Don’t buy this book to teach your children; take them along as you commit these beautiful speeches to memory.
Don’t be fooled by the title. This book is for anyone who wants to brush up on Shakespeare.
Playwright Ludwig, who has written numerous hit plays for Broadway and London’s West End, explains his simple, proven method for teaching the works of the Bard of Avon—and we know it works, since he has used his children as guinea pigs, starting when they were 6. Now that they’re off to college, flipping quotes back and forth, it’s obvious that the simple repetition of short sections of speeches is most effective. The author includes a wide variety of speeches from such classic Shakespeare characters as Puck, Orsino, Macbeth, Falstaff, Rosalind and Hamlet. Learning to quote Shakespeare is one thing, but Ludwig opens up the secrets of the plays, the characters and the genius of the man. The best person to learn from is one who is passionate about his subject, and Ludwig certainly fits that bill. There is subtlety here: “no one in history, before or since, has written better than this.” There is sufficient sprinkling of like praise and professional envy throughout the book. Shakespeare’s creativity serves to cause creativity in those who read him. The difficulties we often encounter in his works are the unfamiliar words (though an English schoolchild would know more than an American), the oddly curious sentence structure and the broad use of metaphors. Shakespeare’s dramatic methods, such as repetition of sounds, inversion of thoughts, curious rhyming and breaking right into the action are just a few of those that make him great. Some readers may liken it to a foreign language, but once the key phrases are explained, they will appreciate the magic and begin to fall in love with Shakespeare.
Don’t buy this book to teach your children; take them along as you commit these beautiful speeches to memory.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95149-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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