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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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