Concluding with an annotated list of online resources and an index, this guide will be a boon for teen fitness buffs, if not...
Emphasizing a moderate approach to physical activity and balanced eating, this fitness guide for teen girls will be most useful to those who are already motivated.
Easy-to-read chapters offer advice on topics such as the benefits of healthy habits, fitting activity into the regular school and weekend day, and stress relief. Sample workouts offer simple, illustrated instructions that often require little or no equipment. Likewise, tips about healthy meals suggest foods that can be eaten raw or prepared with a minimum of fuss. Beyond the basics, there is concise information offered about subjects that include organic produce, eating disorders and High Intensity Interval Training. Yet the distinctly positive tone of the guide does not always work. The authors’ suggestion that a good attitude is one of the most important elements to fitness is likely true, but it’s hard to imagine many teens suddenly being won over by the insistence that gym class can be fun. It’s also unlikely they will thrill to some of the more didactic maxims offered here: “By being committed to making yourself the best you can be, you’ll find that getting fit is empowering—not dreadful.”
Concluding with an annotated list of online resources and an index, this guide will be a boon for teen fitness buffs, if not couch potatoes. (Nonfiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-936976-30-0
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Zest Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
A compelling true-crime story with a can’t-lose hook.
A young Canadian man spends 17 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
Long-haired, 19-year-old Kyle Unger had a reputation as a troublemaker. On the night of June 23, 1990, Kyle and his best friend made a last-minute decision to attend the Woodstick Music Festival in Manitoba. The teens had fun at the festival playing games, listening to bands, drinking; they didn’t head home till morning. Later that morning, the body of 16-year-old Brigitte Grenier was found in a creek, having been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted before being strangled. By the next week, Kyle was charged with her murder. Releasing him due to insufficient evidence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were still convinced Kyle was the killer. The RCMP laid a trap for Kyle called the “Mr. Big” operation, tricking him into confessing to a murder he did not commit. Convicted and sentenced to prison in 1992, Kyle spent 17 years fighting to prove his innocence until his acquittal in 2009. Brignall chronicles Kyle’s ordeal in a fast-paced, detailed narrative that relies heavily on court transcripts and features copious dialogue (not specifically sourced). Admirably, the coverage of the trial and Unger’s post-conviction legal proceedings are as absorbing as the accounts of the murder and investigation.
A compelling true-crime story with a can’t-lose hook. (photos, timeline, glossary, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 13 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4594-0863-0
Page Count: 136
Publisher: James Lorimer
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Painstaking, judicious, and by no means exculpatory but with hints of sympathy.
A portrait of two victims of the Great Depression whose taste for guns and fast cars led to short careers in crime but longer ones as legends.
Blumenthal (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2016, etc.) makes a determined effort to untangle a mare’s nest of conflicting eyewitness accounts, purple journalism, inaccurate police reports, and self-serving statements from relatives and cohorts of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Though the results sometimes read as dry recitations of names and indistinguishable small towns, she makes perceptive guesses about what drove them and why they have become iconic figures, along with retracing their early lives, two-year crime spree, and subsequent transformations into doomed pop-culture antiheroes. She does not romanticize the duo—giving many of their murder victims faces through individual profiles, for instance, and describing wounds in grisly detail—but does convincingly argue that their crimes and characters (particularly Bonnie’s) were occasionally exaggerated. Blumenthal also wrenchingly portrays the desperation that their displaced, impoverished families must have felt while pointedly showing how an overtaxed, brutal legal system can turn petty offenders into violent ones. A full version of Bonnie’s homespun ballad “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” and notes on the subsequent lives of significant relatives, accomplices, and lawmen join meaty lists of sources and interviews at the end.
Painstaking, judicious, and by no means exculpatory but with hints of sympathy. (photos, timeline, author’s note, source notes, bibliography, index) (Biography. 12-14)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-47122-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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