A text full of hope, self-examination, and a profound belief in the young people whom the author coaches and teaches.
A high school basketball coach and teacher debuts with a volume about a successful basketball season—and a host of educational, social, and personal issues.
Skelton, once an all-state player in his native New Hampshire, had drifted away from basketball, but then he returned to the sport when he began teaching history and English at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, a school whose praises he sings throughout (“a touchstone for small school success in the city”). Within a few years, he had built a team that won two city championships and one state crown. As the author guides us through a recent successful season, he steps away occasionally to talk about his family, educational issues—he is opposed to high-stakes standardized testing and the narrow curriculum that exists because of it, and he’s deeply worried about what he sees as the deleterious effects of the charter-school movement on public education—his classes (he especially loves teaching Russian literature), and his valued colleagues at the school. Throughout, Skelton sprinkles literary allusions and quotations, including elements of Moby-Dick (probably the most frequent), Rabbit, Run, and Troilus and Cressida. The focus, of course, is on the author’s players, their practices and games, and relationships. He chronicles how he deals with injuries, players quitting the team, and with his own passion for the game and for winning, a passion that often manifests itself in shouting and punching his notebooks. His diction is not always fresh or surprising. “Life is not easy,” he writes; his wife is “my best friend.” Some readers may be surprised by how little Skelton discusses race given the school’s location in “one of the most segregated sections” of NYC. Although there is one moderately tense moment with local police officers, the author is more focused on the individual players and students than on their value as racial metaphors.
A text full of hope, self-examination, and a profound belief in the young people whom the author coaches and teaches.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54265-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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