A Pulitzer Prizewinning veteran journalist repackages old news to argue for an overhauled America. Smith, a longtime student of Soviet society (The New Russians, 1990, etc.), here turns his attention to his homeland, contrasting our educational and economic systems—and especially the points where they intersect—with those of Japan and Germany. He finds America wanting, and for good reason. Noting, as many others have, that Japanese and German workers are much better trained than are their American counterparts, he takes a close look at the interplay of solid, year-round education and apprenticeship programs with economies that can roll with the punches rather than ``downsize,'' jettisoning workers and destroying lives in their retreat. Along the way Smith turns up surprises; he notes, for instance, that Japan's supposedly rigid public-school curriculum is remarkably flexible, with ``a baffling lack of stress on academic achievement'' and a more emphasis on ``stimulating [students'] delight in the process of learning than...on their getting the right answers.'' His arguments are sharp and telling, and Smith is not afraid to steer into controversy, stating baldly that ``by focusing its resources on the college-bound, America's public school system has unintentionally become undemocratic, elitist.'' Smith's mistrust of received wisdom is a refreshing plus. The book is occasionally marred by business-book clichÇs: the abundant use of terms like ``benchmarking'' and of metaphors from professional sports, the peppered quotes from that old mainstay, Machiavelli. It is also too long by half. Still, his sharply pointed case studies and eye for telling details keep Rethinking America on track to a hard conclusion: We must change our ways or be lost in the future. Smith's timely arguments for redesigning our educational system to prepare students for life to come bears much discussion.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43551-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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