purple streak flowing behind her “(Strauch 11). Strauch says that she loped in the clinic, which is unusual because this is the first and only time she uses words that are descriptive, rather than being straight forward. She allows to imagine that Nora is a very enthusiastic person by the way she depicts her character. It seems as if she has taken her time to express and portray an image in our minds using the purple streak in the brown flowing hair but she later ignores description. She says, “Now sixteen, Nora was