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CREATING ROOM TO READ

Name: CREATING ROOM TO READ
Author: John Wood
ISBN: 978-0-670-02598-5

A STORY OF HOPE IN THE BATTLE FOR GLOBAL LITERACY

by John Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2013

An absorbing personal account of a remarkable achievement.

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How one man's vision of making books available to every child has changed the lives of millions.

In 1999, at the height of the tech boom, Wood (Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children, 2006, etc.) gave up the executive fast track at Microsoft to pursue “the quest for global literacy.” His success—the opening of 10,000 school libraries across the globe within the next decade—exceeded his optimistic expectations. Room to Read, the organization that he founded, has published more than 700 children's books in local languages, expanded globally into 10 countries in Asia and Africa, partnered with local communities to build new schools and provided 17,000 scholarships for women. This moving account of the way the program has impacted the lives of children is only one part of Wood’s important story. The author explains how he applied lessons learned in the corporate world to running a successful nonprofit, describing Room to Read's commitment to maintaining low overhead and accountability. Opening the first school libraries (filled with donated English-language books) revealed the need for simple children's books in local languages, and this led to the publishing venture. Similarly, the organization addressed the special problems faced by young girls who wanted an education. In every instance, local communities were challenged to partner in the venture. Wood explains how he is achieving his goal of being “one of many leaders of a global movement,” and he pays special tribute to Nelson Mandela's understanding of how encouraging “a profound and deep love” for reading can be a transformative social force.

An absorbing personal account of a remarkable achievement.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-670-02598-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012

Categories:

EDUCATION | BUSINESS | GENERAL BUSINESS

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

- SEEN & HEARD
Bill Gates Shares His Summer Reading List

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INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993

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American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.