A handy, accessible, relatively useful package.
Reviews of 42 boarding schools in the U.S., U.K. and Canada by former students who have gone on to attend top universities.
These days, boarding schools are well versed in the hard sell via sleek websites, polished DVDs and professional school-review sites that often simply regurgitate a school’s marketing material. Parents and potential students will be thrilled with this independent guide showcasing the perspectives of former students who have gone on to brighter things. Although its range is limited—overlooking, for example, all the private military prep schools—the book is well organized. Each section provides the name and street address of the school, the founding date, a glowing quotation and a short list of notable alumni. Reviews are introduced with the name of the college or university the reviewer attends, followed by their prep school graduation year. Each review covers five standard sections: Academics, College Counseling, Admissions Process, Extracurricular Activities and Quality of Life. All entries conclude with a web address on PrepReview.com that connects readers to further information about the school; however, a subscription is required to access most of the premium content. Within these reviews, readers will run into a plethora of platitudinous praise (“Kent is an amazing place,” “academics at St. Paul’s were amazing”) and the occasional criticism (“everything at [Northfield Mount Hermon] is micromanaged,” “I found our university preparation lacking” at Cheltenham Ladies’ College). Some comments are so sweeping that readers may question how the college-age reviewer gained such a far-reaching perspective: The Harkness method used at Phillips Exeter Academy leads to “probing discussion on a breadth of topics at intellectual levels rare at most secondary schools,” while a new arts building at Northfield Mount Hermon School “will be one of, if not the, most advanced arts building in New England.” Speculative comments about what has occurred since the writer graduated (p. 165; p. 192) may raise concerns that some of the observations are outdated or inaccurate.
A handy, accessible, relatively useful package.Pub Date: May 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453682487
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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