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Show Them You're Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year before College
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68/99
Critics
18/99
Readers
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Scholars
70/99
Rating
66/99
Volume
19/99
Rating
18/99
Volume
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About This Book
Four teenage boys are high school seniors at two very different schools within the city of Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the nation with nearly 700,000 students. Author Jeff Hobbs, writing with heart, sensitivity, and insight, stunningly captures the challenges and triumphs of being a young person confronting the future - both their own and the cultures in which they live - in contemporary America. Combining complex social issues with the compelling experience of the individual, Hobbs takes us deep inside these boys' worlds. The foursome includes Tiofilo, a nonchalant skateboarder harboring serious ambitions to attend an elite college despite a father who doesn't believe in him; Carlos, son of undocumented delivery workers, who aims to follow in his older brother's footsteps and attend Yale; Own, ambivalent about high school in general but still yearning to fulfill the expectations of his successful and loving parents; and Sam, devoted member of the academic decathlon team who lives in a tiny cramped apartment with his Chinese mother and Jewish father and cannot wait to have some independence. Filled with portraits of secondary characters including friends, peers, parents, teachers, and girlfriends, this masterwork of immersive journalism is both intimate and profound and destined to ignite conversations about class, race, expectations, cultural divides, and even the concept of fate. Hobbs's portrayal of these young men is not only revelatory and relevant, but also moving, eloquent, and indelibly powerful.
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Reviews
"Drilling down into the second-largest school district in the country to shine an intimate light on a few senior boys in two very different high schools would have been a daunting task in less capable hands...Hobbs does it so well that these soon-to-be men may be forever cast in the amber of their adolescence: slightly familiar from the start and, finally, utterly unforgettable ..."
"Hobbs arranges dozens of vignettes of these boys and their friends, foregrounding their experiences and centering their voice in a beautifully rendered group portrait of adolescents and of adolescence itself."
"[an] exceptional work of investigative journalism ..."
"It's sure to cheer school librarians looking for true stories of male high school students known for something besides their athletic talents or troubles with the law ..."
"A uniquely illuminating window onto the lives of young people in the midst of a hugely consequential year."
"But despite the book's perhaps unfounded optimism and baffling juxtaposition between Compton and Beverly Hills, Show Them You're Good is an admirable addition to the growing body of literature that humanizes the struggles and expands the scope of our understanding of the lives of immigrant youth at a time when they're under near-constant threat of dehumanization."
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