Tompkins's whiny musings on the state of American education, told through her own story of a lifetime in academia. Tompkins (West of Everything, 1992) seems to have had a pretty easy time of it: She grew up white and middle class, attended Bryn Mawr and Yale. She landed a teaching position immediately after graduate school, took some time off, got another teaching position, and was then tenured at Temple University. After leaving her second husband for the legendary scholar Stanley Fish, she and Fish were soon picked up and tenured by Duke University, where Tompkins now teaches English. It sounds like an academic's dream come true, but Tompkins doesn't see it that way. Here she picks through her schooling, finding fault with nearly everything she encountered: She didn't like going to school when she was young. She tried too hard to please the teachers. She once wet her pants in front of her sixth-grade class while giving a book report. Her mother, an insomniac, took naps in the afternoon. She hated a classmate who said something clever in a graduate English class. These somewhat disjointed remembrances and other anecdotes are Tompkins's proof of a malevolent force behind our educational institutions—the obsessive quest to educate (as opposed to a shared exploration by student and teacher). Her prescription is for teachers to adapt her style of instruction, using open discussions, intensive interaction, fluid syllabi. This may work for college English classes, but what about courses where a mastery of set material is more important than the immediate pleasure of the student and teacher, such as, say, medical school? While a nonstressful, nonconfrontational school environment is a wonderful goal, Tompkins offers little practical advice on how to attain it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-91212-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
