Solid material for Vanity Fair readers, fans of investigative journalism, and observers of higher education and its myriad...
A collection of in-depth journalism previously published in Vanity Fair, each piece exposing trouble at an elite university or prep school.
Even the articles dating back a decade still seem timely, and most of them have been updated briefly at the end of the original text. In some ways, the monthly magazine is about high society and fashion, but editor-in-chief Carter (editor: Vanity Fair’s Writers on Writers, 2016, etc.) has never wavered in his commitment to investigative journalism. Most of these articles carry the bylines of veteran investigative reporters, including Sarah Ellison, David Margolick, Nina Munk, Todd S. Purdum, Buzz Bissinger, and Alexandra Robbins. The targets of the investigations include the University of Virginia, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Harvard University, St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Duke University, the United States Air Force Academy, Yale University’s Skull and Bones Club, and the shuttered and disgraced Trump University. Many of the pieces deal with sexual misconduct on campus, while others focus on financial malfeasance, racism, and athletics. The somewhat disparate themes are tied together brilliantly in an introduction by magazine editor Cullen Murphy, who illuminates the schools that offer such an important, attractive subject matter for journalists. They are usually easily accessible and familiar locales for almost every reporter and editor, as opposed to, say, corporate headquarters or government agencies. In addition, many journalists and their audience members carry high expectations for campuses, especially at elite colleges and universities. “We expect more from schools than we do from big business or big government,” writes Murphy. “When it comes to standards of conduct, standards of honesty, and standards of care, schools represent a first line of defense. A breakdown here portends a breakdown everywhere else.” While the book could have benefitted from value-added material, such as reflections by the journalists on their reporting and writing, this is a worthy collection.
Solid material for Vanity Fair readers, fans of investigative journalism, and observers of higher education and its myriad problems.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7374-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf