Category: Why Should Your Parents Have All the Fun?

Jesse and Eric live in Idaho—a state not exactly known for setting the world on fire with its cutting edge technology. Yet here in the middle of nowhere, Jesse and Eric are consummate Doom-playing, Internet-obsessed, expert computer hackers. They’re geniuses when it comes to hardware—it’s just their software (or social skills) that needs a little work. Pop culture guru Katz follows these two self-proclaimed “geeks” as they try to break out of their dead end, strip-mall-working lives and into the big city doings of Chicago. It’s an enlightening trip full of revelations about computer culture, societal pressure to be “normal” (whatever THAT is!) and how the labels people wear (in this case, GEEK) never really tell the whole story.

Life isn’t going too well for Tina S. Her family is living in a welfare hotel, and her mother’s new boyfriend is always giving her the evil eye. So when she meets the beautiful, doomed, drug-addicted April, it’s easy for her to shrug off her old life and join April and the other homeless teens who make Grand Central subway station in NYC their hang-out. Tina adores April, and wants to copy her every move, including April’s addiction to crack cocaine and scamming commuters for money. Soon, Tina can’t remember much of her life before the subway tunnels and crack dealers. Slowly, one painful step at a time, Tina fights her way back from jail, drugs and homelessness to becoming the kind of quality person she knows she is inside. A gritty, four-hanky read.

In what has got to be one of the funniest, and at the same time saddest memoirs ever, Esme Codell, (or“Madame Esme” as she likes to be called by her 5th graders) shares what it’s like to be a 24 year old, first-year, white teacher in an inner city, predominantly African American Chicago public school. Despite all her heroic efforts to teach kids in a fun and innovative way by hosting authors, making a fairy tale festival, and letting her worst kids learn how it feels to be her by letting them teach for a day, she is reprimanded, shunned, and generally told to fit the standard teacher mode or else! A book that will make you stand up and cheer, Educating Esme gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what a teaching life is REALLY like.

Of course, no bio list from me, the rabid Doors fan, would be complete without the inclusion of the legend, the Lizard King, the bad boy to end all bad boys–Jim Morrison. Yes, the lead singer of the Doors had a very bad rep. as a drug-addicted alcoholic who publically exposed himself at concerts and ran around on his girlfriend. But author Danny Sugerman, who was part of the Doors entourage, also writes about the sensitive, wacky kid that Jim was. His I.Q. was off the charts and he read tons of philosophy and classical lit. in his teens that most people don’t even try to tackle until college. Sugerman also writes about the Jim Morrison who felt so distanced from his military parents that he told reporters during an interview that they were dead, even though at the time, they were very much alive. (Admit it, you’ve been tempted sometimes to do the same thing)This biography is also a good book about the 60’s and how the Doors music influenced and was influenced by the political and moral movements of that time. Now kids, I’m not endorsing Jim’s lifestyle in any way, shape or form. All I’m saying is that despite all his bad behavior, Jim Morrison was also a gifted poet and a voracious reader–one habit of his that I think would be great for you to pick up.

If you were assigned to read about Christopher Columbus, I would suggest this modern day adventuring Chris instead. Christopher McCandless was a twenty-something nature loving college graduate looking for adventure. Unfortunately, in this advanced technological age, there just wasn’t too much frontier left for him to explore. He hitched around out West for awhile with no car and very little money, just to see how far he could push himself. But he found that just moving around on the edge of civilization wasn’t extreme enough, so he decided to trek up to the last great American wilderness left–Alaska. Only a few months after he was last seen heading out into the Land of the Midnight Sun, his body was found in an abandoned school bus in the wilderness, where he had apparently starved to death. What made him do it? Was his crazy camping trip a suicide mission or just a good plan gone wrong? True adventure author Jon Krakauer has taken Chris’s life, death and thirst for the extreme and turned it into a first rate biography. You may not have the same fanatical wanderlust as Chris McCandless, (and I hope you don’t, you see what it got him)but nevertheless, this book speaks to the would-be rock-climbing, parachute-jumping runaway in all of us. And the movie, starring Emile Hirsch and directed by Sean Penn ain’t bad either.