That Mad Game

Growing Up in a Warzone: An Anthology of Essays from Around the Globe
By J.L. Powers

Coming of age during a time of war: fighting, dying, surviving. First-person accounts from around the world.

Description

What’s it like to grow up during war? To be a victim of violence or exiled from your homeland, culture, family, and even your own memories?

When America’s talking heads talk about war, children and teenagers are often the forgotten part of the story. Yet who can forget images of the Vietnam “baby lift,” when Amer-Asian children were flown out of Vietnam to be adopted by Americans? Who can forget the horror of learning that Iranian children were sent on suicide missions to clear landmines? Who wasn’t captivated by stories of the “lost boys” of Sudan, traveling thousands of miles alone through the desert, seeking shelter and safety? From the cartel-terrorized streets of Juárez to the bombed-out cities of Bosnia to Afghanistan under the Taliban, from Nazi-occupied Holland to the middle-class American home of a Vietnam vet, this collection of personal and narrative essays explores both the universal and particular experiences of children and teenagers who came of age during a time of war.

About the Creators

J.L. Powers
J.L. Powers

J.L. Powers is a novelist and scholar. Her recent novel This Thing Called the Future is a coming of age story set in post-Apartheid South Africa. Her previous anthology was Labor Pains and Birth Stories. She holds master's degrees in African History from State University of New York-Albany and Stanford University, and won a Fulbright-Hayes to study Zulu in South Africa, and served as a visiting scholar in Stanford's African Studies Department in 2008 and 2009. She lives in San Francisco's Bay area.

Awards

  • Notable Books for a Global Society

    International Literacy Association (ILA)

Reviews

  • When writing their end of quarter reflections, the students in my freshmen Humanities class wrote of the impactThat Mad Gamehad on their learning. Comments such as "the instructor's choice ofThat Mad Gamewas excellent, it opened my eyes and my heart to people and situations I had never thought of before," and "My sense of myself as a global citizen grew in leaps and bounds; I have a new awareness of how others suffer from injustice far beyond my own safety; it made me want to become more active in the world." I will continue to useThat Mad Gameas the central text for my freshmen students. It is a deeply humane way for young people to begin to grapple with the consequences of war.

    - Merna Ann Hecht, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Lecturer, Univeristy of Washington, Tacoma
  • "Uplifting tales of survival. . . War's most vulnerable victims have their say."

    - Kirkus Reviews
  • [R]readers will be rewarded by [this] compelling and often uplifting anthology . . .That Mad Gamesurprises with its variety. From Taliban-controlled Kabul to a Japanese internment camp in northern California, from a teen girl's "soundtrack of war" in Beirut to a young man's long walk across much of Africa, the startling stories make for rough going at times. But the humor, beauty, and humanity shining through the darkness are what make this collection a must-have for all libraries serving high school students. --Sam Bloom

    - School Library Journal
  • "Truly a unique title. If we are lucky, we will never know what the contributors to Powers's collection have revealed. We will only have their record to better know what it was like; we will only have their sorrow to help us understand. Highly recommended. --Coleen Mondor"

    - Bookslut
  • "THAT MAD GAME is a collection of personal essays that can move glaciers. At least they will move the human heart to consider the suffering of those who experience the violence and terror of war . . . Each essay presents a unique perspective, and each one shares pain but also hope. Even humor. --Nancy Bo Flood"

    - The Pirate Tree
  • "There is heartache in the stories J.L. Powers has assembled here, as well as loss and pain and death. They are about war, after all. But there is humor too, and also love and faith and hope, because they are human stories too, and as each one testifies in its own way, humans are able to heal."

    - Charles London, author of One Day The Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War
  • "I was sent to the war in Afghanistan with a lot of slogans in my head about freedom and fighting terrorism. What I found instead was a tremendous respect for the good Afghan people, a deep sympathy for the Afghan children struggling for better lives, and a profound hatred of the Taliban for the way they brutalized their own people. That Mad Game is a reminder that such hatred is the same mistake from which all the world's wars are born. The fact that That Mad Game can steer my hard heart toward sympathy for a young Talib is a sure sign of this book's tremendous potential to foster a spirit of peace and understanding in readers everywhere."

    - Trent Reedy, author of Words in the Dust and Stealing Air
  • "These essays give readers a front-row seat to the hunger, the hardship, and, ultimately, the resilience of people whose childhoods were forever marked by life on the front lines."

    - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
  • "In reading these documents of the inhumanities of war, we open our eyes to the ways brutality is perpetuated upon people and perhaps we become a little more compassionate from this understanding."

    - Viewpoints

Paperback

  • ISBN 9781935955221
  • Publication Date Sep 11, 2012
  • Trim Size 9 × 6 in
  • Weight 0.75 lbs
  • Page Count 300
  • Interests

  • Audience Adult
  • BISAC Category 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Peace
  • BISAC Category 2 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Genocide & War Crimes
  • BISAC Category 3 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
  • Themes Childhood Experiences and Memories, History & Civics, Multiple Ethnicities Represented, Mystery / Suspense, Nonfiction, War
  • Reading Levels

  • Guided Reading Z+
  • Interest Level Grades 9 - 12
  • Lexile Level 1070
  • Reading Level Grades 11 - 12
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