Wes Moore

As Malcolm X once said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” This quote inspires a lot of people like me to try harder and to never stop at one point and give up. In the book The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, is about two people with the same name and born with the same path, going through challenging life obstacles. They both grew up fatherless and had a difficult childhood. One Wes Moore goes to college and becomes a successful author while the other other Wes Moore spends everyday for the rest of his life behind the bars. One wrong choice that you make can lead you down to a complete different path. Whenever I make a wrong choice, I would always regret it but sometimes wrong choices can show you a whole different perspective on things that you never thought of before. When both Wes Moore’s made the choice of selling drugs, they opened up a path, a path of getting into trouble. When Wes went to military school and learned about how much tribulation his family went through to get the money and the “sacrifice”, he realized that he was in a different environment than the one in Baltimore and that leadership was

This passage demonstrates the trouble that the author Wes Moore’s family and their friends go through to help send him to military school. Once Wes makes his first attempt at escaping from Valley Forge Military Academy he contacts his mother in an attempt to come home, she then divulged all the sacrifices she’d been making to send him there and steer his life in a better direction. From this, the author hopes to show that people who are supported throughout their lives have a greater chance of success in the future if they strive to reach goals that they set for themselves.

The book “The First Stone by Don Aker shows the changing of one's identity, the story of Reef and how he began to change his identity to become a better person in society. To begin, during the beginning of the book Reef starts out on the streets with his friends throwing rocks over a highway and scaring people, showing the reader that Reef at this point was someone who had a bad identity, didn’t really care about anything and was involved with bad people and activities. “He launched it over the busy highway below them” (Aker, 3). This is the first scene which helps the reader understand the type of character Reef originally was from the start of the book in order to show the comparison between his identity now and then his identity at the

The Other Wes Moore, a story of two boys with the same name living in West Baltimore, epitomizes the struggles of growing up in a tough low income area. From a young age, both Wes Moore, and the other Wes are raised by only their mother. Without a father, the life’s of each Wes’s mother becomes harder to manage. As the story carries on, Wes Moore moves to the South Bronx, where his mom is supported by his grandparents. Meanwhile, the other Wes remains in Baltimore for the remainder of his adolescence, watching his mother raise two boys without help. With the support of the author’s mother, Wes is pushed to succeed. At a young age he is sent off to attend military school. Meanwhile, the Other Wes finds himself getting involved in city drug trade. After high school, Wes enrolls in Johns Hopkins, and decides to travel abroad to South Africa. Not only does Wes gain exposure to a different part of the world, but he begins how similar his youth is to the life of his host family. He understand how the challenges facing the young men in both South Africa are nearly identical to the confrontations in West Baltimore and the

Wes Moore obtained multiple opportunities and worked tirelessly as to which contributed to his success. As what Malcolm Gladwell said in Outliers, “…they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard…” (19). There are many factors that impact a person’s life, yet as to what Gladwell believes where a person comes from and the amount of effort they put into something is a big part of succeeding. Wes Moore comes from a Jamaican background and when he and his family moved to the Bronx to live with his grandparents they had stricter rules. As stated in The Other Wes Moore, “They made it very clear Paulding Avenue was their home and their rules would

Which character in the book is your favorite, and why? Do you like characters who are sympathetic, or funny, or irreverent, or daring, or what?

Identify two of the essays we’ve read and discussed in class and explain one main thing you personally have in common with both of them.

The book gives specific detail about the circumstances in which they grew up and most importantly the decisions they made which led to one to leading a successful and free life and the other getting imprisoned for life. “I heard that my father had ‘passed on’ but had no idea where he'd gone” (Moore 15) Both grew up without a real male role model the authors father passed away when he was three and the other Wes's father chose not to be a part of his son's life and the only time he saw him was when he was six and his mother uttered “Wes, meet your father”(Moore

In the text “Broken Sentences,” Anna Deavere Smith is informing the reader of the stories of African American females who are incarcerated. Before Smith incorporates the women’s stories into the text, Smith goes into a backstory of her childhood. She speaks of the quality of her childhood and tells it as not only pure, but also as a revealing time period. Also, she speaks of her experience with the prison setting during her time in the Girl Scouts. Smith encompasses this short anecdote to not only set up an ambience of innocences, but to also foreshadow the testimonies to come. Furthermore, her method of writing in this text is very peculiar because she writes in incomplete or “broken sentences.” Throughout the text, Smith first gives a brief

A study of anecdotal evidence in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Fear of a Black President raised this question: is the use of arguments based on narrative a principle all writers can use? To improve my understanding, we looked for emotionally charged accounts in other assigned essays. Our results suggest that ____ works best when the author has established his or her ethos.

There are many people in this lifetime that have experienced discrimination, but today I decided to do my cultural interview on my boyfriend .Terrell Rainey is an African American male, born April 8, 1996 born in Decatur Georgia. I decided to interview on him because of his traumatizing childhood and his drive to overcome poverty .The interview consisted of a series of question that give a brief description of his background and perception on discrimination.

When reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, readers have the chance to view the world in Malcolm X’s perspective. Nowadays, it’s hard for people to be empathetic and understand other people’s views. In spite of his radical views, Malcolm X was still able to make himself relatable to his readers

In Gloria Watkin’s essay “Keeping Close to Home,” she reflects on her childhood and certain events that helped her to form her values. She recalls how her parents were one of the conflicting sources for shaping her values. For example, her parents give her books to her and supported her to be educated, but at the same time threaten to burn the books if she didn’t conform to their expectations of her. These reflecting events in her life made her more open-minded, respectful and value other people’s (different views on education) with different perspectives than education. She also learned from her father, who was a janitor, to value responsibility, thoughtful creativity, and hard work in her career as a writer. Finally, she recalls the events

“We’ve been in and out of positive territory a couple of times. The resilience’s and underlying momentum which is very much weighted on the buy side, is still there.” Throughout “Skittles for Trayvon: A Diminishing Suite In Verse” prominent author Lillian Bertram reflects on her perspective of a stable protagonist who perambulate on unfamiliar territory and, the leading consequence of death. Furthermore, Bertram establishes a persona while still placing emphasizes on perhaps being conscious of traveling to certain locations that suggest peculiar activity. In the wake of 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Benjamin Martin an African American male from Miami Gardens, Florida, was fatally murdered by neighborhood watchman volunteer George Michael Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.

Jaycee Dugard developed Stockholm syndrome. Jaycee wrote A Stolen Life based on her abduction story that began when she was eleven years old. She was held captive by Phillip Garrido and his wife for a traumatic eighteen years. The author’s motive to write A Stolen Life was to tell the world about Phillip’s actions because people should know that “he is most certainly responsible for stealing [Jaycee’s] life and the life [she] should have had with [her] family.” Her other motive to write this novel was to hopefully help somebody facing a difficult situation, especially those who are experiencing similar conditions. “My goal is to inspire people to speak out when they see that something is not quite right… that society changes in regards to how we treat someone who speaks out… With my writings, i hope to convey that you can endure tough situations and survive.”