A passionate memoir of a woman rower who battled numerous odds in search of becoming the best in her sport.
How one woman overcame numerous obstacles to become an Olympic silver medalist in rowing.
Two years after Title IX was passed in 1974, 16-year-old Gilder stood on the shores of the Charles River in Boston watching rowing sculls move across the water. Though she’d never been in a shell before, she was instantly attracted to the idea of skimming across the water in fluid motion. As a freshman at Yale, she was finally able to experience rowing firsthand; by the end of the year, she had “stumbled into its demanding embrace, succumbed to its brutal glamour, and accepted its preeminence in my life. I was in a full-blown love affair with the sport. I wanted it all. I would do whatever it took to be great.” Filled with lyrical descriptions of rowing on the water and detailed portrayals of the workouts she endured to build up her strength and stamina, the narrative flows with the passion the author feels for her sport. She unabashedly discusses the physical and emotional traumas she battled as she worked her way from rowing in college to national and international competitions, forever looking toward an Olympic medal to crown her career. Having seen her mother come unhinged when her father left her for a younger woman, Gilder’s deepest fears centered on becoming just like her mother, but through rowing and a personal tragedy, she was able to persevere. She also openly examines her ambiguities about her sexual preferences at a time when being lesbian was not discussed in public. The author’s ardent story is one of struggle and triumph, of shrugging off the naysayers to follow a dream to its end, whether good or bad, and of following the heart.
A passionate memoir of a woman rower who battled numerous odds in search of becoming the best in her sport.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7477-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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