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AN EMBARRASSMENT OF TYRANNIES

Name: AN EMBARRASSMENT OF TYRANNIES
Author: W.L. Webb
ISBN: 0-8076-1441-6

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF INDEX ON CENSORSHIP

edited by W.L. Webb & Rose Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1998

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A powerfully hard-hitting collection of short essays. Contributor and longtime associate Webb and current production editor Bell offer an edited volume culled from the pages of the British periodical Index on Censorship. Founded to challenge political censorship, the original goal of Index was to provide “the noise of publicity outside every detention centre and concentration camp.” Strangling words by denying them an audience effectively kills an author, and Index is a writer’s response to political tyranny, an effort to keep authors from disappearing “into total obscurity and loneliness” so that they “and the names of their works, would remain among the names of the living.” Twenty-five years ago the repressive regimes of the Soviets and their allies were the obvious targets, but throughout its tenure Index has resisted identification with a particular ideology. Equal opportunity gadflies, its contributors have exposed a wide range of threats to freedom throughout the world and have criticized censorship whether a function of political, religious, or social concerns. Familiar names include Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Rushdie, but the most powerful efforts are not necessarily from the most famous writers: consider the letter from George Mangakis in his Greek prison cell, Ivan Kraus’s satire addressed to Ceausescu, the response of Nigerian Wole Soyinka to Khomeini’s indictment of Rushdie, or Dror Green’s story from inside the Israeli-occupied territories. Essays by Arthur Miller, Judy Blume, and Noam Chomsky cast spotlights on American forms of censorship, and even England is held up for scrutiny by Michael Tippett, John Mortimer, and others. Throughout this volume a unique characteristic of the best political writing is on display: the message is disturbing but simultaneously uplifting, for the simple fact that someone could write about these experiences, however horrible, or make these arguments, however appallingly necessary, indicates there is hope for the achievement of human freedom and dignity in the world.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1998

ISBN: 0-8076-1441-6

Page Count: 347

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998

Categories:

EDUCATION

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THE ABOLITION OF MAN

by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1947

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The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.

Pub Date: April 8, 1947

ISBN: 1609421477

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947

Categories:

EDUCATION

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL MY ROAD BEFORE ME
by C.S. Lewis

- BOOK REVIEW
PRESENT CONCERNS
by C.S. Lewis

- BOOK REVIEW
BOXEN
by C.S. Lewis

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INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993

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American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.