A clear, practical, and well-organized education handbook.
A thorough guide to the planning and execution of learning experiences.
Canadian author Cougler Blom, a self-described “learning designer,” prefers to consider herself a facilitator rather than a teacher. Instead of simply imparting new information, she aims to show her students “what they have inside themselves and what others also have, and I encourage them to relish their similarities and differences.” Fortunately, this vague and anodyne description is not at all characteristic of the book as a whole, which is largely precise and helpful. The author focuses her book on in-person educational sessions and emphasizes the cultivation of an engaging environment that encourages participation and collaboration, knowledge sharing, and inclusiveness. Further, she ably discusses the mindset that’s most conducive to successful facilitation—one that prioritizes flexibility and curiosity and embraces humor and passion. With impressive comprehensiveness, she discusses possible learning outcomes, the formulation of lesson plans, and the collection and analysis of student feedback. Cougler Blom’s prose is lucid, informal, and relatable, and she candidly shares her own past failures as a facilitator. That said, the book too often indulges in facile, vague assertions: “We need to bring our whole, authentic selves to this craft.” The orientation of the guidebook is highly practical, though, with illustrations of her principal points drawn from real life, and she concludes each chapter with concise summaries. Her own experience is considerable—she’s worked as an academic, a community organizer, and an entrepreneur—and that expertise is evident in her sound counsel. Over the course of the work, she covers a remarkable swath of territory, including a discussion of art-based activities, a sample lesson plan, and the bios of 30 facilitators whom she interviewed while researching the book. It’s certain to be helpful to those interested in practicing the facilitation craft, whether they’re novices or seasoned veterans.
A clear, practical, and well-organized education handbook.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-7287-6
Page Count: 244
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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