Wednesday, February 18, 2009

"The Saterday Evening Post" by Russel Baker

I have just recently read an essay called “The Saturday Evening Post” by Russell Baker. I feel like the author was trying to tell his audience what his early life was like and how he discovered that he actually wanted to be a writer. Hey conveyed that his childhood was a rough one and that he had a lot of pressure to be great at something and become rich for his mother. He also wanted to convey that it was hard to grow up in the 1920’s, work was scarce, life was hard, families were poor, it was a lot and he wanted the reader to know that.
The style of this author is a sense of the fact that he should have a dry humor about him, he writes in a way that drips sarcasm, but still conveys a sense of intelligence. I liked the fact that he mentioned that his mother would use many maxims in her daily life and her talks with her son. For example, the author wrote; “By the time I was ten I had learned all my mother’s maxims by heart. Asking to stay up past normal bedtime, I knew that a refusal would be explained with, ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’”
I liked that the writer seemed intelligent, and I liked learning about what the beginning of his journey into his writing career was like. I didn’t like his mother just because she tried to conform him to something successful that she wanted, not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, that is why I was glad that in the end he found something he liked and his mother thought was good enough for him to make into a career.
This essay seemed a lot like the life I feel like I live, the one where I have to be successful or I will fall, but I must also love what I am doing. That sometimes is hard because I don’t really know what I love more than anything that could be made into a successful career. I feel a lot of the time that I must be unique by doing something a lot of other people do as well, which fells almost impossible at times. Though my exact career is not chosen I do know what “kind” of stuff I like and wish to pursue a career in.

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