Like the author’s teaching style: freethinking, demanding, encouraging, at times bumptious.
Honored by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Johns Hopkins University during his 17 years in the Los Angeles public-school system, Esquith explains how he molds disadvantaged kids into high-performing fifth- and sixth-graders.
His counsel is hard-won—the book positively floats on anecdotal evidence—and the author doesn’t boil it down to a few tidy aphorisms. Esquith demonstrates in detail that little of lasting value is attained in an instant; achievement comes instead from “discipline, hard work, perseverance, and generosity of spirit.” Teach by example, like an Atticus Finch, he urges; make sure you get kids out in the world, let them see what they are working for. Fight the gospel of mediocrity: “I got rid of state-sponsored books,” he writes. “They killed the joy of reading.” He could only fire up a desire to pursue learning in his students if he was passionate about what he is teaching, so out went comprehensive guides and routine texts; in came much effort and attentiveness, translated into many extra, unpaid hours. Esquith’s garlicky advice concerns matters both practical and spiritual, ranging from how to avoid bureaucratic pitfalls to keeping a close eye on yourself. Never confuse popularity or the ability to command obedience with effectiveness as a teacher, he cautions. He has some moments of sloppy thinking—surely he doesn’t truly believe “there’s nothing wrong” with teachers going by rote, their charges on autopilot—and his schedule is way too scant on physical activity, though one senses he'd fix that if needed. Mostly he is right there with the goods: sharp math problems, books he and his students enjoy, ways to instill social skills in preteens. “It’s dangerous to think too much about public education,” writes Esquith, but somebody has to, and it’s a lucky thing he decided to shove in his oar.
Like the author’s teaching style: freethinking, demanding, encouraging, at times bumptious.Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42202-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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