After reading this book review, what do you think your experience reading this book is going to be like? Do you tend to look at book reviews before you purchase a book? Do you use book reviews to influence your book purchases? Are you more apt to listen to a friend who recommends a book to you? Your response should be at least 250 words.
My thoughts on “And Still We Rise” is much like Mark Welch’s. I feel that Miles Corwin spent a lot of his time and effort into making the rest of American society (and perhaps societies around the world) to recreate these students’ lives in our own imaginations. Many people from a community like mine take the privileges and blessings they have for granted.
For those who feel offended by that statement, ask yourself if you ever get mad at technology, teachers who assign too much homework, and college applications. Or maybe even your parents for making you come home by curfew. But it truly is not our faults – it’s how we were raised.
This book allows me to really appreciate all of the things in life that I dread – homework, AP classes, tests, pressure for college – because now I know that there are other people out there who have to do all of what I do while dealing with their abusive parents or neglective foster parents and their full-time jobs. The students from South-Central who persevere throughout the entire 13 years of their education to graduate from high school (especially in the gifted program at Crenshaw) and especially those who manage to go on to college, are truly gifted.
To have a family who abuses and doesn’t care about them, to ignore gang activity and stay off the streets, to go to work so they can save up money for basic essentials and clothes, to stay up late at night after a hard day so they can study… that’s tough. I know that I wouldn’t last one year in this city. I would cry myself to sleep every night, pitying myself, asking myself “why me?” I doubt I’d have the courage and strength to do what these students do.
When I buy a book to read, I don’t read the book reviews. I tend to listen to my friends’ opinions or read the back of the cover and judge the book then. Now, I think if I look online for book reviews to read, I’ll find the books that are really great, the books that inspire.
I like your third paragraph. It makes me feel as if I shouldn't complain about school so much :) I mean, if there are kids doing all that school work while dealing with abuse parents, full time jobs, and neglective foster parents, then really anyone can do it too. I agree that the Crenshaw students that graduated to go on to college are truly gifted because it wasn't just about attending school. It was struggling and trying to balance other neccessary means of life and trying to succeed in school. It takes a lot of brains and preserverance to do that.
ReplyDeleteAri! Do you totally want to make me cry? You are so insightful with what you wrote above! Your details are spot on! I could see them and the idea that we don't even know what it's like to life like that for one day! And to know that their lives were that way with Affirmative Action! I wonder what life's like without it for those students at Crenshaw today? Keep it up!
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