by Jim Ziolkowski with James S. Hirsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2013
A motivational tale of the changes people can make in the lives of others, given determination and a strong faith in right...
One man's mission to help change the world one school at a time.
When Ziolkowski first started his nonprofit organization, buildOn, he did so with a hope and a prayer—the hope that he and his group could build three schools in three different, desolate locations and a prayer to God that he was making the right decision on turning his back on a successful career in corporate finance to pursue his dream. He used his strong faith to aid him when times got rough, and from those humble beginnings, Ziolkowski's group has built more than 500 schools worldwide and assisted countless American schools with service-oriented programs. In straightforward, almost humble prose, the author, with the assistance of Hirsch (Willie Mays, 2010, etc.), recounts the fears and triumphs of the past two decades—for example, the incredible poverty and disease he encountered in places like Africa, Nicaragua and Brazil. What surprised him most was the incredible faith the local villagers placed in him and in buildOn and the extremes people went to in order to build a local school, with women lugging 100-pound sacks of cement on their backs up steep mountain trails. The women's desire for education and a better way of life for their children and generations to come motivated them to endure hardships beyond measure. As one African mother stated, "If you educate a boy, you educate one person. If you educate a girl, you educate an entire community.” Ziolkowski's Christian faith is a strong thread throughout the book, as he questions the motives behind his actions and always comes back full circle to the sanctity of his ambitions.
A motivational tale of the changes people can make in the lives of others, given determination and a strong faith in right and wrong.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8355-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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