A Good Friend Of Mine By Jonathan De Souza

In our book groups we discussed two essays “The Connection Between Strangers” by Miles Goodwin and the essay “The People Who Love You When No One Else Would” by Cecile Gilmer. In my group we said that “no matter how big or small your act of kindness is, it could change someones life” was demonstrated in both essays. In the first essay, “The Connection Between Strangers”, shows this because this little girl walked up to this solider and congratulated him. Little did she know, that the small action had changed the soldier’s life, as he said in the essay, “That girl undoubtedly has no memory of what happened years ago… It doesn't matter why she gave me the magazine. The important thing is she did” (Goodwin 83).

For more than 300 years, immigrants from every corner of the globe have settled in America, creating the most diverse and heterogeneous nation on Earth. Though immigrants have given much to the country, their process of changing from their homeland to the new land has never been easy. To immigrate does not only mean to come and live in a country after leaving your own country, but it also means to deal with many new and unfamiliar situations, social backgrounds, cultures, and mainly with the acquisition and master of a new language. This often causes mixed emotions, frustration, awkward feelings, and other conflicts. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, the author

Just dive in. You can swim. It will clear all the burden you have ensued throughout your life. It will be a fresh start. Trust yourself. The novel Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, examines how failure stems from the fear to fail and are caused by sexism and racism, thus placing a burden on victims of this discrimination. Unfortunately, racism and sexism are constant forms of discrimination that have been holding individuals back from reaching their full potential for centuries. Discrimination is due to the tragic reality that people are fearful of the ones that are different from them. They fear that this different race or gender may upstage them in the competition of life. The Lee family unfortunately has to bear the burden of discrimination in their everyday life due to racism and sexism. This burden carries the Lee family down like an anchor billowing to the bottom on the sea in hopes to find peace once it hits the ground.

‘The Devoted Friend’ by Oscar Wilder is my favorite tale. Although this writer is very famous, I had not been familiar with him and I didn't expect a morality lesson from the story, that is good because it can be read by adults, children, and we can share it with our friends or relatives and learn from their opinions and points of views, (Wilde, 2017).

The poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright reanimates the horrible scene of a racial lynching and forces the reader to endure the victim's pain through the first person’s narrative voice. The poem contains structured lines and visual division into three stanzas. Moreover, there is one more type of division in the poem. The author uses an ellipsis four times throughout the poem. This punctuation mark frames the poem into the timeline, where the historical past of the African American poet becomes the present experience of any human, despite the race. The climax of the poem is presented in the middle of stanza two. The animated moment, which starts from the sentence “the ground gripped my feet”, dramatically shifts the

Technology, the advancement of knowledge and productivity through the application of tools, information, and techniques to create an effortless process, has ultimately lead to the declination of our society and our future. In “A Thing Like Me,” Nicholas Carr addresses the development of technology from the day it was created and how it initiated an immediate impact within the lives of humans leading to an unhealthy dependency. Carr establishes how technology, what was intended to be a tool, has become the “pacifier” of our generation. This “pacifier” causes a loss of freedom, not through the laws of the government, but rather with the values of freedom one holds within themselves. This freedom is the individuality that distinguishes each person from the next, and forms a desire for the development of oneself through the experiences of life and the wisdom that is acquired along the way. Technology has blinded man from this pursuit of self-enhancement and with the advancement of technology occurring daily, there is no resolution. Each day people are confined within themselves and the pieces of technology that will continually limit them in their lives. Freedom is more than just a concept of laws instilled by the government, it is the thought process found within each individual person and their “hunger” to become more. With technology, social media was created and immediately immersed within our lives. The society of today has

Cristina Henriquez’, The Book of Unknown Americans, folows the story of a family of immigants adjusting to their new life in the United States of America. The Rivera family finds themselves living within a comunity of other immigrants from all over South America also hoping to find a better life in a new country. This book explores the hardships and injustices each character faces while in their home country as well as withina foreign one, the United States. Themes of community, identity, globalization, and migration are prevalent throughout the book, but one that stood out most was belonging. In each chacters viewpoint, Henriquez explores their feelings of the yearning they have to belong in a community so different than the one that they are used to.

I am a U.S. born citizen. My parents moved to the United States in 1984 without knowing anything about this country. Looking for a fresh start and new opportunities, my parents settled in Houston. With hardly knowing any English, my parents knew this was the place to make dreams become a reality. Luckily, I had older siblings to look up to whenever I needed help. Like Lahiri, I was trapped in between two different cultures while I was growing up. At home, I only spoke Spanish, but in school it was English. My habits and customs were different than others. Life as an immigrant’s offspring can be very difficult. As I grew older, I allowed myself to open my eyes and see the beauty of being an American from Hispanic descent.

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash definitely fits the category of “grit lit.” It is a novel about the Hall’s, a family who is wracked with grief, anxiety, and guilt after the ‘mysterious’ death of one of their sons, Christopher or Stump. The story encompasses more than just the story of the family though as it is told from the perspective of Adelaide Lyle, an old wise woman from the town, Jess Hall the youngest son of the family, and Clem Barefield, the sheriff of Marshall who also had heartache of his own that is intertwined with this families story in more ways than one. The novel incorporates most if not all of the features that is “grit lit” including: an element of crime, a focus on the bleakness of life, lyrical language, and a central character who wishes to escape their environment or get peace inside it.

Growing up the child of an immigrant has given me a unique perspective on life that a majority of kids my age will never have. In my home, I am surrounded by the Ethiopian culture and language, but when I step across the threshold, I am greeted by a culture foreign to my own. I was challenged with learning two more languages than most kids, Amharic and Tigrinya, which classified me as a student who needed ESL (English Second Language) classes. My mom always said, “Ewedeshalo yenekonjo”, meaning I love you, my beautiful. I was immersed in two different communities, and had the impression of living in two different countries. I was faced with the difficulty of not knowing where I fit in since I am one of a few kids who have this reality. Balancing

Unconsciously, we all speak different languages; we categorize the way we speak by the environment and people at which we are speaking too. Whenever a character enters an unfamiliar environment, they experiment with language to find themselves and understand reality. For immigrants, language is a means to retain one’s identity; however, as they become more assimilated in their new communities their language no longer reflects that of their identity but of their new cultural surroundings. When an immigrant, immigrates to a new country they become marginalized, they’re alienated from common cultural practices, social ritual, and scripted behavior. It’s not without intercultural communication and negotiation

Changes occur in every region of the globe; every minute, every second. Most individuals generally do not approve of changes. It entices fear, mistrust, isolation, and even pain. In my youth, I liked change. Changes were something to look forward to, it was fun to meet new individuals and an enjoyable way to see new places. It was useful to learn new skills and live experiences. So at the age of fifteen, my mother told me we were headed for America. No attention was given to these words, because I was a teenager who thought that the state of Texas would be quite similar to Toronto, but never could I fathom that this would completely change my perception of the world. These Challenges have led me to understand the different cultures between the north and south, not to believe in stereotypes, and made me adaptable.

A piece of information that I found the most valuable was “getting to know lots of people and slowly and naturally form close friendships” by Grace Blackmon at Hendrix College. After leaving high school and entering a new school, students tend to look for new people and quickly become friends without known much about one another. This causes for these friendships to fall apart very quickly. By using Grace’s advice, students, including myself, can make sure that the friendships formed are valuable and are formed naturally which can prevent them falling apart.

In the book Life is so Good, George Dawson and Richard Glaubman give a very rare representation of life in the early 1900s. George Dawson, a poor and illiterate black man tells life as it is through his experiences. These many life experiences are portrayed in new stories told chapter by chapter intrigue the reader of the book. This paper will review Dawson’s many stories and his perspective on life at the time, as well as the way his views and mindset compares to the philosophy of African Americans at this time.

Unwavering trust and the heart to love another person as they would their brother is a key aspect of “A Diamond Guitar”. In “A Diamond Guitar” by Truman Capote, there is a man named Mr. Schaeffer who is the ideal good friend. He has been sentenced ninety plus years in a work farm for committing murder. After serving about seventeen years in the work farm a new inmate named Tico Feo, a foreigner from Cuba, arrived in the work farm. Throughout the story, both characters’ lives are visualized through the perspective of Mr. Schaeffer himself. Both of them end up bonding and connecting their lives in the restricted space of the work farm. Mr. Schaeffer is a good friend because of how he treats Tico Feo as if he were his own brother, keeps his feelings in mind, and gives things to him without asking for anything back.