Next book

DOMERS

A YEAR AT NOTRE DAME

From freshman orientation to graduation ceremonies for Notre Dame's Class of '93, Coyne (A Day in the Night of America, 1992) presents a lavishly detailed, day-to-day look at a year under the shadow of the Dome. The school kicked off its sesquicentennial year by welcoming 1,882 freshman, who represented the top 10% of their high school classes. Coyne attended lectures, classes, meetings, parties, rallies, and, of course, football games. Inescapably, a Notre Dame school year revolves around the legendary football program and the ``tightly scripted extravaganzas'' of game weekends. But it's not all football and rah-rah at ol' Notre Dame. Coyne follows the exploits of several students from Keenan Hall, including freshman roommates Patrick Lyons and Steve Sabo, and their live-in rector, Bonaventure Scully. The dorm's annual revue would feature doo-wop singers and skits that, ``like most college humor, tended toward the outer limits of good taste.'' There's also Rachel Stehle, a trumpeter with the marching band; Lou Blaum, a senior member of the vaunted Irish Guard, the kilted corps that leads the band into the stadium; Claire Johnson, co-president of a campus anti-abortion group; Chris Setti, a leader of the minority College Democrats, and Joe Carrigan, a boxer favored to win the 150-pound division of the school's annual Bengal Bouts. Coyne also spends time with school president Edward ``Monk'' Malloy and Father Bob Derby, a revered history professor who swears he'll ``die with a piece of chalk in [his] hand,'' and takes a look back at the late Frank O'Malley, ``Notre Dame's Mr. Chips'' and the rare layman buried in the Holy Cross cemetery. Overall looms the Knute Rockne legend, whose influence was felt in 1992 upon the death of longtime athletic director Moose Krause, who first came to Notre Dame in 1931 at Rockne's urging. Coyne captures the spirit and tradition of this unique institution and penetrates the glow of the golden dome with an objective look at the academic, political, and social life of its people. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995

ISBN: 0-670-85005-5

Page Count: 329

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995

Categories:
Next book

INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

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

Categories:
Next book

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.

Pub Date: April 8, 1947

ISBN: 1609421477

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947

Categories:
Close Quickview