Crackling with energy, Burkett's report is a good dose of high school for those who have been away for a while—turbulent,...
The strange world of the American suburban high school, an incubator in which it is a marvel that any graduates hatch, snappily chronicled by Miami Herald journalist Burkett (The Right Women, 1998, etc.).
Burkett spent the 1999–2000 school year at the Prior Lake High School in Minnesota. She wanted to move beyond the Columbine half-truths regurgitated by pundits, and get a real sense of what goes on inside suburban schools. Is there dignity in the experience? Does it offer hope to its students? Burkett appreciates that she won't be able to experience school like a student would, but she gets right in with the “Jocks and Wiggers, Preps, Punks, Burnouts, Rednecks, Sluts and Goths,” and does her best. What she finds is that high schools are the same as they’ve been for the last 30 years: a welter of angst, hormones, confused purpose, social divides, scapegoating, and often contradictory and hypocritical messages sent by teachers and parents. It’s an environment that confines and restricts—essentially canceling the Bill of Rights until graduation—while urging independent thinking; that infantilizes while demanding maturity; that regiments and practices indiscriminate zero tolerance. Nor is it late-breaking news that students continue to raise flakiness to a high art; that they are wracked by ennui and are “unwilling to be reasoned with or shamed into obedience.” But Burkett brings the gavel down square on the heads of administration and parents for their haywire priorities, and for demanding that students strive for excellence, avoid caving to social pressures, and express themselves, while throwing up as many obstacles to these already difficult goals as possible.
Crackling with energy, Burkett's report is a good dose of high school for those who have been away for a while—turbulent, unstable, and unpredictable, with a company of survivors cast as graduates.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621148-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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