Parents who hope to see their children compete in these word clashes—and those who enjoy word games—will find this a most...
Through the lens of spelling bees, an anthropologist looks at how childhood is becoming increasingly professionalized.
Shankar (Anthropology and Asian-American Studies/Northwestern Univ.;Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Advertising, 2015, etc.) draws on anthropology, education, language, and culture to explore why South Asian Americans from the post-millennial Generation Z keep winning spelling bees. Exploring the “rise of childhood competition to shifts in generational characteristics and immigration,” her research is fascinating. The author attended every National Spelling Bee from 2013 to 2018, plus many regional bees, and interviewed numerous winners, semifinalists, and their parents, and she discovered that “no immigrant community has embraced spelling as completely as South Asian Americans.” As one parent told her, “now if you’re an Indian child, you try spelling bees. This is a common thing now.” The Indian-American winning streak, writes Shankar, can be attributed to the efforts of highly skilled immigrants who came to America in the early 1990s. They valued education and prioritized “academic enrichment “over all else.” It also helps that Gen Z kids have a very high digital fluency. “The shift from US-born Baby Boomer helicopter parenting to Generation X stealth-fighter parenting,” writes the author, “has fostered greater self-reliance.” Shankar also provides a concise history of bees, noting that by the “latter half of the eighteenth century, spelling matches were a well-established practice in American schools.” The first National Spelling Bee was sponsored by the Louisville Courier-Journal and held in Washington, D.C. The author is excellent at capturing the drama of these events on both the national and local levels as well as explaining how “Spellebrities” are created. Today, the finals of the National Spelling Bee are televised on ESPN, and comedy writers provide humorous sentences for the pronouncers.
Parents who hope to see their children compete in these word clashes—and those who enjoy word games—will find this a most enlightening read.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09452-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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