Benjamin Cayetano: _Ben: A Memoir, from Street Kid to Governor_

Benjamin Cayetano's autobiography provides a surprisingly engaging, personal, and compelling read from an intensely private, seemingly aloof public figure.  Born into a broken home in working-class Kalihi, Cayetano documents the evolution of his intellect and social conscience amidst struggle and hardship. While the bittersweet, poignant reflections on childhood and family will speak to a broad audience, political junkies will delight in the latter sections that offer insider perspective on Hawaii politics and the dirty dealings and scandals that're the underbelly of government.  

M.T. Anderson, _The Feed_

In M.T. Anderson's dystopic young adult novel, everyone has a feed, a digital implant that streams media 24/7 to users, rendering critical thinking and articulateness obsolete.  Titus, the novel's protagonist, has spent his entire life dependent on the feed, but when he and his friends take a lunar trip for spring break, he meets a subversive, Violet, who makes him question the status quo for the first time.  Wickedly satirical, Anderson extrapolates on current 21st century realities, including environmental degradation, digital dumbing-down, targeted marketing, and materialistic, self-indulgent teen lemmings who mindlessly adopt the latest fashion trends, no matter how fatuous (hey, check out my cool lesions!).  He does a particularly masterful job skewering linguistic deterioration: adolescents utilize a superficial, minimalist, neo-California style sociolect, chock full of fillers, profanity, and hedges, and devoid of any lexical richness or edge, e.g. "Unit!  She's meg-youch!", while government officials spout political doublespeak to obfuscate cruel truths and conceal lies.  Naturally, the novel's lone radical stubbornly resists the societal language trend, protesting the debasing of English by speaking "entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says" (137).    Provocative and relentless.

Bryce Courtenay, _The Power of One_

Buster, one of my freshman English Award winners and an astute, avid reader, gifted me with this novel, his "favorite book", before school let out for summer.  Indeed, a terrific, affirming page-turner on every account.  Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One is a classic bildungsroman, chronicling the life of Peekay (short for "Pisskopf", the derogatory moniker conferred by school bullies), a precocious white English intellectual growing up in Boer-dominated, apartheid South Africa.  A classic "underdog defies odds" novel, the story celebrates Peekay's resistance against the forces that break the human spirit and his efforts to forge his identity as a pugilist, free-thinking intellectual, and activist for social justice.