No comments about Tributes to John Hope Franklin: Scholar, Mentor, Father, Friend.

5 comments about Teaching Amidst the Neon Palm Trees.

1. This book, while using the trials and tribulations of Academia, isn't about Academia at all. Its about doing the right thing, for the right reasons, no matter what. Lee Miller went the extra mile, and showed what he is made of. He could have been a Marine, or a Bus Driver. The message is still the same.



2. Lee Ryan Miller deserves an award for exposing political corruption in academia. His first person account of his experience as a professor in Las Vegas, enables us to better understand the term, "Sin City."
   
   This book read like a novel. As each page unfolded, I became more intrigued with the story. Facts read better than fiction in this case. He is a gifted writer. Let's hear more from him.
   
   A first rate book from start to finish!



3. Lee Ryan Miller's Book is a perfect text book to clean up waste and what is ineffective about our Comunity College System. I can see that a henchman was sent to discredit.... but read it for yourself and see the patterns of the "underbelly." I could add book # II to his list and maybe we're redy for the recepie. This book takes you into the bowels of the system and tells you where the next volley of shots will be fired.... you bet they don't want you to read this one, as it will change community college elections all over the US.
   
   And by the way..... go ahead and run for a public office like a board position and see how many "Sour Grapes" pop up.. you'll also get a chance to meet the true "underbelly" of the educational system and their buzzards that they keep circling for each and every little crumb and and :chink" in your "metal"... but keep the course and proceed as it will never change unless you take a grass roots approach and start with the drudeous tack of cleaning up the "underbelly"!



4. The author is a flaming liberal. We spend the entire book wondering why he is getting this rough treatment from superiors / colleagues which he documents in such painstaking detail. Amazingly, it is not until page 169 of this 175 page book that he casually reveals that the answer is AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. He explains that CCSN wanted to hire more Hispanics and that his supervisor was told to replace him with a woman. Incredibly, the author seems to sympathize with this goal and then quickly moves on to another topic. His downplaying of this issue is odd, because he mentions a dozen times that he felt his idea of free travel scholarships for poor students was a good idea. Hey, I think everyone could benefit from his class trip to Europe, but why in the world should taxpayers and the other students be forced to pay for those who didn't save their money? Tuition at CCSN is already greatly subsidized and all students have the opportunity to find a job and save money. Besides, maybe their choice of assistance would be something more essential than a free trip to Europe! The author also complains that he didn't receive money from taxpayers (in the form of unemployment compensation) because he didn't teach over the Summer. As a part-time CCSN teacher, I can verify that Summer jobs are not plentiful. Why in the world would a part-time teacher expect to receive a Summer teaching assignment, ahead of all the full-time teachers? If he was truly an educated and talented person, I'm sure he could have found work here, given our 3.5% unemployement rate and our conducive atmosphere for starting a business. He mentions that CCSN's budget for international student recruitment was $270,000, but doesn't seem to find anything unusual about this. Why are taxpayers paying this much money to bring foreign students here? We already have plenty of foreigners in this community... just look around. He briefly comments on the firing of Mike Meyers for using a possibly-derogatory nickname to describe Zelda Williams, but he fails to mention the biggest scandal of all at CCSN: Zelda received a $50,000 payoff by the CCSN President and Chancellor, even though a judge threw her case out of court and CCSN attorneys advised against awarding any money until they could investigate her claim of "emotional distress". The author also fails to mention the outrageous, multiple scandals where Wendel Williams abused his authority to take advantage of CCSN. The lesson to be learned here is that we should privatize the education system and stop abusing the taxpayers.



5. The spiritual journey of a very inspiring educator. This book is exciting and inspirational. Fantastic!

No comments about Sorrowful and Heroic Life of John Amos Comenius.

No comments about Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School,1970 (Sightline Books).

No comments about Trouble in Academe: A Memoir.

2 comments about Henry Steele Commager : Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present.

1. In 1950, Henry Steele Commager was one of the best-known and most widely-read historians in the United States, and he would eventually be honored with over 40 honorary degrees. Today, he is virtually unknown to the public and, I dare say, is rarely read even by professionals in his field, American intellectual history. What a difference 50 years makes in the life of a historian's reputation and influence! The explanation may lie in part in a useful distinction, drawn early by Neil Jumonville, professor of history at Florida State University, between scholars, who write for professional audiences, and intellectuals, who write for the general public. Jumonville makes clear that Commager trained to be a scholar but, notwithstanding long appointments at New York University, Columbia University, and Amherst College, spent a good part of his career practicing as an intellectual. As a result, he was very popular in his own time but had relatively little lasting influence on scholars in his field.

   Jumonville takes Commager's life from birth to burial in this wide-ranging and solid, if not entirely stimulating, biography. The ultimate issue for any biographer of Commager is: Why did he become passé, even while he was still teaching and writing? (Commager died at the age of 95 in 1998.) Jumonville posits several explanations for Commager's quick descent from national authority to obscurity. The first is that much of Commager's scholarly work had encyclopedic breadth but lacked analytic depth; his opinions and judgments were intuitional rather than carefully deductive and simply have not withstood the test of time. Second and not unrelated, Commager clearly, if unconsciously, showed a preference for being prolific rather than profound. His insistence upon writing, lecturing, and speaking to a large audience, largely for financial reasons, enhanced his popularity but may have contributed to limiting the impact he made on his professional peers. According to Jumonville: "Commager as a popularizer was not a major influence on the direction taken by intellectual historians." Although Commager aspired to recognition for a high level of scholarship, "he was not a research scholar." Commager preferred anecdotes, biographical sketches, and narrative over searching analysis. According to Jumonville: "Many historians felt [Commager's] work lacked appropriate sophistication." Third, some historians clearly resented the "breezy manner" in which Commager wrote, although that was not necessarily a criticism. Commager believed that "history is a branch of literature," and even critics of the substance of his oeuvre tended to admire his style. Fourth and finally, I believe, is the fact that he lost his intellectual curiosity and ceased to read his professional peers, which is an essential activity for scholars in any field. In the middle decades of the century, Commager was nationally known as an activist in "liberal Left politics." In particular, Commager was an outspoken foe of McCarthyism, and this brought him into sustained conflict with conservative commentators. (William F. Buckley once inquired, puckishly if not maliciously, whether Commager's middle name was a tribute to Stalin. It was, instead, a family name.) Later, Commager was an energetic critic of the Vietnam War, and he tended to be sympathetic to the student protesters of the 1960s. One of the issues which Jumonville attempts to address is whether Commager was a consistent Jeffersonian liberal. In my opinion, Jumonville spends too much time attempting to locate Commager along the liberal-conservative political continuum, although, in fairness to the author, Commager spent a lot of time thinking about it, too. This exercise would be profitable if it were necessary to explicate hidden biases, but Commager was an outspoken liberal in most senses of the mid-20th century use of that term. Furthermore, it also must be noted that, although Commager enjoyed engaging in public discourse about contemporary issues, his scholarly books were not partisan. Is professionalism in the writing of history inconsistent with partisan advocacy in public discourse? Or, as Jumonville puts, it: Must there be a clear dividing line between "the role of the historian as a scholar and as an activist intellectual"? Commager's life indicates that the answer is: Not necessarily. But, in purely practical terms, there may simply not be enough hours in the day to perform both functions well. Time magazine criticized one of Commager's books for lacking in thoroughness and suggested that he was a dilettante. That was unfair, but the tendency to write and speak glibly, which punditry requires, does not serve the scholar well because depth of insight is what proves the professional historian's mettle. Jumonville's Commager is likeable, if somewhat eccentric. When friends were invited to his home to dine, his wife entertained them during the cocktail hour, while Commager continued to work, and, when dinner was served, Commager joined them for the meal and conversation, invariably with himself as chief conversationalist. Although he was an energetic teacher, he rarely learned the names of his students. And I especially enjoyed the anecdote during which Commager was arguing with a colleague about the author of a line of Scottish poetry; when Commager could not find the line in an anthology, he concluded that the book was incomplete and tossed it out a window. On the other hand, Jumonville's periodic discussion of Commager's long friendship and correspondence with historian Allan Nevins is interesting but not especially revealing. And Jumonville's frequent references to Commager's relations with the New York Intellectuals do little, in my opinion, to add to Jumonville's thesis. Some readers will not find this book very exciting. But to the extent that intellectual history is a spectator sport, it is more akin to golf than football. I believe this book is a major achievement, but I also suspect that there still is room for another, more searching intellectual biography of Commager, especially one which examines his scholarly output in greater detail. What I am suggesting may be the equivalent of "inside the Beltway" political analysis, and, were he alive, Commager might object to this narrow focus, but it is the standard by which every professional historian is ultimately judged.




2. Flatly written and repetitive, this book misses many chances to illuminate the life and work of one of the most significant public intellectuals between the 1930s and the 1980s. Jumonville keeps calling Commager a Jeffersonian liberal but seems to have no idea about the difference between Jefferson's thought and the way that thought was understood in the era of the New Deal. Also, though Jumonville stresses that Commager used history to justify political arguments, he is silent on Commager's place in the 1960s controversy about historians writing contemporary history, on which Commager wrote extensively.

   The sad thing is that this book is just scholarly enough to seem to occupy the field, but not scholarly enough to be the treatment that the subject deserves

2 comments about The Random Walks of George Polya (Spectrum).

1. Even if you aren't in math, I think you are likely to be caught up in the drama of George Polya and the various lives, the times, and the events that he touched. The writing is fast paced and engaging, much like that of Constance Reid's books: "Hilbert", or "Courant"... Through its appendices [by K.L. Chung, R. P. Boas, M. M. Schiffer...], this lovely book further gives you some insight into the math that underlies the stories. Other characters in the book: G. Szego, L. Fejer, J von Neumann, G. H. Hardy, H. Weyl, E. Landau, ...Through the book, the reader gets to experience the tumultous historical period that spans the long career of G. Polya: His life includes the main centers of science and math in Europe in the Golden period between the two World Wars. The second part is Polya's life of teaching and research in the US, at Stanford University. I was a guest at Polya's ninetieths birthday. It has been said that mathematicians have been more likely than others to have been uprooted in the upheavals of history, perhaps because they are concerned with theories and ideas that are more universal.



2. While George Polya is credited with coining the phrase "random walk", his journey through life was anything but random. Extremely influential in many areas of mathematics, his book, "How to Solve It" alone would have made a career. Like so many mathematical heavyweights of this century, his nationality was Hungarian. Given the number of mathematicians and their collective prolific output, Hungary must lead the world in per capita production of mathematical papers. Polya's first papers were published in 1912 and his last in 1987.
   The range of the work is just as impressive. Many concepts now considered standard mathematical fare were products of his genius. When reading this biography, you are struck by the features of human nature that he projects. Who else would talk about the list of the three nicest mathematicians that they ever met? Would anyone else dare to also talk about the three most unpleasant mathematicians that they ever encountered? His honesty when admitting that he was intimidated by John von Neumann show a level of humility that few people of his stature would ever acknowledge.
   In an era when being a lackluster to pathetic teacher is considered a prerequisite for a position as a research mathematician it is extremely refreshing to read about his qualities as a teacher and his concern for the profession. He was an existence proof of the reality that it is possible to be both. His contributions to the field of teaching are as strong as those in any other area of his expertise.
   Biographies of mathematicians sometimes degenerate into lists of life accomplishments emphasizing the major formulas and proofs of their lives. In others, the person comes across as a solid professional, but there seems to be little else to their life. In writing about Polya, the author is describing a person that you would no doubt find to be pleasant company.
   One of those amazing Hungarian mathematical exports that graced the United States with their presence, George Polya was truly a credit to the professions of being a mathematician and a human. This is one of the most enjoyable biographies of a mathematician that I have ever read.

No comments about Builders Of Camphill: Lives And Destinies Of The Founders.

4 comments about The Men in My Country: Sb (Sightline Books).

1. 
   I picked this up because I thought it was about teaching in Japan. Having taught abroad (China and Egypt), and having taught many Japanese students in the US, I thought it was a travel book about the teaching experience.
   
   It turned out to be something very different. It is common knowledge among expat teachers, that some US men teach abroad to meet women, who "unlike American women, know how to treat a guy". As I got beyond the introductory pages about sensing and "watching" Japan, I wondered if this book was about the reverse, liberated American women shattering a taboo and having sexual exploits in a foreign land.
   
   Further into the book, there is more insight. This is a highly sensitive person, looking for a place, affirmation, love, or maybe permanance in a world that hasn't offered it to her. Needs transcend her awareness of the wake she leaves behind. Despite her deep love (or is it need) for one man, she entertains two others. The man she loves wants her in some way, but is emotionally unavailable. Of the other two, one is married, and the other, as a worker in a noodle factory is not a serious suitor. I would expect that both have emotional scars from their relationship with the author. None of the three men speaks English well enough to have a normal, let alone nuanced, conversation with her.
   
   The book chronicles, after 7 years retrospect, her memories of the encounters, from her observation, along with a backdrop of the intrigue of a foreign adventure.
   
   I would recommend this to anyone going through a romantic breakup. Like a conversation with a fellow sufferer, it could offer a balm. The pain comes through the detail of obsession for the lost. The writing is very good, and I like the remembered conversations italicized and not quoted, since there is no way they can be exact. For those looking for a travel adventure, or insight into teaching English, this is not the book.
   
   The cover is great. The oragami figures in subtle colors clearly evoke Japan.



2. Abildskov perfectly portrays the heartbreak of loving more than one can be loved. In liquid prose, she both startles and cajols, rendering a painfully honest tale of heartbreak. I read this beautiful book in a single sitting.



3. This is a lovely work about a women's journey to find what love might mean- and no way is it trite. Ms. Abildskov is placed in a foreign country with new stimulations, finding for herself that love can show itself in a variety of forms and yet hasn't she maybe felt love before without recognizing its subtle ways? I hated to have this story end. I held myself back reading- trying to let each moment penetrate my feelings as they might have Ms. Abildskov. Her descriptions are as beautiful as they are heavy, letting me visualize and feel the weight of her emotions.
   A lyrical non-fiction memoir that left me feeling like I had been granted a gentle good-bye:
   "Are you sorry to go? I ask
   Kind of, one woman says
   In a way chimes the other. But it's time, you know what I mean? You can't stay forever. I mean this isn't real life." (page 115)
   Stay inside the real life Ms. Abildskov recreates and savor the moments. I for one was very sorry to go.



4. I could NOT put this book down. Ms. Abildskov has created a story of such difficult beauty and courage, such clear and striking insight, such sweetness and humor and fury, every page took my breath away. A journey, from the moment I opened the book to the wee hours of the morning. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

No comments about Butterfly Song -- A Woman's Journey Back Into Life.