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.