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The Bronze Rule

HOW I LIVE MY LIFE AND LET OTHER PEOPLE LIVE THEIRS

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A no-holds-barred look at academia from an insider’s point of view.
At first, Sisney’s book seems like an ethics handbook—a contemporary alternative to Aristotle or Kant. Rejecting “do unto others” as a moral guide, she instead proposes the “bronze rule”: “If they are not bothering you, don’t bother them.” During the first chapter, however, readers quickly realize that the book isn’t a new morality but a new memoir—and a fresh, energetic one at that. Sisney is a retired English professor who spent more than three decades plying her trade at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and her book is, first and foremost, an entertaining look back at her academic career. The slim volume is also a piercing, comic analysis of the African-American experience within the ivory tower. As such, it’s a worthy contribution to the academic-memoir genre, which even now features few minority voices. Sisney, now a retired professor emeritus, doesn’t pull the punches she always wanted to throw in faculty meetings; as a result, her exploration is thoroughly—and sometimes brutally—honest, featuring refreshing, candid discussions of race and racism in American universities. Equally welcome is her willingness to pepper the narrative with high- and pop-culture references, matching an allusion to Flannery O’Connor with a nod to The Apprentice’s Omarosa Manigault. The memoir’s shining strengths are dulled, however, by a few minor weaknesses. Although Sisney’s fellow professors will find lots of juicy shop talk here, nonacademics may tire of her in-depth discussions of the politics of tenure, the format of master's exams or the nuances of grading undergraduate essays. Also, Sisney barely discusses the titular “bronze rule”; she drops the term for the bulk of the book, only returning to it briefly near the end. Despite these minor issues, however, there’s still plenty of gold in these pages.

A frank, funny, cheeky and charming memoir of academia.

Pub Date: April 22, 2014

ISBN: 978-1496175021

Page Count: 152

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

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MASTERY

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

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BRAVE ENOUGH

These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.

A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.

What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.

These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-101-946909

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

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