A great read for historians that will also appeal to anyone who enjoys a first-rate family saga.
This debut family biography tells the story of the author’s grandfather, a homebuilder who built a 10-foot-wide, three-story house after losing everything in the Great Depression.
In 1932, after losing his business, Nathan Seely, one of the first African-American homebuilding business owners in New York, drafted a blueprint and singlehandedly built the titular house in Mamaroneck out of scrap materials, which saved the family from homelessness. However, it failed to salvage Nathan and Lillian’s troubled marriage. Nathan was a man who defined himself by his work, and by working for himself. For many years, he and his brother Willard ran a successful construction business, aimed at building affordable houses for African-American people. Lillian, who’d become accustomed to living in a big house during prosperous times, felt that he should have tried other lines of work. Meanwhile, differences between the gregarious Nathan and his introverted son, Tom, were exacerbated by Tom’s lack of interest in the building trades, and the spartan conditions of life in the Skinny House. Author Seely’s interest in her family history was piqued by the architectural oddity of the titular house, as well as the fact that her own father rarely smiled in early family photos. She knew that he and her grandfather were estranged, but she didn’t know why, so in 1998 she became determined to pursue the mystery. The result is a history that reads very much like a novel, and the extensive citations and photos only enhance the reading experience. Along the way, Seely meticulously reconstructs her family’s story, setting it against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and World War II. Although she knew some family members only through research and anecdote, she turns them all into living, breathing human beings on the page, including such vivid secondary characters as her Aunt Sug.
A great read for historians that will also appeal to anyone who enjoys a first-rate family saga.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Skinny House Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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