Small Steps By Louis Sachar

In the article "Chance and Circumstance" by David Leonhardt he speaks about a lot of subjects. These subjects ranged from hockey players in Canada to Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell was a man who graduated from University of Toronto. He had then moved to the United States to try journalism (578). Bill Gates was a man with a advantage over many because he himself states that he had more exposure to software then maybe anyone at the time (579). David also states things about teenagers being born in the beginning of the year are stronger, older and taller than their peers. David interviewed a parent at the championship game at the Canadian junior league, which he later found out that the son of the man was born January fourth. He then discovered that the son, hockey player of the man was big for his age (580). A challenge that I have always gone through in baseball would be that I was always the shortest, youngest and at times the weakest.

Harlem Summer is a novel written by Walter Dean Myers. The story takes place in Harlem, New York in 1925 during the Harlem Renaissance. The author envelopes the reader into a rich African American culture of jazz musicians, poets, writers, Negro leaders, and surprisingly gangsters. Mark Purvis is a sixteen-year-old saxophonist. Mark resides with his parents and older brother. They live in the neighborhood with his idol, Fats Waller 's, sister - Edie. He has big dreams of becoming a famous jazz musician. When Fats offers Mark an opportunity to earn five dollars, he immediately accepts the job without any hesitation. Mark thought - why not? I can earn some money, and possibly become friends with Fats. With any luck, we will record an album together on Black Swan Records.

Puritans and reformers of seventeenth century England have been given a bad name for their part in history. This is primarily because they were working against the grain and trying to create change in world that saw change as a threat. The time period was turbulent and there was bound to be resistance in a world that was dominated by Catholics and those that had reformed to abide by their King’s law. The puritans of the time were considered extreme and rubbed people the wrong way because they wanted a world that abided by their morals and ethical codes. For this, they took the blame for the misery that many suffered during this age, but as we see in Fire from Heaven, this is not a fair assessment. The Puritans of this time wanted to improve the lives of the people and society as a whole through morality and purity.

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a

To be an ethnic American is a culture all on its own. Hunger of memory by Richard Rodríguez gives an insight into the rarely viewed world. A person that no longer falls into either category of family or American community. Such an individual is stuck between two worlds, in which two different cultures collide yet form a rift through family, language and education.

Words and actions have a large impact on the way you work with the world around you, they have the ability to make you feel indescribable emotions in every way. The poem “Little Boy,” written by B.H. Fairchild begins as a young boy questions his father’s hurtful past, as the speaker demonstrates that he asked the questions as he would’ve asked if he ever saw “Dimaggio or Mantle,” and develops into an examination of a lifeless relationship between father and son. In the poem the little boy’s persistent focus on the father’s brutal past reveals a case of PTSD from his involvement in WWII, and how it affects the advancement of an already bad and unsteady and unchanging relationship of a father and son.

Born in 1803, in the village of La Côte-Saint-André, France, Hector Berlioz produced some of the most invigorating and exciting music of the Romantic period (Holoman, 1, 6). Romanticism primarily focused on subjectivism, therefore people were concentrating more on their emotions and spirituality and less on logical explanations for the problems of humanity. Those of the Romantic period valued nature and depended upon the creativity of artists in order to gain a deeper and different outlook on the world, one that was not strictly rational. Of all the Romantic art forms, music, especially

Give and Take is a book written by Adam Grant to describe his view of economic drivers and motivations through the lens of his theory of Give and Take. Economics is the study of how people make choices under scarcity and the results of these choices for society and Mr. Grant asserts that success isn’t just achieved by those who take it; but the majority of success goes to individuals who are willing to look out for others at their potential detriment. According to Grant, the perception of givers are often taken advantage, his research indicates that givers make up a majority of those at the top of the success ladder, even though they are more likely to “sacrifice their own interests to benefit others. Give and Take compares to economic theories like scarcity, cost/benefit analysis, equilibrium, and opportunity costs. To better understand the principles of economics through the lens of Give and Take, one must understand the concepts of Grant’s Give and Take as a description of day to day operations as they relate to well established economic theories.

In the book Half Brother, by Kenneth Oppel, Ben Tomlin is a very thoughtful person because he is considerate, caring, friendly, and kindhearted. Ben Tomlin, the main character in the book, lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada with his mom, dad, and a chimpanzee, Zan. Some things about Ben is that he has curly hair, he likes to play Risk and pinball, and he does cross-country and photography. First of all, Ben is a thoughtful person because he is considerate of others, especially his friends and family. An example that proves this is can be found in Half Brother, by Kenneth Oppel on page 371, said by Ben. “I paused, because this part was hard to admit. ‘I didn’t love you at first, Zan. I thought you were weird, and I guess I was jealous, and sometimes I didn’t want you at all. But that didn’t last long. You were my little brother. I really felt that. That was never fake.’” This quote explains that even though Zan is a chimpanzee, Ben still loves him because he cares for him and wants what’s best for Zan, which is a family. Another time where Ben shows his thoughtfulness by being considerate of others is when he understands why Zan is being crazy. Even though Zan is fooling around and he can’t stop him, he is not mad at Zan because he knows that Zan is an animal after all, even though his family is raising him like a human. He knows that Zan is only having his temper tantrum and he knows that he can’t stop him because he is an animal, not a human. In Half Brother, by

I learned many things about the Civil Rights Era from the book MARCH. Lewis really gives a great picture of what life was like for Black families in the 1940’s and 1950’s under Jim Crow and segregation laws. Something that was evident was during the first day of school for young Lewis during which he saw that the white children had a shiny new bus and the colored children had a shabby broken down one, the inequality was apparent at a young age. Lewis begins to give a clearer picture of what the civil rights movement is trying to accomplish . The Civil Rights movement was not just about minorities getting better treatment. The movement was about equality for blacks and whites and women and men.

Throughout his novel Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman provides numerous occasions for defining freedom. In the midst of attempting to give meaning to freedom, Grossman greatly invests in wrestling with the issue of why freedom is still absent within Russia although the country has seen success in many different ways. Through the idea and image of the Revolution stems Capitalism, Leninism, and Stalinism. Grossman contends that freedom is an inexorable occurrence and that “to live means to be free”, that it is simply the nature of human kind to be free (200-204). The lack of freedom expresses a lack of humanity in Russia, and though freedom never dies, if freedom does not exist in the first place, then it has no chance to be kept alive. Through Grossman’s employment of the Revolution and the ideas that stem from it, he illustrates why freedom is still absent from Russian society, but more importantly why the emergence of freedom is inevitable.

In the Alta Loma Hotel in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, writer Arturo Bandini's hotel room window opens onto the ground level, a smog and sand-choked base of a palm tree as his view. Arturo's train of thought

The cover is of an imbecile, exaggerated cartoon, and infantile large fonts and colours. I picked up Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, slightly annoyed at having to read this for French class. I put off reading it till the deadline for the book review assignment. It was a short story, so I decided to just skim through. In the end though, I didn't skim through it – I couldn't. With utterly zero discern, I was attentively reading every word, enthralled by its ardent observations apropos of the distinctive human nature and life.

‘ Le Petit Prince’ or ‘ The Little Prince’ is a French novella written by Antoine St. Exupéry. It chronicles the tale of a stranded pilot who meets a young prince from an asteroid in the Sahara desert. The book, written as if intended for children, with painted scenes by the author, contains themes suited for people of all ages such as friendship, lost childhood, loneliness, longing and learning through experiences. Written in 1943, ‘ The Little Prince’ stands at the periphery of the time period of modern French works (1860-1960). Its impact on the world has been remarkable despite it’ s still relatively short-lived existence. It is a work of great cultural significance and international acclaim. It is on the list of the most translated

Marriage is a social construct that technically has no meaning other than what the person engaging in marriage puts to it. Yet, the idea of marriage is a concept that copious amounts of people hold dear. It wormed its way into the importance of society early, and even dictates the movement in a relationship, most notably that of intimacy. In John Donne’s poem “The Flea,” extended metaphor is used to explain that the act of intimacy does not matter whether it is performed before or after marriage. Also, explicit imagery is noticeable through the poem and outlines the underlying taboo topic being discussed. Another important detail, the flea within the poem is not only used as a comparison in the extended metaphor, but also as a symbol of innocence. In “The Flea,” Donne plainly spites the acceptance of traditional values by using extended metaphor, gross imagery, and symbolism.