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
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.
A British psychoanalyst examines the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.”
Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up—or giving up on something—is based on beliefs about change. “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can’t,” he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism.” At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take “sadistic pleasure” in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most “serious” of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, “What is worth surviving for?” Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these “answers” to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial “answer” of his own by building on Freud’s ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss—being forced to reckon with it—is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614140
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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