You may use the discussion questions in the back of the book as preliminary essay prompts to focus and/or to expand the discussion of the issues you would like to explore
The academic journal articles should relate specifically to your analysis of the text and support/extend your position on the social issue in a larger scale – by larger scale, I mean that you need to examine the same issues from the book to outside of it – for example, how does the instances of police brutality in the book illustrate police brutality in our culture/society?
Use the online databases through Cook Library to locate the academic articles that illustrate your topic
