A wonderful collection, offering fine bedside browsing for disaffected grad students, refugees from the university, and fans...
A lively greatest-hits collection from the pages of the recently deceased journal Lingua Franca, which “sought to occupy the no-man’s-land between the tabloid and the treatise.”
The brainchild of former Yale professor Jeffrey Kittay, Lingua Franca was rare among general-interest journals in taking academia seriously—reporting as news, for example, an English professor’s argument that the “ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” of T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” belonged to a lobster, not a crab. (On the minor controversy that ensued, the Harvard critic Helen Vendler sensibly remarked, “You’re not supposed to envision an animal, you’re supposed to envision a scuttle.”) The magazine’s reporters did heroic work in bringing to readers strange tales of thwarted ambition, misbegotten theory, and the inexhaustible egotism of the professoriat, but Lingua Franca was always at its best when it joined the classroom to the courtroom—and, indeed, some of the best pieces here examine the vicious battles that followed, say, a Colby College sociologist’s failed bid for tenure or a distinguished classicist’s apparent perjury when parsing a term out of Plato. Other highlights include a profile of the historian Eugene Genovese, who evolved from Marxist to southern conservative “while remaining very much the same man”; an exposé of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s bad treatment of his translators; and a report on the strange matter of a mystery millionaire who paid a dozen philosophers handsomely to comment on a philosophical treatise he had written, revealing in the bargain how few of them were intellectually honest, let alone willing to entertain the efforts of an outsider without said handsome recompense. Though less full of spite and despair over the current state of academia than is, say, Newsweek or National Review, these pieces add up to a condemnation of academic culture as they lay bare the silliness and irrelevance of much contemporary scholarship. Unlike Newsweek or National Review, they’re also wicked fun to read, and highly edifying in the bargain.
A wonderful collection, offering fine bedside browsing for disaffected grad students, refugees from the university, and fans of solid journalism alike.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-52863-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
been.
This analysis of a controversial trend in American education—the gearing of public schools in the 1980s toward teaching
self-esteem—is all but doomed by its lack of focus and poor organization. Stout (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies/California State Univ., Northridge) is certainly capable of lucid intellectual history, as she shows in her accounts of the progressive school movement of the 1800s and the rise of "discovery learning" and the "open curriculum" in the 1960s. But she is never able to do the same for what she calls "the self-esteem movement." After differentiating real self-esteem (based on tangible achievements) from false self-esteem (based on uncritical self-regard), Stout immediately abandons this distinction to launch into a slash-and-burn critique of every educational practice she attributes to the self-esteem movement. She hits all the popular targets—grade inflation, cooperative learning, social promotion, multiculturalism, Ritalin, poststructuralism—yet never makes a historical connection between any of these practices and the promoters of self- esteem, writers she never even names until her final chapter. In the end, Stout's greatest problem is that she has become what she beheld. Though she criticizes the self-esteem movement for its narcissism, she is relentlessly self-indulgent, peppering her analysis with pointless glimpses into her personal life. (Why do we need to know that her Victorian literature teacher hated women and flirted with men?) While decrying the "victim mentality" bred by self-esteemers, she portrays herself as a culture-wars martyr, badgered by her students who expect A’s for subpar work and reviled by her ed-school colleagues for her resistance to their constructivist methods. Despite championing the cause of intellectualism over "emotivism," Stout lets her anger bleed onto virtually every page, producing a document equally flavored by rant and whine, with just enough social history to let the reader taste what might have
been.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-7382-0257-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
Intermittently revealing but inundated with hyperbole. Rowing enthusiasts are better served by David Halberstam’s now...
Hagiographic account of the 2008 Harvard rowing season and a general paean to all things Harvard.
“The first collegiate sports competition,” writes former U.S. World Rowing Team member Saint Sing (The Wonder Crew: The Untold Story of a Coach, Navy Rowing, and Olympic Immortality, 2008), “was a rowing race between Harvard and Yale” in 1852. Since then, Harvard crews have dominated the sport of rowing as no other college team has done in any other sport. The author follows the trials and tribulations of the elite of the elite—V8, the men’s heavyweight varsity eight of 2008—as they attempt to continue this tradition of excellence. Saint Sing ably captures the grueling nature of the sport, in which the athlete must exert maximum physical effort and mental concentration over the full course of a race, and at the same time remain perfectly synched with the seven other crew members. She follows the scholar-athletes of the V8 as they train endlessly while fulfilling the demands of a Harvard education, and offers a loving portrait of Harvard’s legendary coach, Harry Parker. The 2008 season started slowly for the V8 as they struggled in the early Dual Cup races, lost in the Eastern Sprints and experienced, for Harvard, a lackluster season—until the Harvard-Yale race, the most venerated of rowing competitions. With lightning-quick prose, Saint Sing describes the dramatic tension of the contest. Unfortunately, there is too little of this type of detail and too much overblown metaphor. Parker’s coaching words “echo a call into the hollows of the soul where slumbering dreams nestle on a dark rock.” The athletes become almost props: “regal, elegant, and a bit mysterious in their sleek, taut profiles…breathing promise in the morning mist.” Harvard is not a university but a holy abstraction: “Alexandria on the banks of the Nile, Rome on the banks of the Tiber, Harvard on the banks of the Charles, each has its own link to the sacred, through temples, pyramids, and fountains that link the earth to the world above.”
Intermittently revealing but inundated with hyperbole. Rowing enthusiasts are better served by David Halberstam’s now classic The Amateurs (1985).Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-53923-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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