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Show Them You're Good : A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace presents a “carefully observed journalistic account [that] widens our view of the modern ‘immigrant experience’” (The New York Times Book Review) as he closely follows four Los Angeles high school boys as they apply to college.

Four teenage boys are high school seniors at two very different schools within the city of Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the nation with nearly 700,000 students. In this “exceptional work of investigative journalism…laced with compassion, insight, and humor” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Jeff Hobbs stunningly captures the challenges and triumphs of being a young person confronting the future—both their own and the cultures in which they live—in contemporary America.

Blending complex social issues with each individual experience, Hobbs takes us deep inside these boys’ worlds. The foursome includes Carlos, the younger son of undocumented delivery workers, who aims to follow in his older brother’s footsteps and attend an Ivy League college; Tio harbors serious ambitions to become an engineer despite a father who doesn’t believe in him; Jon, devoted member of the academic decathalon team, struggles to put distance between himself and his mother, who is suffocating him with her own expectations; and Owen, raised in a wealthy family, can’t get serious about academics but knows he must.

Including portraits of secondary characters—friends, peers, parents, teachers, and girlfriends—this “uniquely illuminating” (Booklist) masterwork of immersive journalism is destined to ignite conversations about class, race, expectations, cultural divides, and even the concept of fate. Hobbs’s portrayal of these young men is not only revelatory and relevant, but also moving, eloquent, and indelibly powerful.


Author:

  • Jeff Hobbs

Narrators:

  • Fajer Al-Kaisi
  • Christian Barillas
  • Tim Chiou
  • Sean Patrick Hopkins
  • Timothy Andrés Pabon
  • Jonathan Todd Ross
  • Gary Tiedemann

Format:

  • Audiobook
  • E-book

Duration:

  • 10 h 40 min
  • 251 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • History
  • Great occurrences and events
  • Nonfiction
  • Education and pedagogy
  • Society and Social Sciences
  • Society
  • Warfare
  • Social science

More by Jeff Hobbs

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  1. Seeking Shelter : A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America

    Jeff Hobbs

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  2. Children of the State : Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System

    Jeff Hobbs

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  3. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace : A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

    Jeff Hobbs

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  4. The Tourists : A Novel

    Jeff Hobbs

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  • 5 books

    Jeff Hobbs

    Jeff Hobbs is the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was made into the 2024 film Rob Peace. He is also the author of Show Them You’re Good and Children of the State. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

    Read more

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