Uniformly written and passionately considered, the collection brims with ideas, memories and hope for creatively inspired...
Incensed by recent trends to eliminate arts education from public-school curriculums, co-editors Kohl and Oppenheim present 20 insightful essays in a bid to draw attention to the cultural and developmental significance of the cause.
National Book Award winner Kohl (The Herb Kohl Reader, 2011, etc.) is angered by the myth that the arts “are merely frills or embellishments to a meaningful education,” while Oppenheim, artistic director of New York City’s Stella Adler Studio of Acting (and Adler’s grandson) reiterates the social functionality of teaching the arts to less-fortunate youth, “no matter how difficult their circumstances.” A live panel discussion in 2008 inspired these insightful essays from a variety of artists in many mediums. Recollecting her dyslexic childhood enlivened by theater, Whoopi Goldberg believes in the nurturing of the “artistic voice.” Rosie Perez comments that her current work on the board of a nonprofit arts organization allows her to promote creativity to children in inner-city NYC. Phylicia Rashad testifies to the good fortune of a high-school experience rich in artistic programs and creative encouragement; she pleads for a continuation of arts cultivation in schools, thwarting what she calls a “nation of robots.” Heartfelt thoughts from collegiate scholars like Bill Ayers and Deborah Meier lend a necessary urgency to the cause, as does education professor and MacArthur recipient Lisa Delpit, who remarks that “the arts allow us a lens to see gifts that may not be immediately evident.” The dedicated work of former professional dancer and artist Frances Lucerna and linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath offer prime examples of how the arts can be successfully integrated into school curriculums.
Uniformly written and passionately considered, the collection brims with ideas, memories and hope for creatively inspired students.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59558-539-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
By left-wing historian Zinn (The Zinn Reader, 1997; A Peoples’ History of the United States, not reviewed), a whimsical one-man play in which Karl Marx returns from the grave to modern-day Soho—not to the London Soho where he lived, but through some otherworldly bureaucratic error, to the New York neighborhood of the same name. Zinn explains in his introduction that he intends to show that “Marx’s critique of capitalism remains fundamentally true in our time.” Mercifully, however, Zinn’s Marx spends little onstage time defending chimerical Marxist oddities like the surplus value theory. Instead, Zinn presents Karl Marx the revolutionary, the family man, and the impecunious scholar. Rather than the often nasty and abusive character portrayed by some writers, Marx emerges here as an earthy, passionate figure, righteously angry about poverty, injustice, concentrations of wealth and power, and rapacious corporations. Marx also emerges as a beleaguered family man (no mention here of his impregnating the family maid), struggling to keep his wife and children clothed and sheltered. Proclaiming that “I am not a Marxist,” Zinn’s Marx decries the defunct Soviet Union and other police states created in his name, and talks dreamily of the paradisaical socialist society which he still believes will follow the imminent collapse of capitalism, in which workers are no longer alienated from the products of their labor and from one another, and in which inequality and want will be abolished. Imaginatively pointing to the globalization of the world economy and the merger frenzy as dark confirmations of the truth of Marxist criticism of capitalism, Zinn has Marx urge Americans to strive for an egalitarian society. The onstage Marx urges that we use “the incredible wealth of the earth for human beings” and to give people the necessities of life. An imaginative critique of our society’s hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice—which is perhaps the best way to remember him.
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-89608-594-5
Page Count: 88
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eccentric collection of brief essays (plus a glossary) that explains not the facts but the fictions of English life, as they were represented by writers such as Hardy, Trollope, Dickens, and Jane Austen. To provide an understanding of the life portrayed in 19th- century English novels, Pool focuses primarily on economic and social issues; the era's money, calendar (holidays, terms, reigns), and measurements; and geography. The ``public world'' of the era, he explains, consisted of titles, forms of address, various ranks in status and the etiquette associated with them, dinner parties, card games, presentations at court, social ``seasons,'' and balls- -from whom to invite to what to wear, to why wax dripping from overhead chandeliers on to guests was perilous. Pool—often sounding like the annotator of a Jane Austen text—explains the country-house visit; the contemporary definition of wealth; ways to protect one's estate—or to lose it; Parliament; the Church; the navy; universities; law, lawyers, and criminals. A section on ``transition'' discusses the roles of horses, coaches, railroads, and the mail, and is followed by essays on country life (hunting, farms, fairs) and on domesticity (marriage, sex, divorce, furniture, lighting, bathing, food—including puddings, oysters, and gruel—and drink, fashion, and servants). Pool winds up with the ``grim world'' of orphans, work, poverty, disease, and death, while a glossary explains names such as Wellington and Westminster, and terms such as ``wet nurse'' and ``whalebone.'' Not history per se but a period piece—a reproduction of the idealizations and stereotypes that appeared in fiction, many of which were well explained in context. Superficial but charming—in effect, a handbook on how to live as if one were a character in a 19th-century English novel.
Pub Date: July 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79337-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
