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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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