by Jason McElwain with Daniel Paisner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2008
For a more in-depth, gripping story of living with autism, check out John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye: My Life with...
Slight but inspiring book about four minutes and 19 seconds in basketball that touched millions of lives.
In the weeks following February 15, 2006, you couldn’t turn on SportsCenter or a random TV-news magazine without seeing video clips of blonde, slender, smiling high-schooler Jason “J-Mac” McElwain sinking one bucket after another. Basketball-obsessed teenager McElwain, the autistic manager of the Greece Athena Trojans, got his chance to play on the final day of his team’s season, with less than five minutes left in the game. Coach Jim Johnson led Jason to the scorer’s table, and the sympathetic crowd went nuts. Most everybody in the stands would have been happy if McElwain made even a free throw, but he had bigger goals. He kept hurling up a shot virtually every time he got the ball. And they kept going in—to the tune of 20 points, 18 of which came from three-pointers. Next thing you know, the affable, unflappable Jason is doing the talk-show circuit, charming everyone within viewing range. As an inspirational and family-aid tool, his memoir is pitch-perfect. McElwain lucidly explains how he survived and ultimately thrived with autism, and the interjections by friends and family are properly gushing and moving. As a piece of literature, it suffers from the problem inherent in books written by a subject who hasn’t lived a long or rich life: lots of filler.
For a more in-depth, gripping story of living with autism, check out John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s (2007). But if you need a dose of positivity with a sprinkle of Rocky, you could do a lot worse than J-Mac.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-451-22301-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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