A well-researched, disheartening, yet relentlessly hopeful examination of American public schools.
A former teacher assesses the problems that plague public schools in the United States in this debut education book.
During her tenure teaching elementary math in Baltimore County public schools, DeMallie was time and again “a teacher without a voice.” Her own professional opinions, based on the interests of the students she knew best, were constantly vetoed by the schools’ administrations. Tired of seeing how the public school system itself “enabled the problem and failed to provide a solution,” the author resigned after seven years in the classroom to become a national voice for education reform. This book’s first half identifies some of the major issues confronting America’s public schools, ranging from corrupt superintendents to the misapplication of technology. DeMallie’s nuanced analysis tackles the controversial Common Core, noting areas where it “benefits” students but also highlighting spots where it falls short of its intended goals. Even America’s century-old grading system is put under the microscope, as the author encourages readers to ask if “grades motivate students” to learn or even are accurate reflections of their knowledge. The second half of the volume centers on “Ten Steps To Improve Public Education,” which range from mental fortitude (“be resilient” and “focus on the positive”) to pragmatic tips, such as the efficacy of teacher microphones in reducing academic and behavioral issues. DeMallie’s rigorous analysis is often accompanied by anecdotes from her time in the classroom as well as her own experiences as a parent whose son initially struggled in school due to a hearing issue. These vignettes, combined with the author’s conversational yet informed writing style, make for an approachable read. Designed to spawn future parent/teacher activists, the book also includes questions for small group discussions as well as practical advice on how individuals can speak up and make changes on a local and even national level (as DeMallie did as the founding director of the Institute of Classroom Hearing). While some may disagree with the author’s suggestion to not “rely on politicians” for reform, this is a remarkably well-written, balanced, and impassioned case for change.
A well-researched, disheartening, yet relentlessly hopeful examination of American public schools.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-451796-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Zero gravitas, zero laughs—satisfying only to the most die-hard of Allen fans.
A tired blend of putatively comic stories old and new, and good luck telling them apart.
Once a regular in the New Yorker, from which many of these pieces (the most recent from 2013) are gathered, Allen serves up stories that will make readers long for his Without Feathers heyday. The jokes are thin, the puns obvious and labored unless you crack up at character names such as Al Capon, “a small-time egg baron.” Many stories center on showbiz types, often has-beens struggling to remain relevant or even employed. In that poultry-lashed yarn, for instance, the narrator recounts a “circus geek whose specialty is eating a live chicken” playing before a barnyard of birds, one of whose members, “flapping and squawking uncooperatively, managed to vitiate all pathos.” In one of many creepy moments, Allen’s protagonist describes himself as “a supplicant who has yet to achieve double digits when it comes to bedding the juicy gender,” by way of prelude to a Hollywood carnal encounter featuring “the sleek, white-jacketed Chinese houseboy, Hock Tooey.” A later story hinges on the prospect of an orgy, a bit of shtick fit for 1960s-era Playboy, while another tale that plays on the racist “Confucius Say” trope—see the Chinese houseboy above—is a flat-out embarrassment. The most current reference is to Brad Pitt, who, an impresario hopes, will play opposite to “a hot blond biologist…kind of an Eve Curie but with a great rack” who “wears a tight white lab coat” and “the black bikini underwear she got as a gift from her peers for making the Nobel short list.” One of the book’s rare winning bits involves a man “reincarnated as a lobster” and latching onto Bernie Madoff’s nose. Read the whole thing as an anachronism that belongs on the cutting-room floor circa Love and Death, and you’re on the mark.
Zero gravitas, zero laughs—satisfying only to the most die-hard of Allen fans.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956763-29-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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