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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO ACE CHEMISTRY IN ONE BIG FAT NOTEBOOK

From the Big Fat Notebooks series

A useful supplement for studying and test preparation.

This guide to high school chemistry is formatted as if it were a notebook containing notes written by the top student in class.

This resource is divided into twelve units of two to five sections each. The subsections cover basic topics like conducting experiments, lab safety, and states of matter as well as more advanced topics like quantum theory and laws of thermodynamics. The page design mimics handwritten text, with colored sidebars for important facts, highlighting and bold headers for important words, underlined lists, colored figures, and diagrams. Each unit ends with a quiz to test retention; answers are listed on the following page. While most of the explanations and definitions are clear enough to comprise a primary study source, a few of the definitions may require backup or secondary sources for thorough understanding. The spacious, easy-to-read layout makes this an efficient reference book: Finding specific topics is easy (made easier with a lengthy index), and reviewing the content feels like reading through class notes. While not sufficient in itself to substitute for a chemistry text, paired with a class and a conventional textbook, this guide should go far in helping students master high school level chemistry.

A useful supplement for studying and test preparation. (index) (Nonfiction. 14-18)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5235-0425-1

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Workman

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020

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THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE (ADAPTED FOR YOUNG ADULTS)

A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys.

The acclaimed author of Between the World and Me (2015) reflects on the family and community that shaped him in this adaptation of his 2008 adult memoir of the same name.

Growing up in Baltimore in the ’80s, Coates was a dreamer, all “cupcakes and comic books at the core.” He was also heavily influenced by “the New York noise” of mid-to-late-1980s hip-hop. Not surprisingly then, his prose takes on an infectious hip-hop poetic–meets–medieval folklore aesthetic, as in this description of his neighborhood’s crew: “Walbrook Junction ran everything, until they met North and Pulaski, who, craven and honorless, would punk you right in front of your girl.” But it is Coates’ father—a former Black Panther and Afrocentric publisher—who looms largest in his journey to manhood. In a community where their peers were fatherless, Coates and his six siblings viewed their father as flawed but with the “aura of a prophet.” He understood how Black boys could get caught in the “crosshairs of the world” and was determined to save his. Coates revisits his relationships with his father, his swaggering older brother, and his peers. The result will draw in young adult readers while retaining all of the heart of the original.

A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys. (maps, family tree) (Memoir. 14-18)

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-984894-03-8

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020

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ONE CUT

From the Simon True series

This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the...

Porinchak recounts how the legal system fails five teens who commit a serious crime.

The May 22, 1995, brawl in a white suburb of Los Angeles that resulted in the death of one teen and the injury of another is related matter-of-factly. The account of the police investigation, the judicial process, and the ultimate incarceration of the five boys is more passionately argued. Since the story focuses on the teens’ experiences following the brawl, minimal attention is given to Jimmy Farris, who died, although the testimony of Mike McLoren, who survived, is crucial. The book opens with a comprehensive dramatis personae that will help orient readers, and the text is liberally punctuated by quotes drawn from contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage as well as interviews with several of the key figures, including three of the accused. Porinchak argues that the proceedings were influenced by the high-profile 1994 trial and acquittal of the Menendez brothers, and unfounded accusations of gang involvement further clouded the matter. Despite the journalistic style, there is clear intent to elicit sympathy for the five boys involved, three of whom were sentenced to life without parole; of two, the text remarks that “they were numbers now, not humans.”

This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the crime. (Nonfiction. 14-18)

Pub Date: May 2, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4814-8132-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

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