The Lessons of Books: A Review Blog

“I don't know why it's so hard for people to admit that sometimes they're just assholes who screw up because they don't expect to get caught.”  ✰✰ ✰✰ ✰ 5/5 Blurb pulled from here: "Pay close attention and you might solve this. On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.     Bronwyn,  the brain,  is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.      Addy,  the beauty,  is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.      Nate,  the criminal , is already on probation for dealing.     Cooper,  the athlete , is the all-star baseball pitcher.     And   Simon,  the outcast , is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.   Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to po...

"I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car." ✰✰ ✰ ✰ 4/5 Blurb taken from here: "Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of  The Daily Show  began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime  is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never...