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
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.
From African-American economist and author Sowell, a forthright memoir of growing up the hard way in Harlem—without a father, but with an admirable refusal to compromise one’s principles.
As a grown man, Sowell can now discern helpful guideposts (that would later determine his success) in what was an often frightening and uncertain childhood. He is grateful that he left the South too young to be subjected to its pervasive racism, that he was in public school when its education was still excellent, and that he became a professor before affirmative action called into question many black accomplishments. Born in 1929 in North Carolina, he never knew his own father and was adopted soon after his birth by an aunt. He left the South after an idyllic childhood and moved to Harlem with his mother and two older sisters in 1939. There he entered the local public school, and was soon an outstanding, as well as an outspoken, student. The family was proud of his accomplishments, but when he was accepted at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, they objected to the hours he spent studying instead of earning money, and he had to drop out. Drafted into the Marines during the Korean War, he took advantage of the GI bill to finish high school, as well as attend college, graduating from Harvard. The following years—spent teaching at colleges like Cornell or working in Washington while he finished his dissertation—were often rocky. And he describes his run-ins with obstructive bureaucrats, careerist academics, and bigoted racists, encounters sometimes exacerbated by his often-unpopular political opinions. Though Sowell writes movingly of his son who was a late talker, this is not a personal memoir, but rather an account of a philosophical and professional evolution shaped by a lifetime of challenging experiences.
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86464-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A slim, somber classic.
Didion (We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, 2006, etc.) delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter’s death and her inevitable own.
In her 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana’s childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. “I put the word ‘diagnosis’ in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ ” she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom. Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
A slim, somber classic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26767-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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