Reddit reviews Rereading America Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking & Writing 8th EDITION

Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing eighth edition, specifically chapters 2-5.

This is an anthology of articles, plus 1 Visual Portfolio per chapter, that relate to the theme of each chapter. The theme of each chapter is 1 of 6 cultural myths that are analyzed in this book.
>You may associate the word "myth" primarily with the myths of the ancient Greeks...These myths assured the Greeks of the nobility of their origins; they provided models for the roles that GReeks would play in their public and private lives; they justified inequities in Greek society; they helped the Greeks understand human life and destiny in terms that "made sense" within the framework of that culture.

Basically, cultural myths are things we take for granted as being true but may actually have no factual basis, just historical trends. The cultural myths that I read about (in my college English class) that really had an affect on me were "Learning Power: The Myth of Education and Empowerment" (Chapter 2), "Money and Success: The Myth of Individual Opportunity" (3), "Created Equal: The Myth of the Melting Pot" (4), and "True Women and Real Men: Myths of Gender" (5, this one was huge for me).

In chapter 5, there is an article by Michael Kimmel titled "Bros before Hos": The Guy Code, in which Kimmel describes the "guy code" and how it is damaging to the male population while women hardly face the social pressures that shape the male population.

Patrick J. Buchanan's "Deconstructing America", in chapter 4, examines how America has changed over the centuries and how this change could potentially dissolve the USA as we know it. Plus, in "Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?" written by Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, two pictures that were taken of survivors from Hurricane Katrina with two different captions are used as the basis of examining prejudices in America that we assume no longer exist, or at least choose to ignore.

In chapter 3, "Class in America - 2006" by Gregory Mantsios looks at 3 different people (I believe they are real people) from 3 different socioeconomic statuses and examines their lives. Mantsios uses these to emphasize the differences of people born into wealth (provided with SAT prep courses, tutors, expensive private school, vacation houses, high school graduation gift of a BMW, never working before graduating from college but even then starting at a high level in their father's business), middle class (public schooling, generic SAT prep help, employed during high school, full time job by 19, limited college education), and the lower class (poor public education, dropped out of community college due to financial issues, full time job by 17, living in ghetto).

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" by 'Professor X' is included in chapter 2 because he explains why not everyone should be going to college and how the massive number of people that shouldn't be in college are significantly decreasing the value of a college degree.

There are many more stories in each chapter and all I did was give a basic idea of what these stories are about. I highly recommend reading this book.