Enlightenment is available here for anyone who has struggled to understand why their future depended upon filling in little ovals with a #2 pencil in response to odd questions about vocabulary. Lemann (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, 1991) describes a project whose purpose was nothing less than the replacement of family background with intellectual capacity as the basis for social and economic hierarchy in America. The SAT’s originators saw it as the scientific path to the optimal utilization of society’s human resources, matching abilities with educational options and guiding individuals into suitable employment and social positions. Such social utopian convictions today seem naive and possibly dangerous, but in the post-WWII environment the leadership of the Educational Testing Service and its meritocratic allies were able to put the machinery of this system in place, and testing became “the all-powerful bringer of individual destiny.” However, while testing advocates championed equal opportunity for all against the patrician social status quo, the tests they administered reapportioned opportunity rather than expanding it; the criterion for social discrimination changed, not the fact of its existence. Most of the antagonisms engendered by this new system of sorting winners and losers could be deflected by claims of scientific objectivity, but testing advocates didn—t foresee the race factor. Blacks were particularly ill-positioned to do well on tests measuring capacities, such as vocabulary skills, dependent upon education and environment; consequently, testing reinforced racial inequity. Lemann follows the story through the ups and downs of affirmative action and concludes with an unusually cogent analysis of what an educational system should be in a democracy and what a genuine American meritocracy would look like. Lemann has produced a suitably big book, sprawling across most of a century and multiple major issues, told through the lives of numerous fascinating figures, and ultimately providing an original, perceptive, and powerful analysis of institutions that are too often taken for granted. (First serial to Newsweek)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-29984-6
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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