Humane and informative stories about refugees and their plights in America.
Personal stories of child refugees as they integrate into American society.
Focusing on one classroom in South High School in Denver, Colorado, Thorpe (Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War, 2014, etc.) dives deep into the lives of 22 students, all refugees, who were just some of the many who enrolled in South High School’s newcomer class, a basic English acquisition class taught by kindhearted Eddie Williams. The students came from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, running from civil war, extreme persecution, drought, famine, and a variety of other atrocities. As in her previous books, Thorpe writes with great compassion, and she demonstrates a profound understanding of how difficult it must have been for these children to leave everything they’d ever known and move to a foreign country where the language, customs, and culture were so vastly different. She shares Williams’ methodology, which allows these boys and girls to cast aside their fears and bond with one another and their teacher, all while gaining a basic understanding of the English language. Thorpe also includes information on the general refugee situation in the U.S., discussing the various needs that must be provided for these newcomers and their families, including adequate clothing, housing, and money for apartment rentals, as well as job training and integration into the work force. She is candid about the occasional difficulties using an interpreter to learn each student’s personal story and how some children refused to discuss aspects of their long journeys to the U.S., a decision she respected despite her innate curiosity. Interviewing these young adults enhanced Thorpe’s understanding of the world, and reading her story will entertain and enlighten readers, creating a wider, more sympathetic view of the world and its inhabitants—certainly something we need right now.
Humane and informative stories about refugees and their plights in America.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5909-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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