V itibaren 영국 DT2 도싯 도체스터 윈터본 케임 itibaren 영국 DT2 도싯 도체스터 윈터본 케임

My niece Giselle and I read this together, as it was on her summer reading list. And I'd be hard pressed to think of a better book for sparking a high school class conversation on ethics and disability and the concept of intelligence. The book was written in the late 1950s and Charlie is a middle aged man with cognitive disabilities. He volunteers for an experiment and undergoes an operation which takes his IQ from 68 (mild mental retardation) to over 185 (genius). The book is basically Charlie's journal. Lots of interesting ideas and a great little history lesson of what life could be like for a person with developmental disabilities during that time period. Well done, but the characters, excepting Charlie, lacked any depth, and appeared fairly two dimensional.

This is a brave and candid look at the culture of Southie in Boston. I grew up in the Boston area myself in the 80s & 90s and the palpable tension that the author describes from the 70s shed insight into race relations and poverty issues in the area that I never knew the background of. Many of the events I had been largely unaware of previously. The sadness of the true stories profiling many young people, including many of the author's siblings, who lost lives to violence and drug use are moving and enraging at the same time. Highlighting a tight knit community too ashamed of its faults to save its own, opting to instead hold their pride and loose many of their young people.