A kindhearted, engaging story of helping modern immigrant children via a 400-year-old classic text.
The story of an after-school program that helps immigrant children adjust to their new American life.
What does reading and translating Don Quixote, published in the early 17th century, have to do with modern-day life for immigrant children in Bushwick, Brooklyn? Quite a lot, according to Haff, a theater director and former high school English teacher, who set up Still Waters in a Storm for children of undocumented immigrants. As he writes, the author chose Cervantes’ work because “that book is everything human—it is funny and tragic and beautiful and disgusting and smart and stupid—and because it was written in Spanish, the native language of my students and their families.” By reading the quirky tale of a man who never gave up his dreams, Haff’s students have found new meaning in their own lives despite the constant fear of deportation amid the current toxic landscape surrounding immigration, an atmosphere inflamed by the current presidential administration. Not only did the students read the book and translate it out loud; they also adapted it into a series of musicals that they wrote. They became Kid Quixotes, acting out their own versions of the story, which they performed in multiple venues. Haff also includes his own story of being an educator suffering from bipolar depression and how this project has positively impacted his life as well. This is a decidedly upbeat book full of compassion and an attentiveness to language, and Haff imparts pertinent lessons regarding truth, hope, thoughtfulness, awareness, friendships, and what it means to be genuine. The narrative also carries the weight of what each child must endure as an immigrant, including racism, distrust, and fear, and shows how they have worked to overcome these obstacles via songs, acting, drawings, and imaginative retellings of their lives.
A kindhearted, engaging story of helping modern immigrant children via a 400-year-old classic text.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293406-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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