An encouraging, frank, and informative overview of an often misunderstood career path.
A brief but thorough guide to those whose work is centered around play.
McCarty notes throughout that collaboration and communication are requisites for gaming careers and that overtime, unemployment, and gender discrimination are real risks, undercutting naïve stereotypes about solitary gamers and easy success. Creative aspirants might become generalist or specialist game artists, designers, or sound designers; programmers implement their vision, while pro gamers play in tournaments, and testers provide quality assurance. Each chapter opens with a sidebar giving useful stats: the number of existing jobs, typical pay, educational requirements, desirable personal qualities, work settings, and future employment prospects (with projections given through 2030). This data is fleshed out in the subsequent text. Readers follow a typical workday and working conditions, noting necessary skills including software proficiency, versatility, physical stamina, and mental resilience. Many specific examples and direct quotations make the job descriptions vivid and credible. Readers see and hear from women and people of color in the industry. Each chapter ends with annotated online resources that will allow interested readers to learn more. Realistic about the downsides accompanying the excitement and fun, this guide will help gamers think about their futures.
An encouraging, frank, and informative overview of an often misunderstood career path. (source notes, interview with a game designer, jobs in the gaming industry, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-67820-334-4
Page Count: 64
Publisher: ReferencePoint Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys.
The acclaimed author of Between the World and Me (2015) reflects on the family and community that shaped him in this adaptation of his 2008 adult memoir of the same name.
Growing up in Baltimore in the ’80s, Coates was a dreamer, all “cupcakes and comic books at the core.” He was also heavily influenced by “the New York noise” of mid-to-late-1980s hip-hop. Not surprisingly then, his prose takes on an infectious hip-hop poetic–meets–medieval folklore aesthetic, as in this description of his neighborhood’s crew: “Walbrook Junction ran everything, until they met North and Pulaski, who, craven and honorless, would punk you right in front of your girl.” But it is Coates’ father—a former Black Panther and Afrocentric publisher—who looms largest in his journey to manhood. In a community where their peers were fatherless, Coates and his six siblings viewed their father as flawed but with the “aura of a prophet.” He understood how Black boys could get caught in the “crosshairs of the world” and was determined to save his. Coates revisits his relationships with his father, his swaggering older brother, and his peers. The result will draw in young adult readers while retaining all of the heart of the original.
A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys. (maps, family tree) (Memoir. 14-18)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984894-03-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the...
Porinchak recounts how the legal system fails five teens who commit a serious crime.
The May 22, 1995, brawl in a white suburb of Los Angeles that resulted in the death of one teen and the injury of another is related matter-of-factly. The account of the police investigation, the judicial process, and the ultimate incarceration of the five boys is more passionately argued. Since the story focuses on the teens’ experiences following the brawl, minimal attention is given to Jimmy Farris, who died, although the testimony of Mike McLoren, who survived, is crucial. The book opens with a comprehensive dramatis personae that will help orient readers, and the text is liberally punctuated by quotes drawn from contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage as well as interviews with several of the key figures, including three of the accused. Porinchak argues that the proceedings were influenced by the high-profile 1994 trial and acquittal of the Menendez brothers, and unfounded accusations of gang involvement further clouded the matter. Despite the journalistic style, there is clear intent to elicit sympathy for the five boys involved, three of whom were sentenced to life without parole; of two, the text remarks that “they were numbers now, not humans.”
This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the crime. (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8132-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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