The Natural Essay

In the sports novel, The Natural, Roy Hobbs has major flaws but is considered a hero of the game baseball. Roy has been shot, scouted into the big leagues, teased, and wanted just about everything he couldn’t have. The characters include Roy Hobbs, the main character, Max Mercy, this scout, Harriet Bird, the woman he has a crush on that shoots him, Pop Fisher, the manager of the New York Knights, Bump Bailey, the star player, Judge Banner, the team owner, Memo Paris, Bump’s wife. His sidekick in the book is his bat that goes by “Wonder boy”. The setting of this book is mainly in New York City. The main character is given many hardships to see if he will remain the best baseball in the league.

While many obstacles get in the way of friendship, true friendship still lives, even in silence. In the book, The Chosen , By Chaim Potok, two boys, Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, who are very religiously different and both raised in completely opposite ways, develops a deep friendship. Their friendship opens up their worldview to many other different viewpoints in life. The friendship between these two boys is one with great religious significance, starting off with destiny and Gods will. As Danny and Reuven’s Friendship develops, it teaches them to respond wisely to the values of the more complex and secular world. It also teaches the true value of friendship. Because Danny’s father, Reb

John Steinbeck 's novel Of Mice and Men is a famous Naturalist work in American literature. Various elements of Naturalism is exhibited in this novel through its character types and story plot. Charles Darwin, an English Naturalist proposed a theory called natural selection, meaning that nature selects the best adapted varieties to survive and reproduce. Darwin also identified this theory as survival of the fittest. Steinbeck incorporated this belief of natural selection in many instances throughout Of Mice and Men using characters and their circumstances. One character named Candy has an injury and is old in age. They were leading factors in his fear of being unemployed. His dog’s old age and uselessness also resulted in its death.

“A young player with great natural talent.”(Overview: The Natural, pg.2) The title of the book is symbolic to the natural talent that Roy Hobbs is blessed with. “The novel’s title repeats the duality implicit in Roy’s role. A “natural” in baseball jargon is a player with outstanding natural talent.”(Understanding Bernard Malamud, pg.3) Roy is seen as a natural to many people, even by people who dislike him. People started to doubt him, especially if they didn’t like him. “People questioned his bat and if it was legal to use because of how well he was hitting. His bat was legal.”(Overview: The Natural, pg.4) Outside of baseball, Roy Hobbs was judged by his character. “Hobbs never grows in any meaningful way and despite his natural talents, his other failings keep him from achieving his true potential.”(Overview: The Natural, pg.3) Many said that Roy didn’t grow or improve on a personality standpoint. “Then again, Malamud’s Hobbs, however talented was hardly an attractive character.”(The Natural: pg.7) Even those who dislike Roy Hobbs’s character it is undeniable the true, natural talent that Roy Hobbs inherits for

In the biography Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, a troubled adolescent boy named Louis Zamperini revolves his life around his running career. Starting at such a young age, running had many impacts on Louie’s life. The high demand of training kept Louie distracted from making unintelligent choices he had previously been making. Running changed the young teenager he was and the man he was going to become.

Kevin Baker described him as “staggering in his self-absorption” (Baker, xii). This means that he is confident to the point that he believes he can do everything himself, and doesn’t care about the rest of his team. Roy is also a very greedy man, and his greed is accentuated by his baseball skills. For example, Roy’s contract entitled him to make three thousand dollars for the season. Within a few weeks, he decided that this was not enough, so he spoke with the team owner about a raise. In the novel, it says that: “He figured for himself a flat forty-five thousand dollars for the rest of the season” (Malamud, 89). Forty-five thousand dollars is more than most baseball players made in an entire season, and he was asking for this astronomical amount for only half of a season. Each of these traits can be considered one of Roy’s tragic flaws. His greed and his self-confidence both contribute to his downfall at the end of the novel, in which he is humiliated due to his acceptance of a bribe to throw an important game and lose the pennant. In the New York Times, an article written by Harry Sylvester stated: “Roy Hobbs almost achieved greatness, but was distracted or betrayed by people, objects, or events equated with elements in our environment” (Sylvester, www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/home/baseball-natural.html). Sylvester is saying that Hobbs has the potential to be a

As with playing the “What If” game (asking “what if” incessantly to explore each aspect of a situation), so did a chain of events occur that caused this relationship to form.

Biodiversity is life’s variety. It is the varying genetics that each species carries that makes it different and “unique”. Biodiversity is important, not only in evolution, but in survival; when sometimes those terms can mean the very same thing. Interestingly, biodiversity can mean a variance in the life itself – or within the genetics of a species. In keeping breeding habits within the same lineage, some animals risk lower biodiversity and sometimes even deformities and disease, as they are able to more easily pass on unfavorable hereditary traits. In increasing the overall biodiversity, the only risk is a

The doctor-patient relationship always has been and will remain an essential basis of care, in which high quality information is gathered and procedures are made as well as provided. This relationship is a critical foundation to medical ethics that all doctors should attempt to follow and live by. Patients must also have confidence in their physicians to trust the solutions and work around created to counter act certain illnesses and disease. Doctor-patient relationships can directly be observed in both the stories and poems of Dr. William Carlos Williams as well as in the clinical tales of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Both of these doctors have very similar and diverse relationships with multiple patients

1. The nation is at war, and your number in the recently reinstated military draft has just come up. The problem is that, after serious reflection, you have concluded that the war is unjust. What advice might Socrates give you? Would you agree? What might you decide to do? Read the Introduction, Chapter 2 Crito and the Conclusion Chapter 40 Phaedo by Plato.

Matt Lamkin’s “A Ban On Brain-Boosting Drugs is Not the Answer” first appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011. In this essay Lamkin aims to convince his reader not to deter improper conduct with threats, but to encourage students to engage in the practice of education. Lamkin tells us “If colleges believe that enhancing cognition with drugs deprives students of the true value of education, they must encourage students to adapt that value as their own” (642). Appeal to logic, consistency, and compare/contrast are techniques Lamkin skillfully uses to create a strong effective essay.

Beginning in the late 19th century, two separate movements spread across America know as realism and naturalism. While the two were very similar in their beliefs and ideals there were still many apparent distinctions to differentiate the two. Realism and naturalism showed themselves in many aspects of life, from art and sciences to new math techniques and even religion. However, above all else these movements may have been most evident in the literature of this time. Reading through American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it becomes perceptible which short stories portray realism and which represent nationalism.

All of us have formed habits in our daily life. Even though some of these habits only exist in our subconscious and we cannot actually make sure whether they are real or only the conjectures. But it is undoubted that all of our behaviors are influenced by our desires on specific objectives. In the book, the power of habit, Charles Duhigg explained the definition of a habit as an effort-saving instinct. “When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making” (20). To support his opinions on habits, he introduced the three-step model of a habit loop, the theory of golden rule of habit, and the role of a craving brain and belief in the process of a habit changing. Through learning

    Challenging the strict deterministic confines of literary naturalism, which hold that "the human being is merely one phenomenon in a universe of material phenomena" (Gerard 418), Edith Wharton creates in The House of Mirth a novel which irrefutably presents the human creature as being subject to a naturalistic fate but which conveys a looming sense of hope that one may triumph over environment and circumstance if one possesses a certain strength of will or a simple faith in human possibility.

In “One Last Time,” Gary Soto talks about how he grew up in an immigrant family, and to make money had to work the fields. He talks about how the menial jobs made him feel and what he thought of them. I may not be able to relate to the immigrant laborer part of the story. I understand what it’s like to come from very little but still think that some things are not worth doing just to get something if it will make you feel like less than you are. Soto goes into great detail about his time picking grapes and cotton, but he doesn’t really go into as much detail about why he feels the way he does. I feel that even though he talks about being a laborer and how he felt, it can be understood by many different types of people. I think that it is a