A humorous, gossipy account of an unusual lifestyle.
In this memoir, a woman looks back at five years of traveling and teaching kids in the circus.
Of everyone who’s ever run away to join the circus, Radcliffe—“a very proper fifty-year-old lady from academia” and former country-club member—is one of the unlikeliest. But after divorce and an unsuccessful stint as a Spanish teacher to “large classes of aspiring delinquents,” she started tutoring children in the entertainment industry and was then invited to apply for a teaching job with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Interested in new experiences, Radcliffe went for it. In her debut work, Radcliffe writes evocatively of cramped train compartments, bad smells, being too cold or too hot, and the difficulties of setting up classrooms anew in various towns. She reports on many behind-the-scenes glimpses of “the greatest show on earth”: the often troubled young men who do the heavy lifting; the performers’ routines and hierarchies; the seamy sides of many cities; and circus gossip, stories and scandals. Circus life, Radcliffe writes, is something like a village from centuries ago: Everyone knows “whose bastard the village drab had borne, who was stealing chickens, and whether the lord’s son preferred the shepherd, the shepherdess, or the sheep.” By the same token, “Circus children, on the whole, are warm, loving, and well-adjusted. These kids don’t just have one or two doting parents; they have more than three hundred.” Sometimes Radcliffe’s sympathies seem oddly placed. Writing of a cook who abandoned his family and joined the circus to avoid paying child support, she comments jauntily, “The circus won!” Hurray? She also breezily dismisses animal rights activists as “do-gooders” despite considerable evidence, including videos, of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey animals being abused with bullhooks, whips and electric prods. Elsewhere, though, Radcliffe is more sensitive to the darker undercurrents beneath the circus’s bright, spangled surface. In response to a jest, one of the guys says, “Hey, I’m not on the ten most-wanted list….I joined because nobody wanted me.” As Radcliffe says, “Sometimes a joke covers up a lot of pain.”
A humorous, gossipy account of an unusual lifestyle.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4827-0676-5
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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