Inspiring reading for educators and anyone who cares about education.
A self-proclaimed “educational abolitionist” reflects on her journey to becoming a children’s literacy advocate.
For as long as Bailey could remember, books offered a thrilling freedom she could not find elsewhere, and the African Methodist Episcopal church she and her parents attended exerted an equally powerful influence on her. Through it, she learned the importance of “elevat[ing] the status of the Black community.” Both would later become sources of the author’s strength in a world hostile to people of color and inspire her to pursue a career in education. She navigated a life that took her from a high school English teaching job to full-time motherhood to a doctorate in education. Her research led her to the work of Paul Farmer, the head of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, a leader in health and human rights. Galvanized by his example, Bailey organized an after-school reading program, Freedom Readers, at a public housing community. Her experiences with that program led her to the realization that low-income students needed strong literacy skills to “navigate a world where racism throws up barriers every day.” At the same time, she continued to see how easily the academic institution could derail the work in which she believed. A month before her graduation, the professors overseeing her dissertation tried to invalidate her research by saying the communities Freedom Readers served “didn’t need [her] to come in and fix them.” Bailey successfully deflected their criticisms and earned her doctorate, with a specialization in language and literacy, while continuing to expand an educational program that challenged both “white supremacy” and the anti-humanist leanings of a capitalist society. As it critiques modern American educational practices, this timely book makes an impassioned plea for the humane innovations needed to create a just learning system for all.
Inspiring reading for educators and anyone who cares about education.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63542-080-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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