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
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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