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Summary
Summary
"What you need to do," Kevin said, "is publish a book called Rules for Every Thing."
"If I publish a book," Duke said, "I'm going to call it Handbook for Boys."
Growing up is tough...really tough.
But what if you had a handbook that told you how to figure things out? How to stay out of trouble? How to think about success? How to think about the guy on the street?
At Duke's Place, Jimmy and Kevin find out that the handbook isn't written down. It means listening to Duke and his friends talk about their lives. But how can Duke, a senior citizen, understand what it is to be young now?
In the tradition of his award-winning book Monster, Walter Dean Myers once again breaks new ground with this extraordinary, original, and complex novel about learning to be a man.
Author Notes
Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsberg, West Virginia. When he was three years old, his mother died and his father sent him to live with Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem, New York. He began writing stories while in his teens. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at the age of 17. After completing his army service, he took a construction job and continued to write.
He entered and won a 1969 contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which led to the publication of his first book, Where Does the Day Go? During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. His works include Fallen Angels, Bad Boy, Darius and Twig, Scorpions, Lockdown, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Invasion, Juba!, and On a Clear Day. He also collaborated with his son Christopher, an artist, on a number of picture books for young readers including We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart and Harlem, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, as well as the teen novel Autobiography of My Dead Brother.
He was the winner of the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Monster, the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness, at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Myers prefaces his new novel with an explanation of his belief that adult mentors can help teens choose positive paths in their lives. The book begins with a judge giving 16-year-old Jimmy the option of being assigned to a juvenile facility for six months for assaulting a classmate or to a community-mentoring program. Of course, he chooses the latter and begins his relationship with Duke Wilson, the owner of a neighborhood barbershop where he will work every day after school. Duke is an older man who, with several of his cronies, tries to give Jimmy and Kevin (another troubled youth) advice about the decisions and paths they will choose as they travel through life. This is imparted by using characters who visit the shop as good or bad examples of people who think independently, who take responsibility for their actions, who are on drugs, or who believe they can solve their own problems. Although the conversations provide valuable life lessons, they come across as didactic and preachy. Much more realistic are the one-on-one scenes between Jimmy and other characters, like his mother and, particularly, his contemporaries. The teen's perspective is the vehicle that carries the story and by book's end readers know he will make it while Kevin has more to learn. Marketed as a work of fiction, the book becomes transparent; as a handbook, it could touch many lives.-Joanne K. Cecere, Monroe-Woodbury High School, Central Valley, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Returning to the setting for his 145th Street: Short Stories, Myers (Monster) constructs a penetrating profile of a community through the brief appearances of characters who file through Duke Wilson's barbershop. The author juxtaposes a sketch of 16-year-old narrator Jimmy Lynch's home life with nuggets of wisdom delivered by the barber with wit and tact. As the novel opens, Jimmy is about to be assigned to a youth facility for six months, until Duke offers to take him into his "community mentoring program." Initially Jimmy and Kevin, another teen whom Duke mentors, call the shop the "Torture Chamber." But as Jimmy shows up to the shop day after day at 3:30 p.m. to sweep, hang old photographs on the wall and polish spitoons, his anger and resistance erode and he begins to absorb Duke's advice. Organized into chapters with titles as straightforward as "Victims" (featuring a man who is evicted and whose marriage is in trouble because he "just go[es] from day to day to see what event [he] stumble[s] into," in Duke's words) and as humorous as "The Blind Monkey Strut" and "Froggy Goes A Courting," the novel introduces various customers from ex-cons to a millionaire who demonstrate specific life lessons. Jimmy's change in attitude is gradual and credible, and his tenuous friendship with Kevin takes an unexpectedly poignant turn when Kevin falls back into trouble. The author's instructional prefatory note may be offputting, but once inside the book, readers will be hooked. Ages 10-up. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Charged with assault and assigned to a community mentoring program, teenaged Jimmy works after school at DukeÆs Place, a Harlem barbershop. Duke and his cronies tell colorful stories that impart life lessons to the young man about achieving success, making the right choices about sex and drugs, and being a responsible adult. Though the book reads more like a lecture than a novel, in general it's goodhearted and thought provoking. From HORN BOOK Fall 2002, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In a self-help treatise in the guise of a novel, Myers's (Bad Boy, 2001, etc.) passion and concern for adolescent boys infuses the material and gives it a heartfelt urgency. He's eager to teach youngsters how to make the right decisions so that they can avoid the pitfalls of modern life and become productive members of society. With that aim in mind, he gives his readers three rules for achievement: "Find out what you mean by success . . . find out what work is needed to get there . . . go on and do the work." The story itself is slight: after being arrested for injuring a classmate in a schoolyard fight, an unexceptional child named Jimmy must work for an upright elder, a right-thinking street-corner philosophizer, and the owner of a local mecca-a barbershop in Harlem. Everyone who comes into Duke's barbershop relates a story of victimhood or success-fodder for discussion and a moral. At first, Jimmy finds Duke and his endless life lessons insufferable-and it must be said that the lack of dramatic tension and structure of personal story followed by analysis does grow tedious-but over time the man's genuine decency (and the rightness of his position) makes its mark. Finally, Jimmy sees firsthand how a poorly thought-out choice can have a catastrophic impact on a person's future, and begins to make better judgments in his own life. Although compositionally flawed, this has such important things to say to adolescent boys that it deserves a wide audience. (Fiction. 10-15)
Excerpts
Excerpts
A superb memoir. A story full of funny anecdotes and tender moments. Young writers will find inspiration, while others may read the book as a straightforward account of a colorful, unforgettable childhood. Excerpted from Handbook for Boys by Walter Dean Myers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.