Billy Shepard: Summary

In this book an asteroid is crashing into the Earth and causing a huge dust cloud in the atmosphere, annihilating the human race, but a few groups survive. Billy, a sixteen year old, and his team of 100 ten-year-old specialists orbit the Earth in a collection of space stations. He talks with a man named Professor Shepard (a seventy year old man there to guide Billy) about how he feels out of place around a bunch of geniuses and he’s not particularly smart. Professor Shepard explains to Billy that they’re all specialists in one field of study and have doing that their entire lives. He also explains how Billy has been working on leadership his entire life back on Earth when he lived in the streets of New York with a gang. Billy is the leader of the group and while trying to prove it to everyone else in the first year, he also needs to prove it to himself. The reason this passage stuck with me is because I always feel like I need to know more, learn more to be accepted. I feel out of place when I don’t play a sport or play a musical instrument, so I force myself to do that even if I don’t want to. I used to force myself to be a grade level ahead in my mind, that way the materials in class wouldn’t be new and I could impress others around me. I used to care a bunch about what other people thought and that helped round me out today. I

I felt similarly in elementary school, I always raced against others who were unaware they were in a race. Sometimes I feel like a specialist and other times I feel like a generalist. Everyone is good at multiple things, not just one. Just because you spend your entire life on a subject that interests you, doesn’t mean that you haven’t lived a normal life. Life is all about