Will make readers feel as if they’re sitting beside a relative, listening to stories and shared knowledge.
This memoir by award-winning author Chuculate (Muscogee Creek) is a testament to the importance of support from family and friends in shaping identity.
This work is largely centered on Muskogee, Oklahoma, during the 1970s in what was a racially mixed community. Chuculate shares episodes from his daily life that readers can reflect on and interpret to draw their own life lessons. These seemingly random memories collectively tell his story of growing up Native in an inclusive environment with white, Black, Native, and Latine friends; his best friend, Lonnie, was Black, and the multiracial environment felt completely ordinary. Growing up, Chuculate spent a great deal of time with his maternal grandparents, Granny and Homer; following his parents’ divorce, he barely saw his father. But he was close to his mom and stepdad, Roman (Chickasaw), and his family’s guidance provided Chuculate with a loving environment that nurtured him. Hearing Creek spoken by relatives and in church, he was fascinated and wrote down the words he learned. In high school, Chuculate began covering sports for the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, something that sparked his passion for writing and led to his work-study job writing about college athletics. The conversational style and family photographs throughout help bring this intimate, anecdotal memoir to life.
Will make readers feel as if they’re sitting beside a relative, listening to stories and shared knowledge. (map, author’s note, Q&A with the author) (Nonfiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781338802085
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic Focus
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A perceptive, loving tribute.
A uniquely personal portrait of the United States’ first woman in space, illustrated with sheaves of public and private photos.
As her longtime companion, as well as co-author (of Exploring Our Solar System, 2003, etc.) and business partner, O’Shaughnessy is in an unparalleled position to illuminate Ride’s inner life as much as her well-known outer one. She does so here in a frank, engagingly detailed account that tenders as much about her subject’s significant friendships and loves as it does about her outstanding academic, athletic, astronautical, and post-NASA achievements. All of these are also traced in the illustrations, which begin with baby and toddler pictures, close with images of post-mortem tributes (Ride died in 2012, of pancreatic cancer), and in between mix family snapshots and posed portraits with report cards, yearbook photos, news clippings, mementos, and letters. Sue Macy’s excellent Sally Ride: Life on a Mission (2014) covers much of the same territory (and broke the news to younger readers that Ride was gay), but both the visual material and the author’s personal memories here add significant insights and angles of view to her subject. They describe the growth and complex character of a smart but unmotivated young “underachiever” who became anything but and stands as an exemplar for budding scientists of any sex.
A perceptive, loving tribute. (timeline, index) (Biography. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59643-994-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Give this a pass: much clearer pictures of what DNA does and the strong personalities who were involved in winkling out its...
The story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, in graphic format.
Failing to take advantage of either the format or the historic search’s drama, this rendition presents a portentous account heavy on explication and melodramatic rhetoric and featuring a cast of grimacing or pinched-looking figures spouting wooden dialogue. Watson: “So if we combine our research with Rosalind’s data and…” Crick: “And Linus’s approach of building models. We might be able to figure this out.” Helfand diffuses the focus by paying nearly as much attention to the childhoods and early careers of Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin as he does to Watson and Crick but downplays the rivalries that drove the race. Also, for all the technical detail he injects (“the phosphates would have to be on the outside”) and further explanations in the back, readers will be left in the dark about the role of genes, how DNA actually works, or even the significance of its double helix structure. A closing note about the contributions of Indian-born Nobelist Har Gobind Khorana adds a note of diversity to the all-white cast.
Give this a pass: much clearer pictures of what DNA does and the strong personalities who were involved in winkling out its secrets are available. (Graphic nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-93-81182-21-5
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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