A unique slice of male high school life with strong crossover appeal for YA readers.
The ups and downs of male college-bound high school seniors during the 2016-2017 school year in Los Angeles.
In his first book, the much-praised The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (2014), Hobbs, a Yale graduate, focused on a black male Yale graduate who was murdered after returning to his hometown of Newark. In the author’s second work of nonfiction, the clear hero is Carlos, an undocumented Mexican immigrant also headed to Yale. Here, however, the music is polyphonic: Hobbs follows nine young men of varied races and ethnicities—four main and five lesser figures—cutting back and forth among their splintered accounts of college applications, taking AP classes, playing video games, pursuing after-school activities, and despairing over the 2016 election. Two key players attended the Ánimo Pat Brown charter school: the academic star Carlos, who applied to both Ivy League colleges and for protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; and Tio, a student leader rightly worried that his grades, though high, would not get him into top California colleges. The two other linchpins of the story attended Beverly Hills High School: Owen knew he was well off, but his mother was bedridden with a chronic illness; Sam’s mother, who was born in China, grilled him about school in ways he found “maddening.” At times, the author’s jump-cuts among the nine voices make it difficult to keep the teenagers straight, particularly the too-numerous secondary figures, and the story lacks the strong, cohesive narrative of his earlier work. Nonetheless, Hobbs offers a rare group portrait of well-rounded, hardworking male teenagers focused on college and securing a bright future. It’s sure to cheer school librarians looking for true stories of male high school students known for something besides their athletic talents or troubles with the law.
A unique slice of male high school life with strong crossover appeal for YA readers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1633-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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