Book Review : ' Same Kind Of Different As Me '

I have two sisters and a brother that I live with, with my mom and step-dad. Then I have two brothers and a sister on my dad’s side. I don’t see my dad much. Haven’t for a while. The first couple years of my life I was pretty much raised by my great grandparents and grandparents. After my mom had me she had to catch up on school and provide for me. She went to school and night school, and when she wasn’t going to school she was working to provide for me, pay for her car, and other stuff. I got very attached to my great grandparents. My great grandmother had Breast Cancer, she beat it. Shortly after beating it, she died, don’t remember from what and don’t like talking about it. My family is everything to me. Yes we might fight but I will always love them and stick by them no matter the consequence. I love my family to death and will never let anybody get between

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

Technology is the epitome of human evolution. We are the only species we know of to have successfully developed tools, not just primitive ones, that’s been done before by other organisms. The tools I’m talking about are the ones which enhance our senses beyond their human abilities. Tools like GPS, farming equipment, calculators. These are tools that push the limits of human ability beyond what can be naturally achieved. Through these tools we can navigate the earth on a scale far beyond our ancestors, we can turn a field that would have previously taken months, and we can compute mathematics that further our understanding of our very existence. However, these tools might be taking more than they give; at least that’s what Nicholas Carr argues in his essay A Thing Like Me. In his

My grandma was my superhero with her genial personality and her ability to give you her full, undivided attention in order to listen to whatever you had to say. It was always my dream to be able to share both my high school and college graduation with both my parents and grandma and being able to later pay them all back for all their sacrifices. Towards the beginning of my sixth-grade year my grandma became unexpectedly sick and as months passed her health slowly began to deteriorate until she fell into a vegetative comatose for the next four years. My grandma’s sudden illness came as an unexpected surprise which leads to my mom and her family having to take turns in order to care for my grandma throughout her extensive hospital visits and inhome medical care. Throughout those four years both my emotional and mental health took a hit as I tried my best to learn how to deal with her sudden illness and the fact that my mom was rarely home because she was either in the hospital or at my grandma’s house in order to help take care of

Carr begins chapter 10, A Thing Like Me, with Joseph Weizenbaum, a MIT PC researcher who imagined a PC program that could parse and react to language. The program was called ELIZA. ELZA could recognize speech patterns and could rephrase sentences in question form and was displayed to have the identity of a psychotherapist. When ELIZA first appeared in the 60's, some people actually mistook her for human.

Although I had an older brother and sister, I felt alone a great deal of the time I was growing up. I never "acted out" my need for attention. I did not get bad grades in school. On the contrary, I was a quiet child who made the honor roll. I was always given my sisters hand-me-downs which I resented. My grandmother was very strict and often cold. There were never hugs or kisses and not once do I remember an I love you. My father still came to visit, but remarried when I was eight. His new wife was like something out of a horror novel. The mental torture that I endured was a million times worse than what Cinderella went through. My grandmother along with my brother and sister came up with a nickname for me. They called me dog and taunted me every time we passed the pet supplies in the grocery store. At the age of ten my beloved paternal grandmother Memo, the only light in my otherwise dark world, died in her sleep while I was in the next room. I sat and watched as the paramedics tried to revive her with no success. On the car ride back home, my stepmother screamed at my father to "shut me up and stop my crying," as if what I had just been through should not have affected me at all. She left my father a few years later. At fifteen I ran away from my grandmothers house and went to live with my dad. I was receiving survivors support which I never saw once I moved in with my father. Although I did not know it

My mother was only a little girl and she was already taking care of three little sisters. My grandmother was very harsh on her 10 daughters and

In September 2013, I came to the United States and lived with my mother for nine months. In those months, my stepfather left my mother and she became more aggressive with my sister and I. One time she went to my stepfather’s job and cut her veins and was immediately sent to the hospital, I had to take care of my little sister since then. She didn’t take care of us and was really difficult for me to take care of myself and my sister’s needs. One day on May 2014 she came home and started fighting with me saying that all her problems were my fault and threatened me with killing me, she threw my clothes out of the house and I left to my grandma’s house. I just needed to finish school before I could moved to West New York, I graduated on June 26, 2014 and that same day I came to West New York.

But since I am trying to do better for myself and make it out here in the world so I do not need to depend on others she wants to hold me back. I understand now, she doesn't want anyone to be as or more successful than she is. She expects and wants everyone to ask for her help and continuously depend on her for the rest of her life. I hope she is held accountable on judgment day for her actions and behavior on earth. I believe that God does not like people who hold his children back from becoming successful. He has plans for their life that can't be accomplished if she makes them continue to leech off of her for her pleasure of having or being in control over another human being. Sometimes, I wish that I could do bad so I could be rewarded like the others, but that is not who I want to be. It kind of hurts when she says mean things to me, but I know she only does it to get the results that she wants out of

My grandparents came with me, and since I did not trust my parents, I was always glued to them. At times, when my parents wanted to talk to me, I would be stubborn, and when I did talk, I talked to them directly with bad manners. My parents wanted to take me to places and do activities together, but I would always stay home with my grandparents unless they went with me. This continued on for several weeks, until my grandparents had to go back to China. When they left, I felt abandoned and frustrated. They had spent the past five years raising me, and now they were leaving me behind with people I barely

Same Kind of Different as Me: a Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent is truly a magnificent story about the crossing and changing of two radically dissimilar people. The book is written in the form of two autobiographies that merge into one fantastic life story. The novel is based around the concept of compassion and what reaching out can do to a person’s life. Throughout the book, the readers’ eyes are opened to the cruelty of life for several people in the south and their eyes are also opened to the opinions and lifestyles of the homeless.

After reading the book, “This is My Life”, it touched me in a certain way nothing has every touched me before. David Carter has made me look at life in an entirely new perspective that I have never been able to see before. David Carter was born in Lexington, Virginia to Carrie and Lewis Carter. David goes through every day daily struggles that “normal” people don’t even have to think twice about. David was born with cerebral palsy, which is classified as a motor disorder and also causes forced and involuntary movements of the arms and legs. When David sits in his wheelchair, he has to sit a certain in order for his libs to stay still and not move involuntarily. He would sit with his legs crossed. Cerebral palsy also affects the ability to swallow

LGBTQ social movements have evolved over time from liberationist politics of the 1970s to an enormous contemporary focus on gay and lesbian marriage rights, a controversial and arguably assimilationist priority for mainstream LGBTQ advocacy groups. Different forms of activism have approached assimilationism versus societal reformation or preservation of unique constructions of queer identities with a myriad of arguments. In “The Trouble with Normal” by Michael Warner, the author focuses primarily on a criticism of gay marriage rights activism in which he posits that all marriage is “selective legitimacy.” He points to other LGBT movements and issues as more worthy of pursuing, particularly intersectional pursuits of equal rights for people regardless of coupled status. In “Marital Discord: Understanding the Contested Place of Marriage in the Lesbian and Gay Movement” authors Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor give a snapshot history of LGBTQ activism since the 1970s and offer similar arguments as Warner about the heteronormative and neoliberal nature of placing the fight for legal marriage rights at the forefront of LGBTQ activism, although they do also introduce emerging improvements with the increasingly intersectional awareness of modern advocacy efforts.

My older sister called me “have you talked to Mommy? No, why? She is not answering her phone. Okay I will keep calling her phone. Unfortunately, Mom forgot where she lived, she lived alone, a hundred miles from the nearest relative. When I spoke to her on the phone, she sounded feeble, my sister suggested we move Mom to Los Angeles, closer to my sister’s apartment, Mom declined. I called my oldest daughter, “Kich, I will pay you whatever you make in a day to go and see about your Grandmother”, she replied “Mom, you don’t have to pay me to go see Grandma’. Kich called me “Mom, Grandma is so thin, she says she forgets to eat, I fixed her some soup, and watched her eat. Okay, what is the plan, we moved her back to Philly, to her house, where my younger sister and her husband live, she continued to drop weight, however I suggested a in-home health assistant to fix meals and sit with my Mom, my sister and my Mom declined, I told them both I was coming to get my Mom if she did not eat, I received a call from oldest sister, stating my cousin said my Mom was picking up weight. It is so easy to forget that are parents are aging, I never thought my Mom would forget her way home, or forget to eat, I was ashamed, because I took it for granted that she was

To preface, my great-grandmother is 92 years old, lives alone, and has had plenty of time to perfect the art of passive aggression. By this I mean that she is very often passive aggressive with different members of our family. She loves playing the role of sickly sweet grandmother whose family no longer loves her. This, of course, in untrue. I love my grandmother, but she loves playing the victim. In one particular scenario where this passive aggression came into play, my mother was in the midst of cleaning my great-grandmother’s house, which she does weekly. She