Hopeful, necessary, and true.
Young People’s Poet Laureate Engle (A Dog Named Haku, 2018, etc.) explores her tumultuous teenage and early adult years during the equally turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s.
This companion memoir to her award-winning Enchanted Air (2015) is written mostly in free verse with a spot of haiku and tanka. This is a lonely dreamer’s tale of a wayward yet resourceful young woman who zigzags to self-discovery amid the Vietnam War, Delano grape strike, moon landing, and other key historical events. Dreaming of travel to far-off lands but without the financial resources to do so, she embarks on a formal and informal educational journey that takes her from Los Angeles to Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, New York City, and back west again. With Spanish interspersed throughout, Engle speaks truthfully about the judgment she has faced from those who idealized Castro’s Cuba and the struggle to keep her Spanish alive after being cut off from her beloved mother’s homeland due to the Cold War. Employing variations in line breaks, word layout, and font size effectively, Engle’s pithy verses together read as a cohesive narrative that exudes honesty and bravery. While younger readers may not recognize some of the cultural references, themes of dating, drugs, and difficulty in college will resonate widely. Finding one’s path is not a linear process; thankfully Engle has the courage to offer herself as an example.
Hopeful, necessary, and true. (author’s note) (Poetry/memoir. 13-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2953-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
An uncommon (to say the least) coming-of-age, retraced with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement, and as...
Selecting high and low points from his experiences as a child, college student, teacher, refugee-camp worker, amateur boxer, Rhodes scholar, Navy SEAL and worker with disabled vets, Greitens both charts his philosophical evolution and challenges young readers to think about “a better way to walk in the world.”
Revising extracts from his memoir The Heart and the Fist (2011) and recasting them into a more chronological framework, the author tells a series of adventuresome tales. These are set in locales ranging from Duke University to Oxford, from a low-income boxing club to camps in Rwanda and Croatia, from a group home for street children in Bolivia to a barracks hit by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Prefacing each chapter with a provocative “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style scenario (“What do you do?”), he describes how similar situations ultimately led him to join the military, impelled by a belief that it’s better to help and protect others from danger than to provide aid after the fact. What sets his odyssey apart from Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin’s I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior (2012) and most other soldiers' stories is an unusual ability to spin yarns infused with not only humor and memorable lines (SEAL training’s notorious Hell Week was “the best time I never want to have again”), but cogent insights about character and making choices that don’t come across as heavy-handed advice.
An uncommon (to say the least) coming-of-age, retraced with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement, and as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. (endnotes, bibliography [not seen]) (Memoir. 14-18)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-86852-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is an important book recommended for every awakening teenager and guaranteed to capture and sustain profound attention from the first to the last page. No dull recorder of dates and events, this author imparts his own observations of Hitler as he saw him during his rise to power. Against the political climate of the 20s and 30s, each step toward Hitler's coup is included, the Beer Hall Putsch, his imprisonment and diabolical prediction in rabble-rousing organizing and final chancellorship. Details of his initial bloodless conquests, his treaties and then the events of World War II are presented. German defeat and Hitler's gradual disintegration, all the major events of his "bloody trall" emerge to create a full double portrait, of the paranoid Vienna tramp and of his monstrous deeds. Facts throughout are authenticated with quotations and eye witness reports. A knowledgeable dramatic account.
Pub Date: April 3, 1961
ISBN: 0394862708
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1961
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
