An earnest account that sometimes comes off a bit too sunny.
An entrepreneur and educator recounts how he built a business-centric model of pedagogy.
In this memoir, written with Devi (The Language of the Blues, 2006, etc.), high school math teacher Mariotti (co-author: Entrepreneurship, 4th Ed., 2019, etc.) traces his path towards teaching after he left the business world. In the mid-1970s, he was a recent MBA graduate when he was fired from his job as a financial analyst at Ford Motor Company in Michigan. He moved to New York City to find a new path for himself; soon, he started his own importing business and found that it gave him a sense of control. After he was mugged in 1981, however, Mariotti turned to teaching in the city’s high schools to get over his PTSD, and he was placed in a school in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Without any previous teaching experience, he had to quickly learn how to teach math in a way that interested his students, as well as bring discipline to a disorderly classroom. He noticed that kids paid more attention to his lessons when their practical benefits were clear—such as how to make change, or how to judge value and profits. The school system didn’t appreciate that Mariotti brought entrepreneurship concepts into the math curriculum, he writes, but he felt that it gave his students an avenue toward successful employment. He developed his approach in other schools in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx, and eventually founded an organization to promote entrepreneurial education in American schools. Mariotti presents his experiences in a light and engaging manner throughout this memoir. However, the work can feel overly optimistic at times, particularly when Mariotti waxes philosophical about the power of education: “The idea that entrepreneurship education can fight poverty, crime, unemployment, and violence, while spreading free-market and democratic ideals, is steadily gaining momentum.” The book is strongest when it offers in the details of classroom dialogue with his students over the years. It also provides the author’s engaging internal monologue as he worked out his next steps: “What choice did I have? It was either accept this crazy assignment or lose my job.”
An earnest account that sometimes comes off a bit too sunny.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948836-00-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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