An eloquent example of how commitment and innovation can better the lives of inner-city children.
Now principal of a Philadelphia school, Thomas-EL recounts his experiences teaching and organizing a chess program that turned potential dropouts into winners.
A product of Philadelphia’s inner city, raised by a mother who worked as often as she could but frequently was on welfare, the bright and hardworking boy was encouraged to excel by both Mom and his teachers, who helped him gain admittance to a magnet school and then a small, largely white college. Exposed to racism from students and professors, Thomas-EL was tempted to quit, but he persevered, graduated, and decided to pursue a career in television or the law. He had no intention of teaching, even though one of his professors had told him that he could help his community more as a teacher than as a lawyer. He began working as an intern for a sports channel, but was increasingly drawn to teaching; since most of his TV work was at night, he began substituting in schools. Loving the work and the kids, he decided to earn certification and a master’s degree so he could get a permanent position in the Philadelphia public school system. He describes how he did this, paying tribute to the mentors who encouraged him. Meanwhile, his students had to overcome numerous problems to stay in school; many had parents on drugs and didn’t get enough to eat in homes plagued by violence. Thomas-EL’s first success was an alternative learning program called Second Chance designed for disruptive students; it became so popular that students deliberately misbehaved so they could attend. Determined that the kids needed to expand their minds—“strive for an MBA, instead of the NBA”—he began a successful chess program; students won national competitions, as well as the respect and admiration of their peers.
An eloquent example of how commitment and innovation can better the lives of inner-city children.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7582-0186-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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