by Rafe Esquith ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2003
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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