An enthusiastic and engaging—but somewhat narrow—argument in favor of teaching beloved books.
An instructor and avid reader shares lessons from years spent introducing children to classic literature.
In this education book, Pathan (Raman and Sunny: Middle School Blues, 2015, etc.) combines three previously published works into a single volume. The first presents arguments in favor of encouraging young people to read the canon of Western literature; the second offers strategies Pathan has used to develop enthusiasm for the classics among her students; and the third details the author’s experiences teaching and learning about books. Pathan’s own love of literature is evident from the first animated pages (“Classics therefore are like bound movie scripts for our brain production house”). The rationale for teaching the classics is a familiar one—improving writing skills, providing moral lessons, understanding the human condition—but also emphasizes the opportunities for fostering a love of reading among even the youngest pupils. Pathan’s strategies for turning students into fans of the classics are wide-ranging and constitute the most useful elements of the work, addressing ways of encouraging reluctant readers and students whose interests lie in other subjects while advocating the cross-generational sharing of books. The memoir elements are often charming, like Pathan’s account of how Frankenstein helped her “cope with” science when her teachers did not, her gratitude to Oscar Wilde for giving her a broader understanding of sexuality, and the letters of appreciation she writes to former students. While the volume’s focus is on classic literature, Pathan avoids demonizing more contemporary books and discusses her admiration of those works as well. The account overreaches at times (as in the suggestion that “tribal culture” is something students can learn about from Robinson Crusoe ) and never addresses the lack of diversity inherent in a canon drawn almost entirely from European and American novelists writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By eliding entirely the debate over which works should be considered classics, the book avoids a crucial question teachers must wrestle with, thus limiting the effectiveness of an otherwise comprehensive and appealing discussion of literary education.
An enthusiastic and engaging—but somewhat narrow—argument in favor of teaching beloved books.Pub Date: March 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-8-19-329060-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Fiza Pathan Publishing OPC Private Limited
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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