No comments about Trouble in Academe: A Memoir.

5 comments about The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill.

1. For a wonderful read about a man I know, but thank you even more for articulating the hugh problem at the heart of academia today -- political correctness that has left a whole generation of students with a disfunctional inner compass. Thank God Charlie Hill decided to teach at Yale after he left the Foreign Service!
   Francie Bremer



2. Charles Hill is the consumate man behind the curtain - Worthen writes a bio worthy of close examination - her writing is just lovely and shows her wisdom. - Great job.



3. This biography is the first I've read of a man I've had the privilege to know. It's also the first review on Amazon I've felt compelled to write. I applaud Worthen's ability to peg Charlie Hill. Her characterizations are 100% in my experience of man who has lived a compelling life. I recommend this book to all students of foreign policy.
   
   Yes, you can marvel at the fact that a professor buys coffee at Starbucks. I feel sorry for those who've forgotten that.



4. I'm sorry but I've read this book twice now and I don't know when I've had a more amateur read. I'm with Publishers Weekly on this one, this author is smart and clever and in love with her own voice but she's not a natural writer, and her apparent infatuation with Professor Hill gets tiresome after only twenty-five pages. I can imagine that students who went to Yale and took courses with Hill might enjoy reading about him. Will anyone else? His family, perhaps. To the rest of us, even after Worthen's comprehensive look at his career, he seems like a nobody who somehow wound up at the top echelons of a corrupt government and now runs pretentious power courses from a cushy academic post. Worthen gives us a charming picture of campus life at New Haven, and how a lottery system insures everyone an equal shot at studying with Professor Hill.
   
   I got the impression also that Hill was flirting with Worthen continuously, but that his passion for Norma was making him "walk the line" as Johnny Cash used to say. Hill certainly seems unabashed by Worthen's curiosity about his romantic and sex life, even urging her on to ask him some unseemly questions even Bill Clinton might have balked at, though I didn't catch if he wears boxers or briefs.
   
   The revelations about Iran/Contra are minor ones, and debatable. I hate to break it to you, Molly Worthen, but your emperor has no clothes.
   
   The Grand Strategy course he teaches, she notes breathlessly, culminates in a "Crisis Simulation" day in which students are thrown into an imaginary crisis like an outbreak of Ebola or Muslim terrorists occupying the Senate chambers. It's like a Universal Studios tour ride putting you, the tourist, into Jack Bauer's shoes on "24." And out of such theme parks our foreign policy is born.



5. This is a fascinating book. Worthen was still an undergraduate at Yale when she began it, and she brings both the idealism of youth and a mature writing style to the page. Besides being a fly on the wall at some of the most important foreign policy events of the 20th century, the reader also gets an inside view of one of Yale University's most elite communities -- the Grand Strategy program, which trains future leaders in the art of statecraft. Followers of contemporary political events will be particularly interested, since two of the Grand Strategy professors -- John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill -- have close contacts with, and regularly advise the Bush Administration. This is no tawdry expose of secret societies (a la Secrets of the Tomb), but an insightful look into how an experienced diplomat mentors some of the most accomplished students in our country. It also is a moving coming of age story, as Worthen learns that her mentor is as flawed and human as the famous leaders he counseled.

2 comments about Blood And Memory.

1. A wonderful memoir of a son, husband and father focused on the 1940's and 1950's.



2. Robert Benson's assured prose and eye for telling detail take the reader into a vanished time and place -- the Louisiana bayous of the author's youth. This is more than a straightforward memoir, though: it's a thoughtful, frequently moving investigation of the complex web of feeling that grows between father and son, the tragedies we inherit from our parents like family heirlooms. I have known Dr. Benson as a fine literature professor, a man of much dignity. Reading his book opened a door into his heart.

1 comments about Educating America: How Ralph W. Tyler Taught America to Teach.

1. Tyler is helped reinvent twentieth-century education in America, but is too little known. This book offers a graceful, clear, and concise account of Tyler's life and achievements: it's to the point, and free from the woolly and jargon-ridden prose that afflicts so many books in the field of education. And there are some fascinating byways (including Tyler's explanation of how Bruno Bettelheim was rescued from Nazi Germany) into the broader history of America before and after the Second World War. "Educating America" restores Tyler to his rightful centrality -- a fitting tribute to a remarkable figure.

2 comments about The Diary of an Isle Royale School Teacher.

1. I enjoyed this written journal by a schoolteacher who spent the winter isolated on the island of Isle Royale, because it is the history of my mother and her family. They were commercial fisherman and spent the winters on Isle Royale, with only a ham radio for communication. It gives a very true picture of the hardships they endured, the amusements they created to combat boredome, and the personalities of the Johnson family



2. An excellent book giving an insight of how one person experienced the isolated life of Isle Royale during one winter of 1932-33. This is a fast-reading book which is not easy to set down. Anyone who has visited the beautiful island of Isle Royale National Park should find this diary interesting and captivating. Book's epilogue and editorial notes by author's son add special insight.

5 comments about John Dewey & Decline Of American Education: How Patron Saint Of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching & Learning.

1. I was teaching first-grade in Brooklyn when I read this book, and found a lot of Edmondson's arguments persuasive, given my classroom experience. Deweyan pedagogy is challenging, if not in some ways damaging, to implement even in the smallest ways in an actual classroom. That said, Edmondson's book isn't really about Dewey or his thought. It's a political work, which repeats a number of points made by educational traditionalists, but doesn't really represent Dewey's thought accurately, or engage with him critically in a serious way. Edmondson takes the portrait of Dewey presented by Russell Kirk in "The Conservative Mind" and imputes it to Dewey. Again, let me stress, I often agreed with Edmondson's assessment of American education, but his book is NOT an accurate or effective account of Dewey's thought and what's wrong with it. John Patrick Diggins' "The Promise of Pragmatism" remains the best account of Dewey's flaws, though it is primarily political, rather than pedagogical.



2. In 51 years of observing and experiencing the public education system in America I formed three broad impressions. The first was that educators must have a fondness for experimentation, since they always seemed to be reinventing the wheel. The second, was that all this reinventing was disturbing considering that those same educators didn't even seem to have a firm grasp on what outcome they desired. The third impression I had was that all the experimentation must be good for educators in the sense that it probably gives them ample excuse to go on taxpayer funded junkets to symposiums in swank places like San Franciso; all in the name of discovering the next best "method" of educating children. This book has made it clear why I developed those impressions over the years. The author of all the chaos in the schools is a man who wrote 130 books/papers on educational theory but could not manage or get results in the one actual classroom he taught in - namely John Dewy. Only a liberal could follow such a blind guide. Dewey might be likened to a Jimmy Carter of Education.
   
   This book is not as in-depth as one might like, but the author points out in the preface that oceans of ink have already been spilled over Dewey and his theories. This book seeks to cut through those oceans and offer a brief and devastating critique of the reckless experimenter named Dewey. Dewey serves as type of person who thinks he knows better than parents how to raise and educate children, and who flippantly would use children as pawns in an end-game of social engineering. Sort of sounds like Marxism doesn't it?



3. You are welcome to do your own research on John Dewey, but he has hardly corrupted America's schools -- in fact, we've hardly adopted his theories at all. If we had, we would no longer have SATs, LSATs, MCATs, or GPAs for that matter. We certainly wouldn't have the No Child Left Behind Act. This book is about school prayer, not John Dewey.
   
   From Wikipedia: "Dewey's ideas, while quite popular, were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes. In the post-Cold War period, however, progressive education has reemerged in many school reform and education theory circles as a thriving field of inquiry. Dewey is often cited as creating the foundations for outcomes-based education and Standards-based education reform, and standards such as the NCTM mathematics standards, all of which emphasize critical thinking over memorization of facts."



4. To be in education is to be, at some level, a political activist. After all, education is the water that feeds the tree of a democratic republic, and those who would educate are preparing the youth for citizenship in said society. Edmondson decries the state and direction of our society and this book is his activist response. While the focus of his scapegoating is John Dewey, the book is much less about Dewey's legacy and his work (which is superficially represented in the book - and naturally so; after all, who could possibly summarize in less than 130 pages the oevre of a man who published over 35 books and scores of articles over the course of his career?) than it is about the tragedy of a judicial interpretation of one of the cornerstones of our founding Constitutional principals: separation of church and state.
   
   The book is interestingly researched and is a unique and lively discussion of Dewey. About half way through the text, though, it becomes clear that the object is not to protest the influence of an educational philosophy but to use the cover of education scholarship to engage in the debate about school prayer. In his discussion of the function of education as an apparatus for moralizing he points towards Dewey and Dewey's ambivalence for religious indoctrination as the root cause for this deficiency in 21st century American classrooms. It seems Dewey, in other words, is directly responsible for having prayer taken out of schools - an extreme claim to be sure.
   
   If partisan scholarship isn't problematic for you, the book ofers some interesting insights into the educational philosophies of our contry's early political leaders. The book offers an interesting spin on the effects of our eduational system - spin that fails to address issues of race and, especially, class in exchange for cliched urgings for a return to a nostalgic educational past.



5. Most of my thirty four years of teaching the physical sciences and math were enjoyable despite being beclouded by the frustrating confusion of the pernicious decline of educational statistics. Our most earnest efforts in "inovative" programs, better book and innumerable caimpaigns for bigger budgets and better schools notwithstanding, the stats continued their depressing downslides. Why??? Professor Edmondson answers that critical one word question most succinctly in the 123 pages of "John Dewey and the Decline of American Education. It is a compelling read for everyone.
   Steve Masone, veteran educator and author of Hammer of Chalk

No comments about African Experience: An Education Officer in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) (Zambia).

5 comments about A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Book Arts Apprenticeship.

1. This was a strange read, because the author continually expresses her surprise for certain techniques and methods of the book conservators craft as she discovers them during her early learning and apprenticeship. I find this odd, as I've done a bit of self-taught bookbinding, and have encountered most of this knowledge through reading, and that the author purports to be a reader and decent student.
   
   An element I found annoying was the typesetting of the book. In general, I'm tolerant of these things, but, as this is a book on book arts and the author worked as a typesetter for some time, one would think that more attention would be paid to this. Specifically, there is only a word space (1/5 em) between sentences, not the age-old standard of 1/3 em (or even the 2 spaces that is acceptable giving 2/5 em). Also, the excerpts are set in too small a font, which contrasts poorly with the main text face. This detracts from the pleasure of reading a book, and should have been more carefully considered. I suspect the publisher is to blame, not the author.
   
   The book also seems to lack a broadness to the characters; their personalities, life, and interests are confined to the conservation department. Although the book is clearly a loving tribute to a master book conservator, one doesn't really learn about the man (nor much about the author).



2. Wilcox artfully narrates her experience as an apprentice for Bill Anthony, a famous book binder and conservator. She artfully interspeses observations about books she is restoring with phases of her life as an apprentice and other texts. She evokes the spirit of craftmanship, of taking many years, much time, and much patience to develop mastery of her craft. Great for book art students, art students, or those considering an apprenticeship of any kind. Of particular interest to those who've made books before, because they will understand vividly the technical descriptions of her project (thought these are accessible to the lay person as well).



3. Someone who knew that I was in the Interdisciplinary Book and Paper MFA program at Columbia College Chicago gave this memoir to me. It's a really nice read---especially since the bookbinding world is a small one, and everyone in it knows everyone else, as people travel around the country giving workshops. Always interesting to read about people who you've had as teachers. I found it very well written, an evocative and accurate depiction of an obscure art/craft/lifestyle choice, an illuminated window into a small, specialized world.



4. A practical person can read this book as an extended essay on how to approach an apprenticeship, and how to bind conservation texts. A spiritual person can add layers to the stories and extrapolate life lessons. Either way, the main character/author is extremely sympathetic character. Her teacher had amazing gifts, both as a conservator and as a teacher.

   The book is deceptively short. Looks like a quick read, but was so meaty and detailed, I found myself reading it for several weeks in order to digest all the material carefully.

   If your taste runs to the obscure, the "sleeper," I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.




5. A Degree of Mastery tells the story of one woman's journey through the education and apprenticeship necessary to become a book preservationist. Annie Wilcox, a bright woman with an impressive past in the field of English and writing, begins to take an evening class in bookbinding at the University of Iowa taught by a world-reknowned preservationist, William Anthony. Little does she know that not more than two years later she will become the first female apprentice ever to study under the direct supervision and teaching of Bill Anthony, an honored position granted only to six others before her. Through her apprenticeship, Wilcox learns the art of preservation and the dire need for conservation in every library, but especially those libraries that house an archives, manuscript or rare books collection. Through Wilcox's autobiography, the reader learns the basic process and means by which book preservation becomes possible as well as the importance and value of conservation in today's libraries. It is a wonderful piece of literature well-worth your time.

No comments about From Fallow Fields to Hallowed Halls: A Theologian's Journey.

2 comments about In Passionate Pursuit: A Memoir.

1. I have just finished reading Alessandra Comini's autobiography, "In Passionate Pursuit", which was recommended to me through your "personal recommendations" list on your Amazon.com site. This memoir which covers six decades of the author's life and career as an art historian was a delight to read. There were many sections where I had to actually put the book down and wipe my eyes, as I found myself tearing up with emotions of both joy and sadness. As a mental health counselor, professional musician, and patron of the arts myself, I was touched by how Comini so beautifully integrated her love for art history and musicology with equal passion and pursuit! Life can become such a balancing act for all of us and how many of us truly follow our heart's calling as Comini does? Equally, how many of us, especially when we age, look back and wish we had pursued those dreams much differently?
   Comini's book rejuvenates the human spirit. Her colorful descriptions of each site she visited makes readers feel as if they are standing there beside her. Intertwined with her journeys and discoveries are those very reflective moments such as having to say goodbye to life-long friends she has made along the way. Heart wrenching was the moment when she opened a letter mailed to her after her own mother's death, a letter in her mother's handwriting compassionately consoling others who had had a loved one die. Poignantly, she describes another period in her life when she dropped out of graduate school in order to assist Hungarian Refugees as they fled to Vienna during the Hungarian Revolution. Subsequently, she so bravely, and honestly describes her own battle with breast cancer which gives hope to women everywhere who are going through similar experiences. Alessandra Comini's introductory description of discovering Schiele's prison cell leads the reader into an exuberant, 233 pages of the author's adventures, travels, and personal memoirs. Comini's book is "real" and can reach audiences from those in the arts' world, students, and especially those who have ever had a slight tug in their heart to follow their own dreams.



2. Any student of the liberal arts - and, for that matter, anyone who has ever been inspired by a book, a painting, or a fragment of a song - should run out and buy this book immediately! Comini's rich, hypnotic prose brings her world alive and takes one on a journey of the senses through her brilliant career. Making deft use of language, Comini's writing is both deeply personal and introspective, tracing her growth as a person and as a scholar. At the same time, the narrative provides a warm, refreshing look at how art is "pursued," with the indomitable Comini and her trusty camera on the forefront of some of modern art's greatest re-discoveries. A cult icon amongst young intellectuals, Comini's articles and public lectures are the stuff of academic legend, so this book written in Comini's own words is a treat for her readers. This book takes up Goethe's call to arms: "Strive! Strive! Strive!"