Looking For Work and What we Really Miss About The 1950's

In these two essays the authors look at the family life around the 1950's. In Looking For Work, the author tries to have his family dress and look like those he sees on tv. He also explains what his childhood was like even though his family wasn't like those families on tv. Near the end his brother tells him that he can't hang with him and so he goes and starts looking for work in a happy atitude.
In What We Really Miss About the 1950's the Author explains why a lot of people feel nostalgia about the 1950's using facts, comparing other eras, looking at the political scene, economic scene, and media scene.

In Looking For Work I feel the author did a great job of using description to paint the scene of his childhood which really draws in the reader into the setting he was in. You could get the general mood of how he felt all the time and that in spite of his wanting his family to change and be different he really did enjoy his life as a child. The intro was great as it just hooked you from the start by putting you into the middle of the story like it was the pensive out of Harry Potter and you just jumped into someones thoughts.
In What we Really Miss About the 1950's the author didn't have to good of a hooking intro which made it really hard to focus on what she was writting about and what was so important about it. She used a lot of statistics throughout her peice and I feel almost to many numbers and facts were thrown at me to keep anything strait between the different decades that were talked about. Although all the facts did help to point to the fact that there were things that were better in the 1950's than in any other time, but also showed that it didn't just stop with the 50's but that it continued on into the 60's but people associate it with the 50's because that is when the good stuff started to happen.

From these two essays you could say that these authors are showing why people long for the "Good ole' days." It seems that people as they grow up and older most of them always look back to their child hood and how simple it was and enjoyable it was. This could be what these authors are driving at.

These two peices do challenge the ideals of the 1950's of what a family should have been like, mostly they understand that families weren't at all like the tv shows of the time which is what a lot of people associate with the 50's. A lot of the younger generation which have no clue about what went on the 50's only have those old tv shows as their example of it and the essays shed the light that that isn't what it was like. People even today want to structure their families after the perfect families of the tv 50's and wish that their families were perfect, although it is a long way off of that.

I think it is interesting how in Looking For Work, the author could maintain a happy go lucky attitude even though things weren't going the way he would have liked them to go, whereas today if things aren't right then we get mad, even, or revenge, for the most part. The two essays showed how in the 50's the neighborhoods were more of a community and they enjoyed one another where as today we would just rather have people stick to their own business and not have them bother us.