Rachel Shilsky: The Man Who Changed My Life

I honestly don’t know where to begin, there's so much chaos inside of this book and in each specific chapter. But this book made me open up my eyes to so much more that is going on in the world than what is just shown on the news and in all of the current magazines. This memoir showed me something different and made me change my perspective on life now, knowing that there were people in poverty as well as getting discriminated against and it's horrible. And this book was very hard to read since it's tells you how his family is being impacted because of her race and who she married as well as her kids. And how wrong it was to marry a man of different color. They face a lot of struggle from different things in their life, abortion, sexual abused

They do not try and sugar coat it. Ruth was especially having a hard time with life as she has dealt with a lot of different things right now, like how both of her husband's dying, losing kids and she was basically ‘Dead’ with her Jewish relatives. But certain things in her life made her want to change to a whole new person," Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I'm concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live" (McBride, 1). This quote really made me think since this was in chapter 1 and Ruth could not mentally move on from her past without killing her past self, which is why she wanted to change her name. Changing her name was the only thing she could do at the time, which sadden me at the

But this is really a unique different book that deserves to be recognized for its nice transitions and James as well as Ruth's story which was very surprising. I started to sit their as I read and tried to place myself in their shoes as well as compare my life to theirs and realize sadly that their is some similarities. Like how they had a sister who ran away, that has happen to me with both of mine. But that was a while ago and things had gotten much much better. While I was pondering on what quote I can use to do and text to self then I came across an great one,“It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets”(Mcbride 3).Reading this made me realize that it shows the true feeling of the family living in an area where they weren’t fully accepted. Even though they were fine with the locals and seemed to fit in rather decently with everyone else, the fake attitudes of the people around them were evident and made them feel uncomfortable to live there. It just made me think of high school,the world or even an workplace but since there's people in your life that is going to have an negative