by Nadia Lopez with Rebecca Paley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 2016
The narrative demonstrates a clear progression from a woman’s dream for a model school to that reality, which has made a...
The methods one principal used to create a safe learning environment for her students.
Opening a new school in Brownsville, “one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of New York City,” may seem like a crazy idea to many, but Lopez knew that she could make a difference in the futures of the children who would attend her school. This book shows how she turned her dream into reality. The author readily admits the countless obstacles she faced during the first year. “Kids screamed at the top of their lungs or walked out of rooms in the middle of class; it felt like an asylum rather than a school,” she writes. “Every single day there was a fight….When they set fire to the bathroom, by burning toilet paper, I didn’t think it could get any more insane.” Despite the many challenges, however, Lopez continued to fight for her school and eventually received nationwide recognition for her efforts. Throughout the book, she walks readers through the steps she took, each fraught with stress and anxiety. She believed in each scholar and insisted each teacher develop a strong relationship with every child; she enforced discipline, but her office door was always open to anyone who needed to talk; she demanded respect among all members of the school, children and adults; and she made sure she and her peers understood the scholars’ backgrounds and the dangers they faced the minute they stepped back onto the street outside the school. The personal stories of many of the students show that it wasn’t always sunshine and roses, as Lopez describes some of the bleakest moments at the school. For anyone in education who thinks a student is beyond learning, Lopez’s story will prove them wrong.
The narrative demonstrates a clear progression from a woman’s dream for a model school to that reality, which has made a huge impact in its neighborhood and across the country.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98025-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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