Both personal and historical, this is a welcome book on the importance of education for all.
Elevating the thinking around school improvements, from the nuts-and-bolts ideas to a broader view.
Most parents, teachers and others involved in the education of children and teens would agree that nearly every school could use improvement in certain areas. There are, of course, dozens of useful books on the education shelf, but Buzbee (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History, 2006, etc.) provides a bracing rejoinder to the didactic, data-driven books from policy gurus and social scientists. Where other authors draw on research studies and have specific case studies that serve as the frosting on the cake, the author starts from his own experience and leapfrogs back in time to explore various educational practices and their origins. The blackboard itself was invented back in 1800. Students were using their portable blackboards to practice writing and arithmetic in school and at home when George Baron thought to connect a series of them on the wall to teach broader and more complex formulas to a larger audience of students. Buzbee writes of the different views of the teacher in the front, from the “lecturing chalk-and-talk” droners who fail to reach students to those who serve as “a lens through which the lesson is created and clarified.” From the layout of schools to the distinction between “middle school” and “junior high school,” Buzbee spreads engaging prose across the pages, providing both a reminiscence of better days and a considered examination of the assumptions we all make about what does—and does not—constitute a quality education. In the epilogue, he offers a series of proposals, noting the importance of raising teacher salaries—and yes, even if that means raising taxes. “And to prove my seriousness, let me be the one to say it first,” he writes. “You may read my lips: Raise my taxes!..you can raise my taxes through the roof…raise them to Swedish levels, to ‘socialist’ levels.”
Both personal and historical, this is a welcome book on the importance of education for all.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-683-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
