A rancorous but focused treatise on college admissions process reform.
A blistering takedown of the admissions process at elite academic institutions.
Connelly, the dean emeritus of Golden Gate University’s business school and a father of five, examines what he calls “the black box” of elite college admissions in order to reveal how it perpetuates socio-economic inequality and has even driven some teens to suicide. The book is split into three sections: “The State of Play in the Admissions Game,” “The Dark Side of Admissions,” and “How To Blow Up the Elite College Admissions Black Box and Reopen the Front Door to Social and Economic Mobility.” Each repeats the same arguments, noting how the admissions process works and asserting that it has a negative impact not only on students, but also on the country as a whole. Many of Connelly’s points are well taken, such as that students from lower incomes are at a disadvantage, in part, because they must take out loans that saddle them with crushing debt and that students from wealthier families have such advantages as the ability to send kids to “feeder schools,” which act as direct gateways into elite colleges. These notions will come as little surprise to many readers; however, the author also provides research and his own firsthand experience as a father to support his claims. He also examines the problem of admissions from several angles, showing how the system is economically, socially, and personally problematic; at one point, for instance, he sharply notes how colleges employ “sophisticated marketing techniques that exploit the anxieties of children and their parents in order to achieve a self-inflating and essentially meaningless aura of ranked selectivity.” The book ends with practical, actionable steps on how to create a fairer and more balanced college admissions process.
A rancorous but focused treatise on college admissions process reform.Pub Date: June 25, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-65-203600-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Deep—and often hilarious—thoughts from wee ones.
Questioning the “popular depiction of children as adorable idiots.”
“What should you do on the last day of your life?” It’s a question Socrates might have pondered. In reality, it’s a question posed by a young child—one of the many earnest queries asked by preschoolers in this whimsical and sometimes profound collection. Manguso, the author of nine books, among them the novels Liars and Very Cold People, included questions from her son that she wrote down in his early years. She also solicited entries from other parents on social media. “Before I started spending time around children,” Manguso writes in a preface, “I thought that people who paid close attention to these simpletons were people who had decided not to be interesting anymore. I thought that people found their own children fascinating simply because they’d been biologically hypnotized into loving them. Once I learned what children are really like, I immediately wanted to create an artifact of their weird eloquence.” Manguso divides these questions into a handful of categories; People, Animals, and Big Things are a few of them. The questions reflect the curiosity, thoughtfulness, and innocence of these “dizzyingly fast-learning engines of art and experiment”: “What do clouds taste like?” “Did horses know they were in a war?” “How do you get the meat off the animal without hurting it?” Each question is paired with imaginative and playful drawings by Finck, a New Yorker cartoonist. “When the baby is born, how do the parents know its name?” The accompanying drawing shows a mother cradling a tiny baby who is waving to her. A thought bubble above his head reads, “Hi. I’m George.” This is a book that will appeal to anyone who has raised humans or is thinking of raising humans—or is a human.
Deep—and often hilarious—thoughts from wee ones.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733622
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.
The noted record producer, sound engineer, and musicologist surveys the many sounds the world has to offer.
The title is from Paul Simon, whom Boyd, author of White Bicycles, met back in the 1960s when Simon was in the process of making a Martin Carthy treatment of the old folksong “Scarborough Fair” his own. But borrowing is the nature of the game, and musicians are often a step behind the times. Even as Simon, enamored of Zulu music, was recording Graceland, “on home ground, world music’s biggest sellers—Le Mystère des Voix Bulgaires, Buena Vista Social Club, Ladysmith Black Mambazo—were considered old-fashioned, even reactionary.” The kids, in other words, weren’t listening. Instead, hip-hop reigns in Ghana, the Rolling Stones in Rio, and heavy metal in Hungary—though Boyd adds, “even the hardest-core Hungarian heavy metal headbanger will acknowledge a fondness for Muzsikás, Márta, and táncház,” traditional sounds that world music–loving hipsters began to eat up courtesy of Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and other explorers. Boyd’s leanings are catholic, his enthusiasms varied, and he engagingly explores how Ry Cooder gathered the traditional Cuban musicians who made up Buena Vista, Herb Alpert scrapped light jazz for mariachi, and so on. Readers should prepare for a flood of disparate data that adds up to something more than trivia: Argentine bassist Leopoldo Thompson “may have been the first anywhere to deliver percussive slaps to this normally bowed instrument”; Elvis Presley was crazy for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and thus “Dean Martin’s Italianate crooning is all over Elvis’s vocal style”; “Wimoweh” owes its title to “Pete Seeger’s mishearing of uyimbube”; and much more. It’s marvelous, sometimes careening adventure, as Boyd darts from one musical obsession to another.
A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988670025
Page Count: 760
Publisher: ZE Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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