Glass House, By New Orleans

What first triggered me was her depiction of New Orleans as a lackadaisical safe haven where underachievers can make a pilgrimage to spend their time “...on the stoop or on project so underproductive they wouldn’t count as hobbies in other cities…” Nonetheless I was still willing to overcome the bad taste this story had hastily put in my mouth and give it another chance. With a fresh new outlook on the story, Roahen did not fail to promptly regain my disapproval. After reading a measly five paragraphs I found myself exerting an unnecessary amount of energy and effort to stay focused on reading the monotonous story.

Second Chances-Stanhope House is a non-profit residential facility for women ex-offenders located in Norfolk, VA. Second Chances was established in 1999, sponsored by the city of Norfolk, and operating under the organizational umbrella of The Garden of Hope, Inc. This program is designed to assist non-violent women ex-offenders with transitional supportive services that lead to economic and social stability. “Since 1990, the number of women in America’s jails and prisons has tripled. The number of women on probation nearly doubled from 1990 to 2003, while the number on parole more than doubled. Considered collectively, the needs of thousands of women transitioning from some form of correctional confinement to the community

Writer, Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle, provides an insight into the fanciful and shocking life of growing up poor and nomadic with faux-grandiose parents in America. With her memoir, Wall's purpose was to acknowledge and overcome the difficulties that came with her unusual upbringing. Her nostalgic but bitter tone leaves the reader with an odd taste in their mouth. In some memories, the author invites her audience to look back on with fondness; others are viewed through bulletproof glass and outrage.

Elijah’s daughter, Luvenia, struggles to get a job and into college in Chicago while her brother Richard travels back to South Carolina. Abby’s grandson, Tommy works with civil rights and protests, and tries to get into college for basketball. The story ends with Malcolm, Richard’s grandson, getting his his cousin Shep, who is struggling with drugs, to the family reunion. In reading this story one could wonder how the transition from slavery to segregation in the United States really occurred. The timeline can be split into three distinct sections, Emancipation, forming segregation, and life post-Civil War, pre-civil rights.

After reading the essay “The Ghetto Made Me Do It” written by Francis Flaherty, I thought differently about the situation than I had before hearing both sides of this tragic story. My perspective changed from being bias toward Felicia Morgan to feeling a sense of sympathy for her. However, regardless of what defense there is to this story, it does not change how ruthless and tragic this homicide actually was.

In the Bronx, crack and violence came about as poverty increased. Wes was a victim in witnessing these crucial actions in his new neighborhood. Like the other Wes, Wes Moore was a product of his environment. Only he didn’t allow this to hurt his future when he grew up. On the other hand, the author lived in a bad environment but the expectations held by his mother and grandmother for him affected his future greatly, “When the streetlights went on, we had to be back home…these rules had helped their children navigate the world, they would work on

As flames engulfed her dress, they burned down her stomach as she screamed for help. This was the first memory Jeannette Walls had in The Glass Castle . The plot of the story reveals her childhood of poverty as she moved around the country with her delusional family. Her alcoholic father and mentally ill mother created a very different lifestyle for their children, and raised them like no other. The unique plot, strong characters, and many settings make the novel successful. In this autobiography, she perseveres through tough times and leads the reader down the path she took to adulthood.

Let the Water Hold Me Down by Michel Spurgeon is written in a very unique and skillful way of the realities of being of human, and dealing with loss and grief, guilt and longing, loyalty and love. These psychopathologies affect the readers and present a different way of seeing the text. By applying critical theory to this novel, not only the reader but the main character, Hank Singer, gets a different perspective, a new lens after making several changes in his life. Critical theory helps individuals observe from an unusual angle and learn things in new ways, different from his or her typical way of viewing things. It opens up new lenses, and through this new lens, it can lead to new understanding or unfortunately, make things harder to understand. "Knowledge is what constitutes our relationship to our world, for it is the lens through which we view our world"Tyson states if the lens is changed, the view and the viewer may be changed as well.

As Anderson does a walking tour of Philadelphia, he sees the very divergent aspects of the city by observing the people, places and tension around him. Walking the readers through a very poor area of the city, to Center City and through an upper-middle-class area, he attempys to answer the question of how race is lived and considered in Philadelphia. Although he is most interested in the Cosmopolitan Canopies of the city, he shows that there are parts of the city that are not as diverse including the poor sections and upper-middle-class

In the beginning of the documentary, The House I Live In, President Nixon gives a speech declaring, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive” In 1971, this speech made Preside Nixon the first president to ever declare a “war on drugs” in America. He fought by battling, both the supply and demand for drugs. Karst J. Besteman (1989) describes this “war” as a “strong initiative against drug dealers and expansion of drug treatment facilities” (p. 290). The beginning of Nixon’s “war” was focused on providing treatment and rehabilitation, after the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973, the focal point of the

Teju Cole’s phenomenally written original novel majorly takes place in New York City. Cole character was easy to relate to because of his Nigerian American decent being that I am a Ghanaian American. Cole is a Nigerian American. He was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992 at the age of seventeen. Cole is also well educated and is a graduate student at Columbia University. I found it insightful how in the novel Cole met several various types of people, including other immigrants. He met and shared stories with a Haitian shoe shiner, at work in Penn Station; a Liberian, imprisoned for over two years in a dentition center in Queens; and a Moroccan student working at an Internet café. I enjoyed the fact that the narrator was well stocked minded. He touched on the topics of art, music, and interesting books. He had a very eclectic set of interest.

Many tragic events happen in this short story that allows the reader to create an assumption for an underlying theme of racism. John Baldwin has a way of telling the story of Sonny’s drug problem as a tragic reality of the African American experience. The reader has to depict textual evidence to prove how the lifestyle and Harlem has affected almost everything. The narrator describes Harlem as “... some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin 60). Another key part in this story is when the narrator and Sonny’s mother is telling the story of a deceased uncle. The mother explains how dad’s brother was drunk crossing the road and got hit by a car full of drunk white men. Baldwin specifically puts emphasis on the word “white” to describe the men for a comparison to the culture of dad and his brother.

The fundamental characteristic of magical realism is its duality, which enables the reader to experience both the character’s past and the present. In the novel, Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson uses this literary device to address the the trauma and mistreatment of the Haisla community in Canada by unveiling the intimate memories of the protagonist, Lisamarie, and the resulting consequences of this oppression. Monkey Beach illustrates how abuse in the past leads to another form of self-medication in the future - a neverending, vicious cycle for the members of the Haisla community. Many characters in Monkey Beach are scarred from childhood sexual abuse and family neglect, and resort to drug and alcohol abuse as a coping mechanism. These

When you live in the suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites. Whites were like those pigeons: real and existing, but rarely seen or thought about…everyone had seen white girls and their mother coo-coing over dresses; everyone had gone to downtown library and seen white businessmen swish by importantly, wrists flexed in front of them to check the time as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman…those images were a fleeing as cards shuffled in a deck, where as the ten white girls behind us were real and memorable (179).

In the song Hurricane by Bob Dylan it describes their protest about the imprisonment of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. It arranges alleged acts of racism and profiling against Carter. Bob Dylan describes as leading to a false trial and conviction. Rubin Carter and John Artis were charged with a triple murder at the Lafayette Grill in Paterson, New Jersey in 1966. The next year Carter and Artis were found guilty of the murders, which were reported as racially motivated. In the following years, numerous amounts of controversy appeared over the case from allegations of faulty evidence and questionable eyewitness testimony to an unfair trial.