A fascinating premise and plenty of personal experience aren’t enough to carry this book from conceptual advice into...
An earnest, sprawling assessment of how we approach learning and thinking.
Part memoir, part theory, this book has a lot of thoughts about thought. Drawing largely on his experience as a teenager who left Japan to attend a boarding school in Connecticut, Ogata explains how he approached new challenges, from learning to pronounce certain words in English to physics. His central thesis is that learning can be organized into five steps—observation, inquiry, confirmation, discovery and review. The anecdotes Ogata shares to illustrate these steps are often intriguing and enlightening, such as his detailed observation regarding the syntax of thinking in Japanese and its contrast to the syntax of thinking in English. Ogata clearly illustrates how this type of observation informed his oral and written communication. Yet as the chapters continue, the five steps become redundant, processed again and again in different examples of problem solving. Ogata defines a genius as “a person with the ability to perform rare and creative thinking.” How Ogata’s five steps lead to genius-level thinking is an approachable line of thought, but it remains somewhat abstract how and why readers are supposed to apply these steps in common dilemmas. A sturdier framework for presenting these concepts may have helped rein them in. Some of Ogata’s suggestions—such as using a how-to approach in solving problems—are concrete enough to be useful, but other examples stem from the business world and other limited arenas. There’s a lot of talk of fun—a word that appears dozens of times in the text—but not all readers will be convinced that there’s entertainment to be had in slowing down and examining personal thought processes. At best, the broad guide is an enthusiastic treatise that urges readers to be conscious of how they think and recognize the untapped resource of their own curiosity.
A fascinating premise and plenty of personal experience aren’t enough to carry this book from conceptual advice into practical application for daily life.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991024001
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Duke Ogata
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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