A curious hybrid: part history of the American university during the Cold War years, part memoir of the elder (Jacob) Neusner's five decades as perhaps America's leading Judaica scholar. Neither part works. Neusner Sr. is the hyperprolific author of hundreds of works on the nature and evolution of talmudic Judaism; son Noam is a reporter for the Tampa Tribune; together, they provide a brief and rather superficial history of the postWW II American university that is informed by a distinctly neoconservative bias: Recently, faculties supposedly have become radicalized; teachers pander to student wishes, curricula are standardless and rigidly politically correct; students are pampered and left intellectually unchallenged. At times, their tone deteriorates into Rush Limbaughlike rhetoric, such as a reference to academic ``fascist feminism.'' Meanwhile, in describing a supposedly pre-'60s ``golden age'' of academia, the Neusners somehow forget to mention the influence of McCarthyism or the CIA's efforts to infiltrate campus faculty. The memoir sections are no better. While Jacob Neusner has some interesting things to say about his own pedagogic ideals, particularly the desirability and necessity of balancing good teaching with good scholarship, his tone often is grandiose, as if he were the only one doing important work in Jewish studies. He writes about numerous colleagues with transparent contempt (about named and unnamed ``scholars of Judaism'' at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he claims, ``They confused their opinions with facts, cultivated obscurity, and practiced obfuscation''). At the end of his career, isolated after almost three decades at Brown University (he is now at the Univ. of South Florida) in part because of his abrasive personal and rhetorical style, Neusner sounds kvetchy, self-pitying, and bitter; one of his chapter subheadings reads ``A Career Concludes, The Ostracism Continues.'' Poor Jacob Neusner, poor readerthis is dreary stuff from an admirably productive, often insightful scholar.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8264-0853-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
MEMOIRS OF A MINOTAURFrom Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to PoetryMagowan, Robin
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999
ISBN: 1-885266-79-0
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
A passionate argument that moral education should be seen as an intrinsic part of high school life suffers from the very abstraction the authors seek to avoid. Sizer, noted author of a trio of school-reform books (Horace’s Hope, 1996, etc.) and his wife, who trains teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, believe that most educators view character education as an “extracurricular” activity designed around a series of “absolute” nouns: respect, integrity, honesty, and so forth. The authors, on the other hand, insist that “the routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matters of character” and that becoming an ethical person ought to be an active struggle that engages students’ minds as much as calculus does. For even as the typical high school preaches a “civil religion” intended to turn out young people of good character, the Sizers point out, the sights and sounds of a typical school day may undermine these same values. Students who walk into broken-down school buildings learn that their education is not a priority. Teachers who come to school ill-prepared also teach their students how to cut corners. Schools with predominantly white honors classes teach that academic winners and losers break down along racial and class lines. Though the Sizers do a wonderful job of highlighting the hypocrisy that students see all too clearly, the authors frequently use “real-life” situations as springboards for airy theorizing. Rather than discussing the frightening rise in student violence, for example, the chapter on “Shoving” contemplates pushing in the hallways, dirty jokes, and rudeness, before redefining ’shoving” past the point of absurdity to mean breaking new intellectual ground. This book makes an eloquent case that schools need to practice what they preach. But because the authors define their moral categories so broadly, the values they champion lose their power. When words mean too much, they ultimately mean too little.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-8070-3120-8
Page Count: 131
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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