"The good old days"

In Gary Soto's , "Looking for work" he compares his life as a young Mexican-American to the lives that he watching on TV which he describes as the "perfect families". Throughout Soto's essay he is impressed and also jealous of the prominent white families lifestyle. Soto makes specific mention to his brother and sister that if they will change a couple of things in their lives like wearing there shoes to dinner they might be looked at differently by the other white family's. It is interesting to see how such a young boy noticed how his life was different in a vast number of ways, and on top of that he was determined to change the way he lived and was looked at. I look at this two different ways, i believe that Soto shows a great deal of ambition to change the lifestyle that finds faults in. On the same hand i don't believe that any young child should need to have those thoughts, or notice that they are treated differently then any other kid. life is too short.

Int the essay "What We Really Miss About the 1950s" Stephanie Coontz decides to take another avenue in her writing. The essay starts out with a optimistic point of view about the 1950s. Coontz uses numbers and polls to show how many people prefer the 1950s to any other decade. What is interesting, and what we come to find out as the essay goes on is all of the comparisons between the 1950s and both the decades before and after. Coontz shows in detail how the 1950s may not have been as good as we thought. There are descriptions about how the family was raised, the divorce rate, the racial segregation and many more ways to show how some decades may be better then the 1950s. It seems that the 1950s may not be the good old days.

In both of these essays i was able to see the authors different points of views and their different writing styles. I naturally enjoyed Soto's a little more just because i could see himself in it. I could see the emotion that he was expressisng in his writing. In Coontz it was a more intense, She definitely used numbers and facts to show and describe her point of view. In the end both of the essays are informative in there own way.