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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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