A useful, readable approach to emotional intelligence in middle school.
Middle school friends see challenges from different perspectives in this resource book for teens and their caretakers.
This set of stories about several middle schoolers is conceived as “a tool for extensive discussion and thought…to support sound emotional learning at home and in the school.” Debut authors Gil-Kashiwabara, Laing, and Whitehouse are all psychologists and parents. This first book in a planned series focuses on the topics of bullying, social media, and honesty, with each chapter showing one kid’s perspective on the same events in a Rashomon-like style. Lafayette, Oregon’s North Morgan Middle School is home to seventh-graders Ben Campbell, Elías Muñoz, Ruby Monroe, and Penelope Whitaker. All are discovering that things are different in middle school: classes are more challenging, girls and boys hang out in cliques, and there’s even going to be a school dance. Ben gets hardworking Elías in trouble when he tries to copy his paper during a test; both boys are interested in Ruby, who discovers that Penelope, a popular, rich girl, has a mean side; and Penelope feels emotionally neglected by her father. Through honesty and reaching out to others, can Ben and Elías work on repairing their friendship, and can Ruby stand up to Penelope? Also, can Penelope admit that she’s been a bully? The book includes a companion guide with discussion questions, such as “How might Ben feel if he cheats?” The stories are written in an entertaining style that sympathetically addresses the thoughts and concerns of tweens; as a result, the tales are likely to succeed in sparking discussion. The characters ask themselves good questions and take time to think about answers, as when Ben realizes that he could have studied and that it wasn’t fair to cheat from his friend’s work. At times, the insights seem overly pat—the friends are remarkably quick to apologize and do better, for example. Also, the satisfying idea that most bullies “usually feel bad about themselves” has been contradicted by research elsewhere.
A useful, readable approach to emotional intelligence in middle school.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 99
Publisher: 3 Docs Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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