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
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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