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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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