The ups and downs of the teaching profession may leave Halpin feeling like a basketball, but thankfully he isn’t full of hot...
After detailing his wife’s struggle with breast cancer, the author of It Takes a Worried Man (2002) turns to a more cheerful topic: his life as a high-school teacher.
When adding to the substantial weird-world-of-teaching bookshelf, it helps to be young, unjaded, brimming with a desire to teach, and able to convey genuine pleasure when a class ignites. Halpin claims to be easily bullied, but he’s also capable of rocking the boat without a whiff of self-righteousness. Nine years into his profession, his voice reflects an honest unruliness. He aspires to be “a hated-then-loved hard-ass,” but admits to feeling “terribly uncomfortable with the reality of my authority,” a circumstance that occasionally bites him on the ankle: “Finally I just lose my mind. I get right in his face and scream, ‘Shut up! Will you just shut up!’…The other kids laugh. The next day I apologize to him. I will feel guilty for years about this.” Halpin changes jobs often, working in various suburban schools as he tries to find a way into the Boston public school system, where he aches to teach. He gets to the city with an experimental truancy prevention project, then goes to a charter school that really has his heart, until its vibrant teacher-controlled atmosphere is crushed by the imposition of an ill-fitting administration. The bureaucracy’s destructive capabilities nearly drive him out of teaching altogether. But he decides instead to push on to a more functional environment. “I used to want to transform education,” he writes. “Now I just want to work with kids in a place that doesn't grind me down.” Is this a cop-out, Halpin asks himself? Readers won’t think so as they watch him move once more from his corner into the center of the ring.
The ups and downs of the teaching profession may leave Halpin feeling like a basketball, but thankfully he isn’t full of hot air.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6083-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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