An upbeat portrait of fine teachers and the students they inspire.
Teenagers encounter great books and dedicated teachers.
New Yorker staffer Denby (Do the Movies Have a Future?, 2012, etc.) believes ardently that reading affords pleasure, “an opening to a wider life,” and enhanced “understanding of other people and oneself.” He wondered, though, whether reading will survive for children inundated with increasing technology. Will they stop texting and read a book? How, he asks, “does the appetite for serious reading get created?” The author decided to investigate by sitting in on a 10th-grade English class at Beacon, a magnet school in Manhattan. After a year of attending classes and reading all the assigned material, he expanded his project by visiting two other public high schools: the inner-city James Hillhouse High School in New Haven and the suburban Mamaroneck High School in Westchester. Beacon, though, and in particular the class taught by energetic, 30-year-old Sean Leon, is Denby’s central focus. Admission to Beacon is competitive, based on grades, a portfolio of schoolwork, and an interview. With students motivated to excel and teachers free to shape their own curriculum, it’s hardly surprising that Denby came away impressed—and he ably conveys his enthusiasm to readers. In the two other schools as well, though, the author found that by teaching “aggressively and flexibly, with humor and dramatic power,” teachers can generate students’ passion for reading. He sees students taught to read actively: responding to readings through journals, annotations, marked-up copies of texts—all of which the teacher reads, comments on, and sometimes grades. At Mamaroneck, a “get-them-reading strategy” requires students to keep a yearlong journal of independent reading, including romance fiction and graphic novels. At Hillhouse, where many students struggle, Denby witnessed a fiery conversation about To Kill a Mockingbird deftly handled by an encouraging, but tough, teacher.
An upbeat portrait of fine teachers and the students they inspire.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9585-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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