Well-handled by Davis: both heart gladdening and a challenge to start making sense of national immigration policy.
The story of four high schoolers from the wrong side of Phoenix who built a robot, entered it in a national competition that included such prestigious schools as MIT, and won.
Wired contributing editor and Epic magazine co-founder Davis explores the lives of four teenagers who could have easily fallen through the cracks but instead managed to channel their creative energy into a preposterous victory in a much-regarded robotic competition. The author lets the narrative grow organically: Nothing came easily; brainstorms didn’t save the day, but ingenuity did; there was anger, poverty and neglect, as well as the quandary of U.S. immigration policy, which, when this drama was taking place, 2004, was actively spawning xenophobic vigilante groups. “[S]tudents who were living in the country illegally could be sought out and detained....Even a seemingly harmless summer science competition bore life-altering risks,” writes Davis. There were also intergroup struggles that had to be overcome, as the author rightly points out that since these boys didn’t have deep pockets, they had to fall back on cooperation and ingenuity and the help, guidance and advice of two mentors. There were also a few angels in the picture, scientists who lent their valuable equipment and wisdom to the project; they didn’t give the boys the answers, but they helped point them in the right direction. Always hovering in the background of the story, and often intruding to the front of the action, is the Border Patrol, as well as “the tractor-beam pull of poverty and low expectations.” This is the everyday life of the illegal immigrant, but these immigrants are trying to win the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition. What motivated those involved and what impressed the judges was “that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice.”
Well-handled by Davis: both heart gladdening and a challenge to start making sense of national immigration policy.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0374183370
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
