David Sedaris 'Chipped Beef'

Written and narrated by chef Marcus Samuelsson, the autobiography Yes Chef shares the journey of a novice home cook transforming into an elite celebrity chef. Originally born in Ethiopia, a Swedish family adopted Samuelsson at the age of three due to the Ethiopian civil war. Samuelsson grew up in Sweden as a member of a middle-class Caucasian family, but throughout his life he traveled around the world in order to advance in his cooking career. Currently, Samuelsson owns multiple restaurants throughout the world, but New York City is where he calls home. He now resides in Manhattan, along with his wife and daughter. His goal in writing this book was to share his evolution from novice home cook to celebrity chef, and to

Looking through the shops for a new deal, hopefully one they could afford. I remember my parents taking me and my two brothers garage sale shopping every weekend, packing snack bags and busted Gameboys. I never understood why we had to get up at eight in the morning to go to sale after sale, sometimes coming home with nothing at all. To me, it was boring to look at other people’s things. I didn’t realize the importance of other people’s things it until I discovered that their stuff, would become our stuff for just a quarter. It’s where our kitchen utensils came from. Our clothes and our books. The little things that filled our shelves and cabinets. After that point, much like Laurel, I began to go to garage sales with a different attitude. These people were selling their things for close to nothing at all. I cannot count the amount of times my mother's face changed from curious to shocked, simply because that piece of glassware for a dollar was in fact some long, rich sounding brand name piece of glass that to me, looked like an impractical bowl. But to the older women selling it, it was her favorite item in her glass cabinet. Or it was a gift from her daughter she hadn’t seen in a long time. Or maybe to that older women, it was just a piece of glass with no use. Maybe she never knew how much it was worth. But we could never really know how much it was worth to her. Being poor doesn’t mean not having nice things. It

This book is made up of two cycles of poems, each confronting the same subject: the characterization of a black man in white America. In this book, I plan to focus mainly on the first cycle and touch briefly on the second. The first cycle includes four different sections. In section one of cycle one, Eady writes about Susan Smith and Charles Stuart, two murderers who blamed their crimes on nonexistent black attackers. The first poem is called “How I Got Born” (Eady 5), in this poem the fictional young African American man is conjured up. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, Eady writes a note that explains who and what the speaker is: “The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children” (Eady 5). In the first few lines of the poem he says, “Susan Smith willed me alive/ At the moment/ Her babies sank into the lake” (l. 1-40). So right away he gives us a pretty straightforward explanation for what this poem is about and what this section will be about. In the next few poems, the narrator discusses his “existence” and reason for being created. Eady uses a lot of metaphors, similes and imagery in his poems, and he does a phenomenal job with imagery.

This story also shows evidence of a young boy trying to find his way throughout life with the skin he was in. Society, at that time, made it extremely difficult for Sedaris to be himself and to feel comfortable expressing his sexuality. Homosexuality was not accepted by any means during the time of Sedaris' youth, which made it difficult for him to express himself as a normal

David Sedaris Repeat After Me is a story about the author’s meeting with his sister, Lisa. The audiences learn about Sedaris and his sister through mostly flashbacks and narration. Although the author and his sister are very different from their family’s view, they still have a strong relationship together. Through Sedaris’s jokes with his sister, the audiences can see a deeper connection between all of the joke and the story by the end of Repeat After me. The author cleverly uses a theme of pets and a shifting in narrating to make his audiences join him on the emotional train.

As I continued reading, the story peaked my interest with Aron being trapped with little food and water. The book became hard to put down, but gruesome at the same time, because of Aron’s descriptive writing about him cutting off his own arm with a pocket knife; which made me curl up and wince the whole time. Even though I wasn’t excited about reading a nonfiction book, I began to enjoy reading the book. When finished with the publication, the main message I got from Aron’s book is to follow what means most to an individual. The book improved my mindset of making the best of any circumstance, and to enjoy life to the

David Sedaris’s Tasteless is an essay filled with imagery and humor. His sarcasm and language really captures the reader’s mind. He takes you through his journey of his eating habits from a boy to an adult. He begins his story with discussing how cigarettes can affect one’s senses, blaming his lack of taste on his smoking fixation. He proceeds to describe his eating habits with elaborate details and analogies, poking fun at himself numerous times. Sedaris tells of a time where he tried to bribe his sister for part of her meal. Then he talks about a cookbook he received from his mother and how by high school he began making pizzas. Although he would be creative with his meals, he never applauded himself once on his abilities to create something

“Eat Mor Chikin!” Shouts this fast food chain’s mascot. The Chik-Fil-A mascot may not be well educated, misspelling common known words, but he knows how to get people to eat and enjoy this new american classic. The Chik-Fil-A restaurants are one of the most popular eating establishments in America. People of all ages enjoy their food but people in Vail, Arizona are feeling left out of this delicious picture.

When writing a collection of poems, most poets chose to focus on maintaining certain themes throughout their literature and Cornelius Eady is not an exception. Cornelius Eady’s collection of poems in Brutal Imagination focus on issues such as racism, family crisis, internal conflict, and death. The first part of the collection circles around a servant who works for Susan Smith and is the caretaker for her children. The story centers around the perspective of the servant who is also the overarching narrator. The story describes old version of United States when racism was still bluntly present and affected individuals identities and financial opportunities. Based off the information presented in the collection, the servant can possibly be male. The general plot follows deeply into the difficult life of the male servant through examining the issues he faces. The first poem within the collection set-ups the rest of the story with context for the readers giving them a few expectations about what they should look forward to reading further. Eady draws the reader through integrating an origin for the male servant and his connection to Susan Smith’s family.

In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie’s humor efficaciously shows the bitter reality on the reservation. For example, at the beginning of the story, Alexie uses humor to reflect poverty on the reservation. After Junior shouts at Thomas, questioning “[h]ow come your fridge is always fucking empty,” Thomas goes inside the refrigerator and sits down, replying Junior “[t]here…It ain’t empty no more” (Alexie 12). As seen in this example, having Thomas sit inside the refrigerator and reply in a humorous tone, Alexie is successful in mirroring the issue of poverty, or the bitter reality, on the reservation. This point can also be supported by Stephen F. Evans’s essay, "'Open containers': Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians,” in which Evans discusses Alexie’s use of satire and irony in his stories and poems. As Evans claims that “[c]onsidered as a whole, the best artistic moments in Alexie's poems, stories, and novels lie in his construction of a satiric mirror that reflects the painful reality of lives,” this further verifies the argument that humor in Alexie’s stories helps reflect the bitter actuality on the reservation (49).

(BS-3) There were multiple contrasting characters that did not follow the same path as the others. (BS-2) Losing emotions and priorities are the two main effects of materialism. (BS-1) The characters described by the author are shown to be full of materialistic personalities. (R) A message from this book is that people should stop focusing on looks and objects and start interacting with people to receive true

A Leg to Stand On, by Oliver Sacks, is a book about Sacks himself. Sacks depicts the story of his self-induced disability, and the mental/physical barriers he faced within recovery, and acceptance. Sacks broke down this process into seven steps: the mountain, becoming a patient, limbo, quickening, Solvitur Ambulando, convalescence, and understanding. Along with the physical and mental barriers he faced, there were many macro/micro contextual level issues throughout the book. These issues included problems with his doctors, with his self-identification, and body ego.

The element of symbolism is extremely prominent in the classic work “The Scarlet Ibis,” by James Hurst to the point where the work is even titled to represent one use of symbolism present in the short story. There are three main examples of symbolism in the story with numerous others scattered throughout the entire text. One extremely common form of symbolism seen across various works of literature is present within this story: the weather. This form of symbolism is introduced when the work states, “After a long silence, Daddy spoke. ‘It's so calm, I wouldn't be surprised if we had storm this afternoon.’”

thoughts and reiterate a significant truth through colloquial diction. His main motive is to suggest that our world revolves around money that trickles down. "The tip I left / For the waitress filters down / Like rain…"(5-7). It made me wonder where each penny I spend ends up. The money I spend on coffee could go to the teenage employee who earns a minimum wage salary and it could go to the multi-billion dollar corporation that established the company. Money "helps others" (13), as stated in the poem, which elicited optimistic emotions in me because I began to think that I can indirectly do someone a favor by simply purchasing an item. Like Soto, I am captivated by the uncertainty of the fate of my spending. Money does not disappear when it

The use of counter culture and ideology can provide unique perspectives on the issues faced by everyone, even those who do not acknowledge it. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh portrays a drug addict who rejects any conventions of normalcy in the pursuit of an alternate reality. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis does the same through the depiction of a rich and greedy Wall Street tycoon. This essay will closely analyze the themes of illusion and reality in Trainspotting and American Psycho. The relationship between the fantasy world and the “real” world in these texts are closely linked and aid the narrative in a criticism of social and structural issues. The texts are often criticized as glorifying drug use and violence however through analyzing the effect of narrative, drug use and culture on the characters reality and illusions will argue that the elements of drug use and violence help in the deconstruction of greed and popular culture in the texts.