A sometimes inspiriting, often infuriating glimpse into how a veteran novelist molds a younger generation of fiction writers.
In this account of what he says will be his last semester teaching, prolific novelist West (The Dry Danube, 2000, etc.) cajoles and exhorts 15 graduate writing students, with equal parts wisdom and pretension.
Although he claims to have barked at a former student, “I would rather lie naked in a plowed field, under an incontinent horse, than read this piece again,” West assumes in this semester the guise of an avuncular, if occasionally cranky, mentor. Outside the classroom walls, in the world of publishing, danger lurks, he warns: editors with MBAs but scant appreciation for literature, an inattentive mass readership, and other writers tempted to play it safe with style. Yet they must stay true to their gifts: “You were not brought into this spotty world to pass muster; you were created so as to stand out in your creative difference.” He constantly invokes exemplars, notably Joyce, Beckett, and Proust (even urging that students sleep with a page of this “Lavender Everest” under their pillows). Before and during critiques, he dispenses pithy advice on style, recommending experimentation in every sentence and truncated exchanges between characters, “so that the reader feels a certain amount of unexpended attentive energy that must be transferred to the next dialogue.” Fascinated by voice in writing, West unfortunately gives the impression of being most enthralled by his own. His classroom monologues, a Niagara of recondite vocabulary like “mystagogical” and “adumbration” and “noetic shrug,” seem more designed to awe than to communicate, and sometimes succeed in doing neither. In addition, self-congratulation seeps freely into his private reflections, such as “I am glorifying a gaggle of talents into a fairy circle of geniuses” or “I have bled a little potassium permanganate into the clear water of their souls.”
A sometimes inspiriting, often infuriating glimpse into how a veteran novelist molds a younger generation of fiction writers.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100574-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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