The Teen's Guide to World Domination: Advice on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Awesomeness
Drawing from his own experiences as a troubled youth, plus nearly a decade of motivational speaking to teen audiences, Shipp offers an unusually stimulating approach to making life decisions, rejecting bad choices, and nurturing a sense of self-identity. In his view, it is all about “dominating” one’s own self and world (without dominating those of others, which is evil) by identifying and dealing with teeming hordes of “villains”—which include Ghosts (i.e., self-imposed fears and limitations), Robots (who seek to replace individual paths with preprogrammed career expectations), and similarly metaphorical Ninjas, Zombies, Pirates, Vampires, and Puppies. Though he waxes platitudinous toward the end (“Never settle for good”; “You need to have a plan”; “Cool isn’t for sale”) his hip vocabulary, vivid imagery, and confrontational rhetoric (“In your face, but on your side,” as he repeatedly writes) should keep readers engaged, and may well prompt some slackers to get off the stick. Grades 8-11. --John Peters