A historical analysis of Scouting as the world’s largest youth educational movement, with special attention paid to its global role in citizenship education.
In this well-researched work, Vallory examines the history of Scouting from its beginnings in 1907, when Robert Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys, and how it evolved, quickly including Girl Scouts (or Guides) and spreading to 172 countries or territories by 2011. Very little literature exists on the subject, as Joseph P. Farrell, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, explains in a useful introduction. This book addresses that gap. Vallory first provides a history of world Scouting and goes on to describe Scouting’s core characteristics, including its definition, purpose, methods, organization and means of differentiation. Finally, Vallory discusses “glocal” citizenship education and the tensions among local, national and global commitments. Extensive notes and a bibliography serve as additional resources. U.S. readers will be especially interested in how the American system differs from that of other countries, with the ideology of sponsoring organizations, such as the YMCA and the Mormon church, conditioning the Scout association. “The controversial manner in which [Boy Scouts of America] executives have dealt with issues concerning homosexuality and atheism is not dissociated from its very unique model of operation,” writes Vallory. (The BSA’s decision to allow gay members, though not leaders, is too recent to be included here.) Via the work’s focus on history, readers can better understand Scouting’s relationship with progressive education. The author makes an excellent case for the importance of Scouting as an education in global citizenship, pointing out, for example, that “individual young scouts in Arab countries were very active [in 2011] around the so-called Arab Spring in Tunisia or Egypt, claiming their role as real citizens, despite the institutional relations their scout associations enjoy with the status quo.” Those who think of Scouting as little more than songs around a campfire will have much to learn from this intelligent, thorough discussion.
A valuable, readable contribution to the history of Scouting.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0230340688
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
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In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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