Directions for Blog Posts

Please note that directions for Creating a Blog are on the Course Page as a pdf document. Also review the Writing Annotations and Printz Justification Guidelines to assist you in developing your commentary. I've included two sample reviews below and I encourage you to view the list of sample blogs previously done for this class (with permission of their authors) linked in the course site page entitled:

"Course Blogs - Sample Blogs - Blogger link"  

in the Assignments course content area to give you an initial sense of format expectations for this process. Hope these give you some good ideas for your own reviews! Please don't forget to e-mail me your URL links to your individual review blogs once you've created them so I can attach them as links on this page.  Once I have them all attached, in their appropriate Group area, all students can use this blog site as a central access point to read all student blogs.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.

Annotation:“I begin with the young…What material! With them I can make a new world.” Adolf Hitler exploited the idealism of millions of Germany’s young people to fuel his evil master plan for global domination.

Justification for Nomination:
The collective voices of these young witnesses and victims create a visceral intensity to this aspect of Hitler’s calculated evil that is rarely addressed in the literature. The narrative threads, beginning with initial capsule biographies, immediately connect the reader to an authentic sense of the experience and events and work very effectively to propel the chronology. The skillful and solid writing is echoed by powerful, at times absolutely haunting photos, and supported by stellar research and documentation. This is outstanding nonfiction that goes a long way in addressing a question I’ve heard asked by many young people: how could the Germans have allowed this to happen? With this detailed immersion into the history, they are virtually walking in the shoes of those who, at the time, would be their peers and have a deeper understanding of how idealism can be manipulated and make the innocent unwitting accomplices to evil.

Genre Category: Nonfiction

Martino, Alfred C. Pinned. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Annotation: Two wrestlers, two different worlds, one destiny.

Justification for Rejection:
Initially, I thought the beginning was a little too shaky and somewhat contrived to make the best category, but darned if this book didn’t sneak up and grow on me as I became immersed in the parallel season-long struggles, both personal and sports-related (in themselves, deeply intertwined), of these two wrestlers driven to become champion. I lived the wrestling season with these characters, vicariously experiencing all the incredible sacrifice, suffering, and focused self-centeredness that marks those dedicated to this level of competition. There is real intensity to the writing, so it is ultimately deeply disappointing to have to move this to the rejection category.
The reader, teased throughout with the promise of a fitting resolution, is left deflated and cheated by a simplistic and unsatisfying ending. A "best" book doesn't have to be perfect, but its strengths do have to be commanding enough to override the more obvious flaws--in this case, the hodgepodge of gratuitous background stories that just don't work. The combination, however, strikes a death knell for this title in a field of books with far more cohesion, artistry, and depth, despite the authenticity of the the teen voices expressed in the characters of these 2 competitors.

Genre Category: Sports Fiction