Uneven in tone, but engaging, cogent and persuasive.
A wide-ranging memoir from a veteran high-school teacher, with personal anecdotes and polemics concerning the future of the profession.
The author begins with a reasonable premise: We are all teachers, we are all students. That awareness, he argues, should form the basis of the teacher-student relationship, because all humans, regardless of age, undergo constant change. The successful teacher presents a life, not just a set of facts or compartmentalized knowledge. From the opening pages, the author argues against standardized testing, insisting instead on the importance of process over product. At first, this argument takes the form of random jabs hidden within disclosures about his rejection of his Catholic upbringing, his flirtations with drugs and alcohol and his first sexual experiences. In the closing pages, however, he addresses the issue directly, bemoaning the wrongheaded approaches of administrators and politicians. Paraphrasing William Butler Yeats, he contends that education must be about the lighting of fires, not the filling of buckets. Teachers should not concentrate on cramming facts into the minds of students, facts they often forget as soon as the test is over. Rather, teachers must “make certain every child can think, and think critically.” This organic approach, based on an honest appraisal of life, explains why Henry moves into a confessional mode at times, openly discussing human sexuality, for instance, including his observations on the taboo subject of teacher-student relationships. Henry strikes the most resonant chords in his closing chapters, when he becomes less personal and situates his complaints within a broader context, particularly that of the language that Americans use to describe themselves. There are two Americas, he argues–the idealized one that admits no faults, and a darker one that politicians and the corporate media fail to discuss. If the establishment habitually lies to young people, he says, it’s not surprising that they often dismiss education as boring or irrelevant.
Uneven in tone, but engaging, cogent and persuasive.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58501-087-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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