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THE RACE TO BE MYSELF

YOUNG READERS EDITION

Informative and inspiring.

The life story of a two-time Olympic gold medalist runner from South Africa who’s faced scrutiny and prejudice.

Semenya pulls no punches in the prologue to the young readers’ adaptation of her memoir. “I have what is called a difference of sex development,” she explains. “To put it simply, on the outside I am female and I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” These details become relevant as Semenya describes, in painful detail, her experience with medicalized discrimination as she underwent invasive exams, hormone replacement therapy (with terrible side effects), and legal battles to be allowed to race in the 2012 Olympics. The beginning of the narrative struggles with cohesion, but Semenya tells her story in an intimate, loose, conversational tone that will make readers feel close to her. Her story is frustrating and tragic, providing an early example of attitudes displayed in the anti-trans movement currently spanning the globe. Semenya, who writes that her Pedi community always “accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider,” asserts her own understanding of herself and her gender in ways that sometimes don’t align with Western medical or activist frameworks and language. While she was assigned female at birth and asserts that she’s a “proud Black woman…a daughter, a sister, a wife, and…a mother,” this story will resonate with anyone who’s felt like their gender and their body are right for them but wrong for the world.

Informative and inspiring. (Memoir. 11-16)

Pub Date: May 28, 2024

ISBN: 9781324030973

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Norton Young Readers

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

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SHIPWRECKED!

THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF A JAPANESE BOY

The life of Manjiro Nakahama, also known as John Mung, makes an amazing story: shipwrecked as a young fisherman for months on a remote island, rescued by an American whaler, he became the first Japanese resident of the US. Then, after further adventures at sea and in the California gold fields, he returned to Japan where his first-hand knowledge of America and its people earned him a central role in the modernization of his country after its centuries of peaceful isolation had ended. Expanding a passage from her Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun (1985, Newbery Honor), Blumberg not only delivers an absorbing tale of severe hardships and startling accomplishments, but also takes side excursions to give readers vivid pictures of life in mid-19th-century Japan, aboard a whaler, and amidst the California Gold Rush. The illustrations, a generous mix of contemporary photos and prints with Manjiro’s own simple, expressive drawings interspersed, are at least as revealing. Seeing a photo of Commodore Perry side by side with a Japanese artist’s painted portrait, or strange renditions of a New England town and a steam train, based solely on Manjiro’s verbal descriptions, not only captures the unique flavor of Japanese art, but points up just how high were the self-imposed barriers that separated Japan from the rest of the world. Once again, Blumberg shows her ability to combine high adventure with vivid historical detail to open a window onto the past. (source note) (Biography. 10-13)

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001

ISBN: 0-688-17484-1

Page Count: 80

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000

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THE WORLD AT HER FINGERTIPS

THE STORY OF HELEN KELLER

Born in 1880 in a tiny backwater in Alabama, Helen Keller lived a life familiar to many from the play and movie The Miracle Worker, as well as countless biographies. There’s no denying the drama in the story of the deaf and blind child for whom the world of language became possible through a dedicated and fanatically stubborn teacher, Annie Sullivan. But Helen’s life after that is even more remarkable: she went to high school and then to Radcliffe; she was a radical political thinker and a member of the Wobblies; she supported herself by lecture tours and vaudeville excursions as well as through the kindness of many. Dash (The Longitude Prize, p. 1483) does a clear-sighted and absorbing job of examining Annie’s prickly personality and the tender family that she, Helen, and Annie’s husband John Macy formed. She touches on the family pressures that conspired to keep Helen from her own pursuit of love and marriage; she makes vivid not only Helen’s brilliant and vibrant intelligence and personality, but the support of many people who loved her, cared for her, and served her. She also does not shrink from the describing the social and class divisions that kept some from crediting Annie Sullivan and others intent on making Helen into a puppet and no more. Riveting reading for students in need of inspiration, or who’re overcoming disability or studying changing expectations for women. (Biography. 10-14)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-590-90715-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Scholastic

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000

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