A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.
From its inception, the science of reading has been intertwined with American anxieties about culture.
The science of reading, writes history professor Johns, began in the latter decades of the 19th century, as the proliferation of print in American life gave rise to worries that it would overwhelm a vulnerable public. The nascent field of experimental psychology studied the process of reading, developing two instruments that would be improved upon and used for decades to come: the tachistoscope, which measured how well subjects recognized words; and the eye-movement camera, which recorded the behavior of subjects’ eyes as they read passages of text. The author’s account ranges back and forth, tracing his topic’s implication in eugenics, adaptation to improvements in World War II aircraft cockpit design, adoption by industry to improve the efficiency of the workforce, and incorporation into modern machine-reading technology. It’s a mammoth subject, and Johns takes some detours to explore, for instance, mid-20th-century librarianship’s adoption of the tools of science to expand its mission. In a later chapter on “the reading wars,” the author delves into Rudolf Flesch’s highly influential 1955 jeremiad, Why Johnny Can’t Read, but those who have familiarity with the push-pull between whole-language and phonics-based teaching will have seen the planting of those seeds in the dismayed discovery that the early-20th-century turn toward science-based instruction in silent reading revealed a population of students with dyslexia. Johns’ argument that this “Manichean dualism” has fed today’s popular suspicion of scientific expertise is dismally convincing. The commercialization of the science of reading is also a constant, seen in the line of products leading from the Ophthalm-O-Graph through the Talking Typewriter, the Dynabook, and Hooked on Phonics, as well as such contemporary products as Feng-GUI and Microsoft’s MCR. Illustrations include laboratory photographs of subjects at formidable-looking testing apparatus and equally daunting diagrams that attest to researchers’ efforts.
A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.Pub Date: April 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780226821481
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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