This has been done better by others, but it’s never a bad thing to encourage reading and writing.
Do we really need another book on writing? Maybe.
Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals, 2015, etc.) previously published Why Teach? and Why Read? His latest is as much about reading as writing. He covers some “lightly drawn” autobiographical material and a little how-to (he’s especially good on the importance of a writer finding his/her voice), and he offers plenty of encouragement. This book is very much a pep talk. The author is an optimistic, enthusiastic cheerleader on the sideline, encouraging us to sit down and try. Along the way, he enlists as co-cheerers other writers, mostly the older, usual suspects: Shelley, Byron, Austen, Melville, Joyce. But he also manages to recruit Roth and Kerouac and others. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections “rang the bell,” while David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest “slammed down the hammer.” Edmundson warns budding authors: it’s lonely, it’s hard, and it can be depressing, but it’s “one of the best acts a human being can turn his hand to.” It brings pleasure and its own rewards, and it can be a “spiritual discipline” like meditation or even prayer. The author tends to get repetitive during the course of the book, repeating some version of the idea that “writing is about writing.” Publication isn’t the goal; writing is: “writing is thinking; thinking is writing.” Try writing a memoir; it’s the “genre of our moment.” Writers must read (a lot) and be willing to revise (a lot). In this and other areas, Edmundson sounds like Stephen King. Even though his own books have been fairly well-received, he’s pretty harsh on book reviewers. Those critics who are wannabe writers will sometimes “clasp your book in their hands, embrace it, and then slap you across the face.”
This has been done better by others, but it’s never a bad thing to encourage reading and writing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-305-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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