An inspiring memoir of a determined man committed to social change.
The triumphs of a progressive educator.
In a book that is both a memoir and manifesto for education reform, Cummins (Two Americas, Two Educations, 2006, etc.) chronicles his remarkable career as a teacher, headmaster, and school founder. Though he was a mediocre high school student, the author was accepted to Stanford due to his impressive sports activities. “I was really ignorant,” he admits. “I didn’t read…I generally relied on Classic Comics when writing book reports on Dickens or Hemingway.” He thought little about his future, either, assuming he would join his father’s business. However, his classes in history and literature—and one course in particular, “Liberal Tradition in American History”—radically changed his perspective. “It was the intellectual equivalent of an earthquake,” he writes. Cummins began to question his parents’ political conservatism, revised his attitudes about social justice, and decided to become a teacher. Schools, he concluded, “seem to be the only place from which genuine reform can emanate.” Influenced by John Dewey, Jonathan Kozol, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Cummins enacted reform first in his own classrooms at several private high schools, and then, in 1971, at Crossroads, which he established in West Los Angeles. At first seen as a “hippie, progressive, artsy, flaky, unstructured, ‘liberal’ school,” Crossroads soon earned a reputation for rigorous academics. Its graduates, some who entered as underachieving students, were accepted into leading colleges. It also attracted the children of celebrities, who added glamour and talent to school events and fundraisers. Raising money, this book reveals, is Cummins’ forte. He not only found support for Crossroads, but also for the several other schools and foundations that he established: the New Roads School, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, the New Visions Foundation (dedicated to creating racially and socially diverse schools), and P.S. Arts, a nonprofit focused on providing in-school arts experiences in public schools.
An inspiring memoir of a determined man committed to social change.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939096-40-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Xeno/Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
