A sharp study that raises troubling questions about the integrity of the research underlying much current educational...
A repudiation of the fashionable claims of “girl advocates” by controversial social critic Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?, 1994).
“It’s a bad time to be a boy in America,” the author (a mother of sons) declares. She spends much of her time in this contentious study establishing and documenting her thesis that, contrary to the declarations of Harvard educator Carol Gilligan and her myriad followers, it is boys, not girls, who “are languishing academically and socially.” Sommers produces convincing, even devastating evidence of the academic dishonesty practiced by those who support the opposite thesis—the so-called “girl-crisis” writers. Gilligan and her colleagues, according to Sommers, base their alarming conclusions on insubstantial and shoddy research. (Gilligan, for example, has neither published nor released to the public in any other form her three studies that were the foundation for her 1982 bestseller, In a Different Voice.) Sommers also assails other widely publicized gender studies sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the McLean Hospital of the Harvard Medical School, showing that they are at best biased and at worst (in the case of the McLean study) vitiated by “outsized claims and lack of evidence.” Sommers recognizes that the disturbing results of these flawed studies attract journalists, many of whom “prefer disseminating sensational claims to looking for dissenting voices”; she knows, too, that “apocalyptic alarms about looming mental health disasters . . . sell well.” Sommers argues that what alarmists have characterized as “crises” are often simply the evanescent traits typical of adolescents—of both sexes. Sommers is much less convincing, however, when she offers her remedy—a simplistic package of back-to-the-basics instruction and “moral education” to overcome the “socially crude, disrespectful, and untoward behavior” in the public schools (whose “permissive” teachers and administrators she blames for crimes ranging from “intruding into . . . children’s psychic lives” to the shootings at Columbine).
A sharp study that raises troubling questions about the integrity of the research underlying much current educational polemic—and the policies that these polemics have inspired.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84956-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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