An impassioned, well-researched history of a groundbreaking California public school.
A pair of sociologists explore the unheralded multicultural legacy of a 1960s and ’70s-era California High School.
Opened from 1956 to 1981, California’s Sunnyvale High School “was built for the baby boom,” write authors Hansen and Monroe. Despite the city of Sunnyvale’s relative affluence, with ties to the defense industry and nascent Silicon Valley, SHS was seen by many in the community as “poor and rowdy.” Yet, to its multicultural attendees, which included white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American students, it “provided a refuge” that was a half-century ahead of its time. The school offered groundbreaking academic instruction for the 1970s, including a Black history class taught by a beloved and dynamic teacher, as well as a “robust program” in the creative and performing arts. It offered vocational education, such as one of Silicon Valley’s first electronics classes, which “dignified manual labor” and prepared students for career success. More than just its innovative curriculum, SHS’s visionary leadership and staff prioritized student leadership, providing ample opportunities for student-driven decision-making that fostered individual empowerment and community building. In an era often defined by racial tension, especially in public schools, SHS’s diverse student and faculty body were remarkably unified. A graduate of Sunnyvale High, author Hansen credits the school with fostering her intellectual curiosity; she became a professor of sociology at Brandeis University and the author of multiple academic books. In this impassioned volume, she combines her scholarly background with her personal connections to the school. Based largely on interviews of more than 50 SHS graduates and teachers, in addition to archival material, the book stitches together a layered, rich history of the successful multicultural high school. A recent Ph.D. graduate from Brandeis, co-author Monroe is a former middle-school history teacher who taught in Chicago and Gary, Indiana, and helps provide commentary about how Sunnyvale High’s “cutting edge” approach to multicultural education and student empowerment can inform 21st-century schools today.
An impassioned, well-researched history of a groundbreaking California public school.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781666959680
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Lexington Books
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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