A well-meaning book that loses its folkloric appeal in its obvious messages.
In Reid’s (The Student Councilor, 2010, etc.) children’s picture book and simple parenting guide, the impending birth of a fatherless child sparks lessons in positivity and spiritual healing.
This book, set in an imagined island village and illustrated in a saturated watercolor palette, is dedicated “To All the Single Parents for Their Strength and Courage.” The author delivers her messages of reinforcement in the style of a multicultural folk tale. The sun, she explains in her introduction, symbolizes an absent parent, who “for one reason or another,” plays no part in the life of the child. The story begins when the sun vanishes before the birth of a little girl named Arina. The unhappy, anxious mother seeks out a magician, who helps her understand that love hasn’t “disappeared with the sun” and informs her that the light of love is found in thoughts of happiness and gratitude. After Arina bathes in her mother’s newfound positive energy, her birth results in so much light and love that people come from all over the world to witness the miracle. From here, however, the story’s folk-tale charm gives way to a prosaic tone. In a kind but firm, teacherly fashion, the book becomes frankly instructive—so much so that when the now older Arina has a tantrum, her mother gives her a timeout and counsels her to “Never be mean or say negative things about anyone,” to focus on the positive, never judge others, be thankful, and to let her inner light shine on “forever.” This works for Arina, but real children may feel somewhat burdened by such a weighty panoply of expectations. That said, Lemaire’s (The Adventure of Maesee Peek, 2016, etc.) pleasant, page-filling illustrations maintain the book’s visual continuity, interspersed with blocks of text set against vibrantly colored backgrounds.
A well-meaning book that loses its folkloric appeal in its obvious messages.Pub Date: May 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5086-1270-4
Page Count: 42
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A brick hurled at the windows of the K-12 educational establishment for serving up content-lite curricula that leave US elementary and secondary schools among the worst in the developed world. Hirsch, whose Cultural Literacy helped launch the culture wars, traces the origins of ``Thoughtworld'' (the lock-step ideology pervading elementary education) to three elements— American exceptionalism, Romanticism, and professional separatism- -which when combined culminated in an anti-fact, supposedly child- centered ideology first propagated by Columbia University's Teachers College in the 1920s. With the best intentions, educators, pointing to today's information explosion, have forsaken rigorous, subject-based instruction for buzzwords he claims are unproven in practice, such as ``critical thinking skills,'' ``project- oriented,'' ``hands-on,'' ``developmentally appropriate,'' ``multiple intelligences,'' and the like. Despite his best efforts, Hirsch cannot easily dismiss the complaint that many of America's educational ills spring from a society disrupted by clashing ethnic groups and crumbling families. He is on safer ground in arguing that, because of these social problems, a demanding curriculum is needed to mitigate the effects of class on America's poorest children in their crucial formative years. Hirsch calls for national educational standards. Critics might argue that critical thinking skills serve as the only constant in periods when the conception of cultural literacy repeatedly changes. But without specific content-based objectives, Hirsch observes, children are likely to get little of substance—a dire outcome for all, but especially for disadvantaged children, who transfer in and out of schools the most. He is also likely to vex educational reformers in pointing out that bolstering student self-esteem does not raise achievement if praise comes without work. Hirsch sometimes sounds like Dickens's Thomas Gradgrind, harping on ``facts.'' Still, an on-target indictment of an educational system that refuses to recognize the madness in its teaching methods. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48457-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
MacArthur Awardwinning historian Levine (Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 1977, etc.) takes on the New Right in the culture wars. The principle problem with conservative attack on the academy, Levine argues in his new book, is that it is ahistorical, indeed, downright ignorant of the history of higher education in the US. ``The best response to critics of the modern American university is the history of the university itself,'' he says, and he proceeds to trace that history. Curriculum changes came not in response to a leftist cabal, he argues, but in response to larger social pressures. In fact, he notes, 19th-century colleges offered virtually nothing in the way of science, modern language, or history courses, focusing almost exclusively on ``classics'' courses that generally consisted more of grammar than content analysis. The current curriculum fights are merely extensions of debates on opening the curriculum that occurred at the end of the last century; Levine highlights the battle between Harvard's Charles Eliot and Princeton's James McCosh as the most prominent example. He demonstrates the ways in which the two world wars affected the rise and decline of Western Civ core curricula, and how the original literary canon offered in America's great universities excluded not only multicultural literatures but American literature itself. Indeed, as late as the 1920s, specializing in American literature was ``professional suicide'' for academicians. Levine is similarly effective in tracing the place of immigrants in American society and the changing understanding of how their cultures interact with the larger American one. Ultimately, he argues convincingly, the real fear of the neoconservatives is not that the university is too closed, but that it is too open. An intelligently argued volume that would be more effective if it were longer and more detailed. Still, an excellent starting point for debunking some of the new catechisms of the anti- intellectual intellectuals. (First printing of 40,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-8070-3118-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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