by Mark Gerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1997
The first-person account of a neophyte history teacher in an inner-city high school: White, Republican, Ivy League, he epitomizes The Man to his mostly black and Hispanic students. What 23-year-old Gerson had going for him in September 1994 was his youth, his straightforward attitude, his skill at and knowledge of basketball, and a sense of humor. For instance, when his students pulled detention for classroom infractions, he kept them after school to listen to Frank Sinatra recordings in an unsuccessful effort to wean them from rap. The kids came to call it getting a Frank. As a teacher, Gerson labored to engage the students by embedding facts in dramatic stories of historical figures—a favorite with the students was the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In current events, the O.J. Simpson trial was used as a springboard for discussions about constitutional rights. The school was a Roman Catholic institution in the heart of Jersey City, an enclave of civility, although it had its share of teenage pregnancies and family crises. The children came from neighborhoods rife with drug dealers and street shootings, and many had friends and relatives in prison. But their parents backed the school and the teachers and demanded hard work from their children, having made considerable sacrifices to pay tuition—conditions that are a barometer for school success, according to the latest studies. Nonetheless, what Gerson learned is that there are still two Americas, one rich and one poor, living side by side in suburb and city, respectively, yet each with its own social system and goals. Reconciling the two, Gerson suggests, takes more than tweaking educational practices. Among his suggestions: Personal contact between social classes, perhaps through a national service plan. Engaging anecdotes of a school year, leading to a thoughtful exploration of what urban and suburban cultures can learn from each other.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82756-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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BOOK REVIEW
edited by Mark Gerson
by Dave Cullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2009
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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BOOK REVIEW
by Dave Cullen
by Debbie Hagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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