An edifying and adrenaline-charged tale of how immigrant soccer players were able to translate “tight-knit family and...
United by a common dream, high school soccer players overcome racism in a town in Maine.
Lewiston was once a nearly all-white mill town on the verge of economic collapse. Then hundreds of Somali refugees poured into the city, creating new growth in the community. Despite racial tensions, the Somalians forged ahead, with their youth leading the way on and off the soccer field. With the help of the high school soccer coach and his assistants, the team led the school to its first state championship in 2015. Bass (History/Coll. of New Rochelle) delivers a lively, informative, and entertaining account of the years leading up to the game, and she includes in-depth coverage of the players and their respective refugee stories, the coach and his assistants, and the overall state of racism in Maine and across the U.S. Minute-by-minute descriptions of the games build tension as the team steadily progresses from a devastating defeat to their ultimate victory. The back stories of the Somalian refugees are often heart-rending and brutal, but they also demonstrate an awe-inspiring resilience. The concern of the people of Lewiston who helped integrate the refugees into the community offers hope and guidance to those who also face a steady influx of immigrants. This is a multitiered underdog story that skillfully blends elements of human compassion, passion for a sport, determination, and endurance with overtones of societal pressure and racism. It's an exhilarating narrative that shows how perseverance and the ability to disregard the narrow-mindedness of xenophobia can lead to victory. “The team’s success embodies a negotiation between an immigrant community and its chosen home,” writes the author, “an often difficult conversation about language, religion, culture, education, and family.”
An edifying and adrenaline-charged tale of how immigrant soccer players were able to translate “tight-knit family and community connection to success on the field.”Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39654-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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