3 comments about Crispy Piffles.

1. If you think that the Ivy League is the only place for a decent higher education, think again. Joanne McClellan Egnor's career teaching at a Florida community college reveals that a lot of people (both students and teachers) with superior intelligence and drive effectively use community colleges as places of higher learning. However, it is the lessons about life related by Ms. Egnor that endear her to her readers. Her book is funny, realistic, practical and makes the reader contemplate what truly constitutes a genuine education. I can't wait for her next book!



2. What a wonderful book of real life vignette's; all tucked into a neat package that flows with her personal experiences; topped off with a bow of humor that made this a delightful book to own and a joy to read. J. Egnor captured a sense of Community College life that I never was aware of on my way through school. J. Egnor writes in such a creative way that I felt she put me in her situations. Her humanistic and direct approach, into a learning institution, was refreshing and puts REAL face's on the people who teach and guide so many people through Community College's. Great book. Could not put it down. Every page was a new experience. PS: Sent a copy to my mom and she told me basically the same thing over the phone. She loved it too.!



3. Come and help yourself to some Crispy Piffles, Joanne's light and crunchy vignettes from 30 years of college employment. Experience shared wisdom features the author's flashes of humor. Teachers and students alike will welcome this account of college life. (Adapted from the editors, Vantage Press).

3 comments about Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of BaseballÆs First Black Major Leaguer.

1. It will come as a surprise to most baseball enthusiasts, but Jackie Robsinson was not the first African-American to play baseball in a major league. That honor fell to Moses Fleetwood Walker who achieved college baseball stardom while a student at Oberlin College in the 1880s. But Walker was expelled from professional baseball because of the devastating and pervasive racism of the day, including ill treatment by his team mates, his opponents on the field, and Cap anson, a star of the Chicago White Stockings, who drove Walker and the few other African-Americans in the major leagues out of the game, where blacks wanting to play baseball formed the Negro League teams and were excluded from the major league teams until Robinson's barrier breaking inclusion so many years later into the exclusive club that was professional major league baseball. Walker was more than just a gifted baseball player. In addition to being an outstanding athlete, he was also an inventor, a civil rights activist, an author, and an entrepreneur. Born on October 7, 1856 in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, Walker died on May 11, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a superbly written and enthusiastically recommended biography by David W. Zang of a truly remarkable life filled with accomplishment and frustration, triumph and tragedy, and which now has made into an audiobook CD featuring the impressive narrative talents of Andrew L. Barnes.



2. David W. Zang's "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a detailed biography of a talented, tormented, late 19th century catcher: Moses Fleetwood Walker--America's first black major league baseball player. "Fleet" Walker was born in Mt Pleasant, Ohio on Wednesday, October 7, 1857. This simple fact is mentioned on the first page of "Divided Heart." It is from this unassuming birthday that Zang begins his interesting, but confusing, discussion fo Fleet Walker. After mentioning Walker's birth, Zang tries to explain how Walker's life follows the lines of the nursery rhyme: "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace, Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go......" According to Zang, "it might have appeared that [Walker's mother], a midwife, used the nativity as a practicum and elected to give birth across the first four days of the week."(2) Following this, Zang attempts to connect the sixty-nine years of Walker's life to the nursery rhyme by saying " For as sure as he carried a full measure of woe, Fleet Walker was unquestionably fair of face, full of grace, and possessed of an ambition that would banish his dreams to distant places....Walker had overwhelmed the simplistic prophecies of the nursery thyme to such an extent that the possibility of a four-day birthing could not be dismissed out of hand(2)." This is only one of many, needless, airy speculations (as another reviewer called them) that wander from the solid facts of Walker's life. Because of these, the true essence of the man, Fleet Walker, is lost in "Divided Heart." The facts of Walker's life are intereting enough without Zang's meandering commentaries. Throughout the book, Zang points to several beliefs he has about Fleetwood Walker. He believes that Walker had a "divided heart," as he puts it; but he never pointedly explains what he believes this divided heart to be. The reader is left to wonder if the divided heart existed because Walker was considered a mulatto (mixed race of black and white), or if the divided heart existed because Walker wanted to belong to the white race and to the black race, but never fully belonged to either. Sometimes, the "divided heart" seems to belong to the author, who never fully explains why the story of Walker's life should be important to a reader today. After reading, it might be difficult for the reader to understand the importance, too. Walker was, indeed, the first black man to play major league baseball. He played collegiate baseball for Oberlin College in 1881, and for Michigan University in 1882. He also played professionally for the minor league New Castle, Pennsylvania, Neshannocks. When Walker began playing for the Toledo ball club of the Northwester League in 1883, the state was set for him to become the first black major league baseball player. How was this possible? In 1884, the Toledo club joined the American Association. At the time, the American Association was considered a major league. In a brief, but unusually clear way, Zang explains the process: "The American Association had been formed in the winter of 1881 with the avowed intent to become a major league rival to the National League, a status it won with an 1882 agreement meant to keep them from raiding National League rosters(40)." Because of the agreement, Walker became the first black major league baseball player. Due to injuries, Walker lasted only one season with Toledo. He never again played major league baseball, nor did any other black man until Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947. After the first two chapters, which explain Walker's rise and fall from major league baseball, Zang shows how Walker's life turned into an aimless, but somewhat successful life of entrepreneurship, invention, race theory, and jail time. He played more baseball for some minor league teams, ending his career with the Syracuse Stars in 1889. Afterward, according to Zang, Walker did "temporarily lose the attention that had been his... he would reclaim it in dramatic and unhappy ways." Walker became a mail clerk, a murder defendant, a convicted mail thief, an inventor, an author on the subject of repatriation of blacks to Africa, and an opera house owner. Generally, the state of Ohio is shown to be a hospitable home to a black man in the late 1800's. Zang excels in showing the history of Ohio's Quaker population's rejection of racism, and in showing how Walker thrived in several businesses in different towns in Ohio. The last two chapters show how much affection Zang has for Walker. Zang's details in the end give some needed energy to Walker's story. Zang even explains the cost of the lid for Walker's casket. Unfortunately, Zang's writing does not follow a chronological timeline closely enough to be easily read. For clarity's sake, the reader will turn pages back and forth to put events in some order--a job usually fulfilled by an author. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a complicated, detailed biography of a complicated, historical figure. Too bad Zang never explains "WHY?"



3. To properly understand the Twentieth Century American civil rights movement, one must understand how and why a similar movement failed during the Reconstruction years following the Civil War. Likewise with baseball history--to properly appreciate Jackie Robinson breaking the major league color line in 1947, one must understand the less salutary 1884 experience of Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker.

   Walker, born of middle class mixed-race parents in Ohio in 1857, attended and played baseball at integrated colleges in the early 1880's. In 1883 he left school to pursue a professional career with the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Baseball teams of the era determined whether to employ African Americans on a team-by-team basis, and Walker's presence on Toledo drew only occasional attention from fans and opponents.

   In 1884 the major league American Association absorbed Toledo as an expansion team. Walker, by then an excellent defensive catcher, followed his team into the Association to become the first black major leaguer. Injuries hobbled Walker, however, and eventually cut his season short. The Toledo club folded after the season.

   Walker returned to the minor leagues in 1885, but faced hardening racial prejudice which blocked his return to the majors. In 1889 the minor International League, in which Walker then played, joined the majors in adopting an unwritten, unofficial color line. By then Walker's career was winding down anyway.

   Walker's subsequent life defies easy characterization. He patented four inventions, published a book, and owned a successful opera house--but also struggled with alcohol, served jail time for stealing from the U.S. mails, and stood trial (but won acquittal) for his role in a knife fight.

   Author Zang integrates Walker's varying experiences into the larger mosaic of declining race relations in the America of his era. Indeed, Zang often ventures too far from the facts of Walker's life--interesting enough in their own right--into airy sociological speculation. He perhaps over-emphasizes Walker's mixed-race parentage as bringing about the "divided heart" of his title. His book nonetheless serves as a valuable testimonial to a fascinating and forgotten life.

No comments about J. O. McClurkan: His Life, His Theology, & Selections from His Writings (Centennial Series, Vol 2).

No comments about Making the Grade: Plucky Schoolmarms of Kittitas Country.

No comments about Father William Boyle: A Teacher Remembered.

1 comments about Between Revolutions: An American Romance With Russia.

1. This memoir is as compelling as a novel. It describes the author's stay in Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) as an English teacher in 1982, and in particular her romance with Kolya, a Russian living in St. Petersburg. She describes a return trip the following summer to see if the relationship had a future, and I was completely engrossed by the story. This is a very candid memoir, and Alberts is very honest about her own insecurities. In addition, the memoir is an accurate portrayal of life in the Soviet Union (at least according to my wife, who spent her first forty years there, and who also read the book).

1 comments about The Eloquence Of Mary Astell.

1. Christine Sutherland (Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary) presents The Eloquence Of Mary Astell, a seminal and scholarly study of the role that women in general, and Mary Astell (1666-1731) in particular, have played in the history of rhetoric. Mary Astell's importance as an Enlightenment thinker was overlooked in the years following her death, but recently her contributions and influence has become more properly recognized by historians. Mary Astell's deliberate choice to move beyond the limited format for rhetoric that was the norm for common female conversation, and into the more public realms of participation in philosophy, academia and political debate, broke new ground and set a positive example for future generations of women up to the present day. A welcome addition to college library, women's studies, and communications studies collections, The Eloquence Of Mary Astell presents illustrative excerpts of Astell's rhetoric, a firm grounding in the context within which Astell expressed herself, extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index.

No comments about Brahms Studies, Volume 3 (Brahms Studies).

No comments about Famous Chemists - The Men And Their Work.

3 comments about The Loneliness of the Long Distance Teacher.

1. I greatly enjoyed this book. It is the story of one teacher's career- both the positive and the negative.



2. I've just had the privilege of reading "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Teacher" by Edward A. Joseph and feel that I should express my appreciation for being allowed to enter the private world of Teaching in urban America. How, one might logically ask, can this be regarded as a private, largely unknown endeavor, given all the publicity the field of Teaching receives? It is simply because the intensity of the emotional involvement is just not appreciated or understood by the general public. This memoir does an admirable job of permitting the reader to share in that intimate experience.

   The book is not voluminous, employing short chapters which actually heighten the effect of the hard-hitting commentaries.

   The Epilogue has a paragraph which I consider to be very important:

   "In addition, the education community needs to restructure the schools so the teachers can teach and the students can learn more effectively. Increasing the amount of curriculum that students have to learn and teachers have to teach is not the answer. High expectations are important, but the setting in which education takes place must make achieving these expectations possible."

   I think Joseph is suggesting a more widespread implementation and acceptance of the Alternative High School concept like Yonkers Prep. I assume also that, while such an implementation would undoubtedly be desirable as part of a restructuring, his thoughts are not limited to only that. The solutions of fundamental problems inherent in our system are so daunting, complex and elusive that they would appear to require daring and drastic measures as yet not seriously entertained by those in positions of influence and authority.

   In any event those closing thoughts seem to set the stage for a follow-up book on this subject. I look forward to it!




3. The author gives great insight into the the trials and tribulations of a teacher working in a large school system. Especially interesting was the section about the beginning of Yonker's Prep, the alternative school that the author helped start. It is obvious that there were many difficult times but it is also apparent that the author loved the actual teaching. This is a great book to read for any one but especially teachers and those that may want to be teachers.