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Friday, 1 June 2018

Yahoo News

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Michael Moore Teases ‘Secret Project’ With Clip of Donald Trump and Roseanne BarrOscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has teased a “secret project” that he said he’d been working on for several months, releasing a two decade-old clip of a TV appearance with Donald Trump and Roseanne Barr. “I know Roseanne. Trump praised “Roger & Me,” Moore’s award-winning 1989 film about his pursuit of GM CEO Roger Smith to answer for the automaker’s downsizing efforts and its effects on Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan.




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Yahoo News

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Julia Roberts To Present George Clooney With AFI Life Achievement AwardJulia Roberts, who has starred alongside George Clooney in big movies and starred for him as a director and producer, will present Clooney with the AFI Life Achievement Award when it is bestowed June 7 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Clooney was selected in October as the recipient of the 46th annual AFI Life Achievement Award, with the two-time Oscar winner one of only two people (along with Walt Disney) to be nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories…




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Reviews of the 2018 Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award Winner and Honor Books

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Nonfiction Winner

Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide
by Isabel Quintero; illus. by Zeke Peña
Middle School, High School     Getty     95 pp.
3/18     978-1-94744-000-5     $19.95

[review to come]

 

 

 

Honor Books

The 57 Bus
by Dashka Slater
High School    Farrar    306 pp.
10/17    978-0-374-30323-5    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-0-374-30325-9    $9.99

It was late afternoon on Monday, November 4, 2013. Sasha was napping on the 57 bus in Oakland, California, when Richard, egged on by friends, set their gauzy skirt on fire. (Sasha is genderqueer and prefers the pronoun they.) Sasha survived, but sustained third-degree burns on their calves and thighs. The incident was captured on video cameras installed in the bus, and the next day Richard was arrested for a hate crime and processed in the justice system. From the start, the deck was stacked against Richard, an African American teenager with a criminal history, who had now committed a horrific crime that grabbed media attention, caused national outrage, and fomented local protests. Slater goes beyond the headlines to tell the very human stories behind these individuals and their families (although it’s clear she did not have as much personal access to Richard as she did to Sasha). It’s a powerful story of class and race (Sasha is white), gender and identity, justice and mercy, love and hate. Using interviews, court documents, and news accounts, Slater has crafted a compelling true-crime story with ramifications for our most vulnerable youth. JONATHAN HUNT

From the January/February 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

 

A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars
by Seth Fishman; illus. by Isabel Greenberg
Primary    Greenwillow    40 pp.
9/17    978-0-06-245578-9    $17.99

“This entire world is filled with crazy numbers, built one on top of the other, making it whole and complete.” Fishman and Greenberg engagingly highlight the wondrousness of numbers and stars, as well as just about everything about our home planet. Fishman exchanges science writing’s traditional stiffness for a confiding tone (“The strange thing is that seven billion five hundred million humans weigh about the same as ten quadrillion ants”). Illustrator Greenberg, too, eschews the typical facts-foisting book’s physical correctness in her kinetic digital art: she presents kids who hoist the earth while stepping on a bathroom scale, fly around the world, and otherwise defy the laws of physics in order to illustrate the ideas presented. The book beautifully succeeds in its mission to convey to young readers the vastness of the numbers in our midst while reassuring them that, although each of us is one of billions of people roaming the earth today, “there’s only one of YOU. Right here, right now, reading this book.” A final illustration suggests a child reading aloud to a captive audience of pets and stuffed animals. An author’s note clarifies that the tallies in this book are only approximations, as the number of each thing being counted is always in flux:  “By the time you’re done reading this book, almost every single number in it will have changed.” NELL BERAM

From the January/February 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.



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Reviews of the 2018 Boston Globe–Horn Book Fiction and Poetry Award Winner and Honor Books

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Fiction and Poetry Winner

The Poet X
by Elizabeth Acevedo
High School    HarperTeen    361 pp.    g
3/18    978-0-06-266280-4    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-0-06-266282-8    $9.99

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara, whose name means “one who is ready for war,” has been fighting her whole life. The self-described “brown and big and angry” Dominican girl from Harlem furiously confronts catcalling boys, chafes under her Catholic parents’ restrictive rules, and both adores and resents her “genius” twin brother, who seems to be everything she’s not. She finds moments of peace by writing in her poetry journal, joining a spoken-word poetry club, and exploring a blossoming romance with Aman, her science partner. The slow-burning suspense of what will transpire when devout Mami discovers Xiomara and Aman’s clandestine relationship is eclipsed only by the devastation that occurs when Mami finds and reads Xiomara’s candid journal. But Xiomara must brave Mami’s ire if she is ever going to realize her writing dream. Spoken-word artist Acevedo’s debut verse novel is an arresting portrait of a young poet coming into her own. In nearly every poem, there is at least one universal truth about adolescence, family, gender, race, religion, or sexuality that will have readers either nodding in grateful acknowledgment or blinking away tears. “It almost feels like / the more I bruise the page / the quicker something inside me heals.” JENNIFER HUBERT SWAN

From the March/April 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

 

Honor Books

The Parker Inheritance
by Varian Johnson
Intermediate, Middle School    Levine/Scholastic    344 pp.    g
3/18    978-0-545-94617-9    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-0-545-95279-8    $10.99

In 2007 Abigail Caldwell, the first female and African American city manager for 
the town of Lambert, South Carolina, was forced to resign after covertly digging 
up the municipal tennis courts, looking for buried treasure. Now, a decade later, 
the late Abigail’s twelve-year-old granddaughter Candice is following the same arcane clues, hoping to uncover the Parker inheritance — but who was Parker? 
Johnson’s Westing Game–inspired tale is a tangled historical mystery, a satisfying multigenerational family story, and an exploration of twentieth-century (and contemporary) race and racism. Chapters alternate between the present, in which Candice grapples with making new friends, dealing with her parents’ divorce, and puzzling together information, and the past, particularly 1957, when a secret, integrated high school tennis match led to a violent racist attack. Johnson’s narrative revels in its puzzle-story elements (“She leaned back in the chair and spun in place. Maybe we’re reading this too literally. Maybe it’s more figurative. Like, if it’s a sum, maybe we should convert the clues to numbers”), and his protagonist is intelligent, endearing, and believable; scenes with her father, especially, have both humor and poignancy. Well-placed textual clues keep historical context and race relations at the front of readers’ minds — and examining those constructs, ingeniously, provides the key to solving the mystery. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

From the March/April 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

 

The First Rule of Punk
by Celia C. Pérez; illus. by the author
Intermediate, Middle School    Viking    319 pp.    g
8/17    978-0-425-29040-8    $16.99

[Books by Horn Book reviewers are not reviewed; we provide notice of publication and descriptive comment.]

The first rule of punk is to be yourself, but it’s hard for Malú, the bicultural daughter of divorced parents, to know exactly what that means. Her white dad doesn’t understand her internal struggles with her Mexican American identity, and her mom would rather Malú were more “señorita” than punk. Starting a band becomes a chance to explore her heritage as well as her musical interests. Eight-page “zines” featuring Malú’s collages punctuate the text. HORN BOOK EDITORS

From the July/August 2017 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.



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Yankees Endure Another Postponement

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By JEFF SEIDEL from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2JniNUA
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Thursday, 31 May 2018

‘The Americans,’ at Last, Lets Us Exhale

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By JAMES PONIEWOZIK from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/2sghj4X
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The End of ‘The Americans’: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys on the ‘Devastating’ Finale

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By MAUREEN RYAN from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/2J2TCaQ
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