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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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