An inspiring if simplistic account of an African-American educator determined to make a difference in the lives of indifferent students. Hayre tells two stories here. The first—of her years as teacher, principal, administrator, college professor, and president of the Philadelphia Board of Education—is too sketchy to be of much value. But the unfolding story of the ``Tell Them We Are Rising'' program deserves a wide readership. At age 80, in June 1988, Hayre met with 116 Philadelphia sixth-graders and promised them that she would pay their college tuition if they graduated from high school. During the next six years, 22 became unwed mothers, 5 had run-ins with the criminal-justice system, and 16 dropped out. None of this is surprising, since, she notes, ``poverty, violence, and abuse informed the geography'' of a substantial percentage of the Risers, who live in ``the grip of a culture that ranks instant gratification above delayed rewards.'' What is impressive, though, is how the intervention of one remarkable person, along with mentors and parents, made a difference in the lives of so many. Khalil, for example, born heroin-addicted, abandoned by both parents, and left back in school twice, began getting As and Bs, and was accepted at Morehouse College. Hayre learns many valuable lessons from her Risers. They include the importance of finding alternative methods for educating at-risk youth; the value of establishing one-to-one relationships with caring, responsible adults; the necessity for parental involvement; and not least, the need for such inventive programs as ``Tell Them We Are Rising.'' (Coauthor Moore is on the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer.) The author can be a little too harsh on teachers, as when she implies that they need to be held more accountable for the anger and indifference felt by so many black males. But here she offers a clear plan, hope, and a challenge to inner-city youth and their educators. (20 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-12679-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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