Contents

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology - Samuel Cohen 2017


Contents

Preface for Instructors

Alternative Tables of Contents

By Rhetorical Mode

By Purpose

By Theme

By Clusters and Paired Readings

By Chronological Order

Introduction for Students: Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, To My One Love

“My glow was gone, my poetry forgotten. I was trying to remember what I had felt when I saw the photo of the dead person on the wall and realized it was Nnamdi.”

SHERMAN ALEXIE, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me

“I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.”

GLORIA ANZALDÚA, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”

BARBARA LAZEAR ASCHER, On Compassion

“Compassion is not a character trait like a sunny disposition. It must be learned, and it is learned by having adversity at our windows….”

JAMES BALDWIN, Notes of a Native Son

“… I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world.”

JAMES BOSWELL, On War

“I have often thought that if war should cease over all the face of the earth, for a thousand years, its reality would not be believed at such a distance of time…”

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., Why Don’t We Complain?

“I think the observable reluctance of the majority of Americans to assert themselves in minor matters is related to our increased sense of helplessness in an age of technology and centralized political and economic power.”

ALAN BURDICK, The Truth about Invasive Species

“Alien species do pose a threat. But their real crime isn’t against nature; it’s against us and our self-serving ideas of what nature is supposed to be.”

NICHOLAS CARR, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

TA-NEHISI COATES, The Paranoid Style of American Policing

“When policing is delegitimized, when it becomes an occupying force, the community suffers.”

JUDITH ORTIZ COFER, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María

“… You can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina … the Island travels with you.”

DANIEL DEFOE, The Education of Women

“The great distinguishing difference, which is seen in the world between men and women, is in their education….”

JOAN DIDION, On Keeping a Notebook

“We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Learning to Read and Write

“… I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.”

BRIAN DOYLE, Joyas Voladores

“Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”

BARBARA EHRENREICH, Serving in Florida

“You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the middle class. But no.”

LARS EIGHNER, On Dumpster Diving

“I am a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps — and only perhaps — as a slightly less wasteful consumer owing to what I have learned as a scavenger.”

STEPHANIE ERICSSON, The Ways We Lie

“… [I]t’s not easy to entirely eliminate lies from our lives. No matter how pious we may try to be, we will still embellish, hedge, and omit to lubricate the daily machinery of living.”

MALCOLM GLADWELL, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

“Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ, Lunch

“It was a boisterous time of day, with everyone talking across rooms, reaching for food, and laughing…. My grandmother went from one table to the other, making sure everyone was fed.”

LANGSTON HUGHES, Salvation

“ ’Langston, why don’t you come? Why don’t you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb of God! Why don’t you come?’ ”

ZORA NEALE HURSTON, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

“I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON, The Declaration of Independence

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

CAMDEN JOY, Surviving Sinatra

“There are moments in a crowd when America makes so much sense, when you want to scream BRING ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUNGRY, AND LET’S ALL DIG FRANK SINATRA. I mean to say, this was one such moment.”

JAMAICA KINCAID, The Ugly Tourist

“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: a tourist is an ugly human being.”

STEPHEN KING, Reading to Write

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

VERLYN KLINKENBORG, Our Vanishing Night

“Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony — the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night.”

AUDRE LORDE, The Fourth of July

“My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature.”

NANCY MAIRS, On Being a Cripple

“People — crippled or not — wince at the word ’cripple,’ as they do not at ’handicapped’ or ’disabled.’ Perhaps I want them to wince.”

MALCOLM X, Learning to Read

“… [T]he ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students.”

JOHN MCPHEE, The Search for Marvin Gardens

“The railroads, crucial to any player, were the making of Atlantic City. After the rails were down, houses and hotels burgeoned from Mediterranean and Baltic to New York and Kentucky. Properties — building lots — sold for as little as six dollars apiece and as much as a thousand dollars.”

LYDIA MILLET, Victor’s Hall

“The amateur is a form of American authenticity, and museums like this embody a deeply resonant utopianism that plays to our culture’s love of the homespun.”

BHARATI MUKHERJEE, Two Ways to Belong in America

“This is a tale of two sisters from Calcutta, Mira and Bharati, who have lived in the United States for some 35 years, but who find themselves on different sides in the current debate over the status of immigrants.”

GEORGE ORWELL, Shooting an Elephant

“It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act.”

PLATO, The Allegory of the Cave

“And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened….”

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood

“Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish intrinsically a private one, I easily noted the difference between classroom language and the language of home.”

MIKE ROSE, “I Just Wanna Be Average”

“Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water.”

OLIVER SACKS, My Periodic Table

“Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.”

DAVID SEDARIS, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform. That’s the way they do it here — it’s everybody into the language pool, sink or swim.”

BRENT STAPLES, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space

“Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness.”

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, Feet in Smoke

“I’ve tried many times over the years to describe for people the person who woke up from that electrified near-death, the one who remained with us for about a month before he went back to being the person we’d known and know now.”

JONATHAN SWIFT, A Modest Proposal

“… I propose to provide for [poor infants] in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.”

AMY TAN, Mother Tongue

“I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all — all the Englishes I grew up with.”

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Civil Disobedience

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

JAMES THURBER, The Subjunctive Mood

“Wives select the subjunctive usually because it is the best mood in which to spar for time, husbands because it lends itself most easily to ranting and posturing. As long as they both stay in it they are safe.”

MIYA TOKUMITSU, In the Name of Love

“Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.”

E. B. WHITE, Once More to the Lake

“Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end….”

COLSON WHITEHEAD, The Loser Edit

“… [T]he critical language used to carve up the phonies, saints and sad-sack wannabes of reality shows has migrated, and the loser edit has become a limber metaphor for exploring our own real-world failures.”

VIRGINIA WOOLF, Professions for Women

“I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

DAVE ZIRIN, Pre-Game

“More athletes are speaking out across the political spectrum as a series of revolutions, occupations, and protests has defined the global landscape. The real world is gaining on the sports world and the sports world is starting to look over its shoulder.”

Documentation Guide

Glossary of Writing Terms

Index of Authors and Titles