A sequel to the lively recounting of life in an inner-city high school. The original, My Posse Don't Do Homework (1992) is soon to be a major Michekle Pfeiffer motion picture (called Dangerous Minds, it's also due for release in May). That book dealt with Johnson's experiences in a mini-academy set up within an East Palo Alto, Calif., high school. The English teacher's students were hand-picked as children who could make it, given enough attention and encouragement. This volume aims to put the emphasis on young women in the academy, neglected, Johnson feels, both in the first set of tales and in the classroom. She blames herself as well as the system, suggesting that girls are simply overwhelmed in the classroom by boys' noisy demands for attention. Girls whisper, Johnson theorizes simplistically, ``wring their hands in quiet desperation for a few weeks, then disappear.'' She introduces Simoa, who, terrorized into leaving home, finally returns to school pregnant; Tyeisha, whose mother abandoned her; Araceli, an artist, who challenges whether Johnson is truly color-blind. Unfortunately, she doesn't introduce their stories until halfway through the book, and then is often distracted by the noisy demands of the boys in her class. But whether it's about boys or girls, Johnson, an ex-Marine, is also a good storyteller, bringing drama and suspense to tales from her classroom, and total dedication to her students. She gives up her Sundays to take them to concerts, museums, and plays, hugs them, remembers their birthdays, cries for them, and at year's end sees most of them graduate, with many—girls included—headed for college. She too heads back to college—``to get a life,'' as her students have urged her, and a graduate degree in New Mexico. Every student, girl or boy, needs a teacher like this— caring and committed to helping them succeed in school and in life. (26 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13081-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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