by Katie Burke ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
An engaging series of glimpses into the minds and priorities of kids in San Francisco.
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An unusual collection offers interviews with California schoolchildren.
In her unconventional nonfiction debut, Burke compiles interviews with a group of San Francisco school kids on a broad array of subjects. The author presents these interviews as fleshed-out profiles, providing readers with short biographical details about each of her interviewees, stitching their responses into a conversational narrative. Burke follows each piece with a selection of discussion questions clearly aimed at children roughly the same age as the kids described in the book. Readers meet youngsters like 9-year-old Silas, who likes living in San Francisco but thinks parts of it are a bit “sketchy.” He appreciates the fact that the city isn’t “cold” like Washington, D.C. (readers from the Midwest and New England will wince a bit), which prompts the discussion question: “Would you rather visit a hot or cold weather place, and why?” The author also presents 9-year-old Lilah, who lives in the Castro District and loves soccer (her favorite thing about the sport is the teamwork). This sparks the discussion question: “If you play soccer, or if you ever did play, do you think it would be more fun to run around or defend your team’s goal, and why?” And readers encounter 6-year-old Eliza, who likes San Francisco, particularly its birds—she loves to chirp to them. (“Do you talk to birds?” the discussion question goes. “And if so, do you tweet at them or say something else?”) These enjoyable profiles are uniformly charming and unguarded peeks into the worlds and minds of kids in one city, and the discussion questions are general enough to be very useful in leading to fun conversations with similarly aged children. But by restraining to such a marked degree from editorializing, Burke misses an opportunity to make the lively book even more captivating for her adult readers, many of whom will want more context about the kids’ lives and environments. Still, the direct voices of these children are quite intriguing in their own right.
An engaging series of glimpses into the minds and priorities of kids in San Francisco.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68463-016-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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