by Asher Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
In this briskly paced book, readers will recognize the courage and tenacity of everyday competitors and the power and...
Austin American-Statesman energy and environment reporter Price seeks to overcome his "genetic foibles" in pursuit of a singular and profound experience: dunking an NBA basketball.
Before he began his yearlong exploration of whether dunking was "literally and metaphorically” unattainable for those with his specific genetics or increasing age (34), he was humbled when tests performed by doctors at a fitness lab diagnosed him as being in “completely average” condition. Through his efforts to increase his body's upward kinetic force to enable him to dunk, Price examines the larger issue of whether humans can outwit their physical limits and asks if it is actually possible to "dream up a task” and force your body to follow. On his journey, the author consulted a variety of experts, including geneticists and other scientists (including a Cambridge professor who specializes in the nervous system of locusts), as well as brick-chopping karate black belts and children at basketball camps. By not dragging readers through the weeds of mathematical formulas—an appendix includes tips for “how to jump higher” and a microlesson in the physics of dunking—Price comes across as a nonintimidating science teacher with a dry, sometimes self-deprecating wit. In easy-to-understand language, he explains such concepts as neuromuscular composition and the biomechanics of propulsion in humans and animals. During the course of his pursuit, Price faced down numerous psychological and physical obstacles, as well as dramatic setbacks off the hardwood, but his optimism, perseverance, and development are at the heart of this good-natured chronicle of his efforts. “I was like a lot of people: athletic enough, with a thin desire to win, but never the best and never desperate to be the best,” he writes.
In this briskly paced book, readers will recognize the courage and tenacity of everyday competitors and the power and awe-inspiring achievements of elite athletes.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3803-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Asher Price
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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