Well-handled by Davis: both heart gladdening and a challenge to start making sense of national immigration policy.
The story of four high schoolers from the wrong side of Phoenix who built a robot, entered it in a national competition that included such prestigious schools as MIT, and won.
Wired contributing editor and Epic magazine co-founder Davis explores the lives of four teenagers who could have easily fallen through the cracks but instead managed to channel their creative energy into a preposterous victory in a much-regarded robotic competition. The author lets the narrative grow organically: Nothing came easily; brainstorms didn’t save the day, but ingenuity did; there was anger, poverty and neglect, as well as the quandary of U.S. immigration policy, which, when this drama was taking place, 2004, was actively spawning xenophobic vigilante groups. “[S]tudents who were living in the country illegally could be sought out and detained....Even a seemingly harmless summer science competition bore life-altering risks,” writes Davis. There were also intergroup struggles that had to be overcome, as the author rightly points out that since these boys didn’t have deep pockets, they had to fall back on cooperation and ingenuity and the help, guidance and advice of two mentors. There were also a few angels in the picture, scientists who lent their valuable equipment and wisdom to the project; they didn’t give the boys the answers, but they helped point them in the right direction. Always hovering in the background of the story, and often intruding to the front of the action, is the Border Patrol, as well as “the tractor-beam pull of poverty and low expectations.” This is the everyday life of the illegal immigrant, but these immigrants are trying to win the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition. What motivated those involved and what impressed the judges was “that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice.”
Well-handled by Davis: both heart gladdening and a challenge to start making sense of national immigration policy.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0374183370
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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