Rag Again By Dennis Miller

“Being Country” just those two words together come with many discussions, but the book brings another discussion. This book “Being Country” by Bobbie Ann Mason honestly had me thinking and wondering if everybody’s perspective about changes in life is the same. The main outlooks I took from this book was; When your surroundings have changed your identity will also, Sometimes a reflection of the past can help your future, and whoever you are going to be will not change.

In her speech Brown has a rather weak organization and seems to jump from one subject to another, as in speaking of being in a sporting goods store buying her children equipment to being a fifth generation Texan. Furthermore, Brown’s organization may be weak and scattered, her sources are well recognized and considered “credible”. For instance, Brown speaks of Theodore Roosevelt’s quote “Man in the Arena”, "It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly." (Brown 12:09) By using this quote Brown evokes a rational response, and viewers are able to understand by defining relevant terms and supporting claims with her multiple citations and stories of her own. In addition to Brown’s sources and organization the only way to fully comprehend what she is speaking of is to watch her previous TED Talk, “Power of Vulnerability” (most popular with four million views), when starting with “Listening to Shame” it is rather difficult to know what to keep in mind and pay attention to in detail of the

Laughter and tears follow the journey of those who faced immense hardships and prevailed. One such individual is Francis McCourt, who wrote Angela’s Ashes, and gave readers a recollection of stories and lessons learned through his difficult childhood. The story starts in New York City, where his parents, Malachy and Angela, married and started a family with five children: Francis, Malachy, twins Oliver and Eugene, and Margaret. Seven weeks after Margaret is born, she passes away, sending Angela into a crazed hysteria causing her and family to move back to Ireland and resettle in her hometown, Limerick, a town known for hating those that seem different. Tragedy strikes again with Eugene and Oliver passing away, causing Malachy to fall back into his alcoholic and neglectful habits, leaving Angela and Francis to financially support the family even with hostile discrimination. Along with that, two more children are born, Michael and Alphonsus. However, over time Francis manages to save enough money to stabilize his family and to go back to New York City. Francis’s success story is a result of overcoming trials and tribulations, showcasing how society was hypocritical and discriminatory of any person that was not Irish, white, Limerick Catholic during the 1930’s and 1940’s

“April Morning” by Howard Fast is a novel that takes place during the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. The entire book takes place during a 24 hour time period. Adam Cooper is the antagonist in this novel. When Adam goes to bed on the eve of April 18, 1775 he is a boy. When he awakens the next morning he is forced to become a man. In the early hours of the morning he, along with the rest of the town, is awakened by a lone rider racing to Lexington to warn them that a British army, of maybe a thousand men, is marching their way. Immediately the town is in a frenzy to prepare for the British arrival. The book is about Adam’s journey during the Battle of Lexington.

In Ain’t No Makin’ It, author Jay MacLeod explores a study of two different groups of young males, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers, in housing projects called Clarendon Heights. MacLeod explores these two extremely different groups over a long course of time to see how they develop from teenagers to adults. MacLeod comes to find that the Hallway Hangers, which is a group of mostly white men, are completely uninterested in education and completely interested in drugs and alcohol. These young men have no desire for a better life. The Brothers, on the contrary, are a group of mostly black men who believe in the American Dream, and will do anything to pull themselves out of poverty. They attend school and stay away from drugs and alcohol, with the hopes of achieving greatness one day. Through norms, values, and ideology, readers can understand MacLeod’s central findings in his study and see the effects of social reproduction.

In life, progressing ahead and following with society 's standards is something everyone tends to look up too. Wishing for events and things to occur is a constant worry in life as well. The downfall of this is that keeping high expectations can lead to even higher disappointments. Wanting and needing are too different aspects and many people have a hard time understanding this. This leads to difficult life situations and making hard decisions that could have been avoided in the very beginning. In both the novel Everybody has Everything by Katrina Onstad and the poem "The Wolves" by Paisley Rekdal, the two stories share a familiar idea in concept of appearance vs. reality and a mixture of rethinking identity. They use the comparison of appearance vs. reality to emphasize the actual significance of the main character as they experience intense feelings and emotion throughout the book/poem. As many people have said that everything in life is not as simple as it seems and the things that occur might not at all be what is it cut out to be. Different situations can change people for the better or the worse in many ways such as building them up or tearing them down as a person, taking an emotional toll on them. This alters their perspectives and is proved in these publications by characterization, tone and mood.

The novel Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, tells the story of a white novelist from the south who seeks to write about the relationships between blacks and whites. He embarked on a personal mission in the late 1950's to experience the hatred and intolerance toward blacks that was widespread in the South. In order to see what life was truly like as a black man in the south, he proceeded to undergo medical treatments to alter his skin to a black pigment temporarily. No longer seen as a human being for other targets, he discovered how oppressed blacks were to a point of no hope. He walked the streets one night as a black man, despised and feared by whites but was respected by his black peers. When Griffin received news that a white jury denied a case of a black lynching, Griffin decided to go to the heart of south Mississippi to check it out. At the bus station, he acquired looks of hatred from the white passengers on the bench. Once on the bus, he and the other black passengers were forced to stay back while the whites departed at a rest stop. The discrimination from the bus driver forced the rest of the passengers to hold their bladders and knew that if an accident were to happen on the bus, it would just be another reason for white people to hold against them. In another incident, a racist teenager shoved him against a wall and mugged him while shouting out the N-word. He recalls that he was once hungry and the clerk refused to sell food to him based on the color of his

Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson centers on the internal slave business in New Orleans as well as the slave market as a place of portrayal and oblique connotations built around the commoditization of the physique of slaves .A significant interest in Soul by Soul relates to the slave pen, where slave bodies as commodities determined the identities of black and white persons. Slave transactions were typically about show and filled with meaning-making, which was itself characterized by cost and worth. The paternalism ideology employed the black persons’ physique and slave transactions to imply that white persons were assisting powerless black people in the slave markets. In essence, the ideology suggests that, contrary to common perceptions, white persons were not separating slave families .The slave market history discussed in Soul by Soul relates to that of the antebellum in the South where slave trade was basically about purchases and sales. Those who owned slaves were consumers in the marketplace. Consumer way of life had structured individual identities. Slave bodies were regarded as items to be rated and assessed and were usually the subject of discussions. Every slave was given a made-up and decorated past. The market culture of slavery in that era was based on fantasy just like the ideology of paternalism. Succinctly, the slave market stimulated the self-definition of white persons from the South.

-He also talks about how people are afraid to talk about what they actually wanna say, because people are afraid to offend someone. For example when someone says Merry Christmas.

In this essay I will go over the different topics that the moderator asked Clinton and Trump. Also, I will go explain the different rhetorical appeals and rhetorical strategies that were employed by the candidates;

ranting that you might convert into an argument, a line of reasoning that another person might find legitimate?

Shortly after the civil war the fourteenth amendment was passed which granted citizenship to all individuals born or naturalized in America; this group included slaves both former and current. However, individuals of African American appearance would be treated like aliens in their own country for years to come. In the eighteen eighties Jim Crow Laws were passed that segregated Black individuals and often subjected them to humiliating conditions. These conditions exasperate and trouble all of the characters in the novel Black No More. In this novel by George Schuyler Blacks are degraded and oppressed because of the color of their skin. This oppression is caused by ignorant prejudices that individuals in the novel hold. Schuyler uses satire, elevated language, and imagery to further support the idea that ignorance can be as great a power or greater than the greed caused for money.

Intern Nation by Ross Perlin tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about internships and then some. Equal parts history lesson, tell all and personal commentary, this should be assigned reading for anyone considering taking part in an internship. It has been coded into the minds of the young job seekers today that they must first work for free if they ever hope to find a good paying position. Perlin sends the necessary message though that the system that has been put in place to make this possible is cracked and presents a bad deal for internship seeking individual.

Could you live your life without making an excuse? Maybe you could go a day, a week, a month maybe, but your whole life? Well, Kyle Maynard describes in his book, No Excuses, the struggle of how he learned to lead a full life while being born with arms that end at his elbows and legs that end at his knees and never made an excuse. There were many moments in Kyle’s life through his middle school and high school career as both a football player and a wrestler where he could’ve said, “Well, I do have almost no arms and no legs, coach,” However, Kyle Maynard never once used this excuse for a reason that he didn’t make the tackle, or got beaten in wrestling, but instead used his mistakes and losses as a guideline on how to improve himself.

Memories can last a life time, so we tend to only remember the extraordinary ones. Extraordinary like the essay “The Yellow Ribbon” by Pete Hamill, in which he talks about how a person named Vingo, was riding on a, bus recently released from jail, to this oak tree explaining to some passengers that he had told his wife to leave him if she wanted, since he went to jail or to go to this oak tree and tie a yellow ribbon around it to see if she wants him to stick around and he will go and check it out. In the end, he saw hundreds of ribbons tied on to the tree. Not only is this an amazing story, but also very unforgettable one as well, because he finds out that after four years in jail his wife has enough love for him to go to this tree and tie hundreds of ribbons just to show the type of love the women had for Vingo. I have to say that, I believe this story is truly unforgettable, but I also got a story that is very extraordinary, like the time that I got my very first car. Furthermore, I didn’t just get a car, I got the love of two truly loving parents.