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A Travesty of American Education

1/31/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Browsing for books with a mouse and screen is not nearly as joyful an act as wandering the stacks and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of knowledge. The best libraries are places of imagination, education and community. The best libraries have mystery to them.
​Sam Weller
Born January 31, 1967
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S. Weller

My Book World

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​Kirp, David. The College Dropout Scandal. New York: Oxford, 2019.
 
Before I left public school teaching in 2002, the district I worked for had implemented, at a low level, a plan to mentor potential dropouts. Kirp’s book argues for the need to have American universities tackle the same problem, citing the fact that, nationwide, colleges and universities support a 40% dropout rate. The rate is even higher among community colleges: 60% of students drop out before completing an associate degree.
 
Kirp visits a number of universities who have implemented innovative programs to retain more students: Georgia State University, the joint campuses of the University of Central Florida and Valencia College, the University of Texas, and an “elite” school, Amherst College. His research indicates that, in some cases, small adjustments can allow a student to finish a degree. One helpful practice is to provide small grants (not loans) during the last semester or two; it can make the difference of finishing or not. Another is for the institution to provide professional advisors (not professors) whose job it is to keep tabs on students, particularly those at risk of dropping out; students cannot escape contact. The institutions have even provided experiences that help students to think positively about themselves. Some forward-thinking professors use the Internet to provide lecture material to be read on the students’ own time; then they use class time to work more actively together. Other places provide accelerated tutoring to catch students up in, say, math in the period of one semester without having to slow down the student’s advancement through a program.
 
In essence, Kirp asserts that because of the great expense involved in attending college now, institutions of higher education owe their students something better than the old sink-or-swim or trial-by-fire approaches of the past. They should meet halfway these bright students who have met the entrance qualifications and make sure they have every opportunity to finish their schooling. Although I attended a small, private school (a half a century ago) and found great comfort in attending small classes led by professors who were highly accessible, with the practices mentioned above, I might have succeeded at an even higher level. There were times that I felt like dropping out, and only the military draft, the threat of being sent to Vietnam, kept me in school. I wound up getting a degree in music that I only used tangentially to earn a living until I left the field entirely at age thirty. Professor Kirp’s book is one all college professors and administrators should read and consider. After all, in corporate parlance, students are the “business” of higher education. They should be given every opportunity to succeed.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert P. Watson's The Nazi Titanic

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A Writer's Wit

1/30/2020

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Every generation of young men and women in America has questions to ask the world, but every now and again in the history of the Republic a different kind of question presents itself—a question that asks, not about the future of an individual or even of a generation, but about the future of the country.
​Franklin D. Roosevelt
Born January 30, 1882
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F. D. Roosevelt
TOMORROW: My Book World | David Kirp's The College Dropout Scandal
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A Writer's Wit

1/29/2020

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You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
​Germaine Greer
Born January 29, 1939
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G. Greer
FRIDAY: My Book World | David Kirp's The College Dropout Scandal
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A Writer's Wit

1/28/2020

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I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.
​Colette
Born January 28, 1873
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Colette
FRIDAY: My Book World | David Kirp's The College Dropout Scandal
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'Home Work" Quite a Ride

1/24/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
​Pierre Beaumarchais
Born January 24, 1732
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P. Beaumarchais

MY BOOK WORLD

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​Andrews, Julie with Emma Walton Hamilton. Home Work. New York: Hachette, 2019.
 
Andrews begins the book with a summary of her first memoir, Home, that came out in 2009, which is a good thing. It induces the reader to want to locate a copy (for the details must be juicy), as well as it gives readers a view of what her early life was like before she became famous and moved to Hollywood to work.
 
Unlike many memoirs which can be of a meandering nature, this one moves quickly from one locale to the next, one creative project to the next, one family crises to the next with little reflection, except by way of journal entries from the time period Andrews is calling to mind. Having said that, I believe Andrews moves from locale to locale because that is the nature of the business she is in. In making a film, she must relocate to where the project is being shot. With regard to each film there are preproduction stories, stories during the shooting, and then stories about when the film or live show opens—the reviews, both good and bad. And I’m sorry, of course, Ms. Andrews does reflect upon the relationships she has with her two husbands, her daughter by the first one, the step children she acquires (happily) from her second husband, her siblings and her Moms and Dads, plus the two daughters that she and Blake Edwards adopt from Vietnam. Julie reflects, but it’s often a hand-wringing followed, most of the time, by things turning out all right.

​Still, the memoir has more than a few amusing anecdotes. My favorite involves one with Mike Nichols and Carol Burnett. The three are staying in the same hotel as Julie and Carol prepare for their joint TV special. He wants to meet late at night after his train has been delayed, and the women agree. They get into their pajamas and robes and when they know he’s in the hotel, they wait for him at the elevators. They decide it would be funny if they are kissing when Nichols gets off the elevator:

“At this point, one of the elevators went ‘ping!’ so I whipped Carol across my lap, making it look as if I had her in a full embrace. The doors opened … and the elevator was packed …. Nobody got out, nobody got in. As the doors closed, they collectively leaned toward the center so they could get a better view. Carol and I simply cracked up.
         Suddenly another elevator went ‘ping’; I quickly dipped Carol over my knee again. The doors opened and a lone woman stepped out, glanced at us both, and then hurried on down the hall. By now, we were both weeping with laughter. Carol slid off my knee and crawled behind the sofa to hide.
         ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
         She couldn’t even reply, she was laughing so hard. With a touch of panic, I noticed that the lady who had just passed us had turned around and was now coming back. Leaning over the sofa, she inquired, ‘Excuse me, are you Carol Burnett?’
         In a strangled voice Carol said, ‘Yes,” Then raising a hand above the sofa to point at me, she added, ‘And this is my friend, Mary Poppins!’” (76)

The elevator pings again, and the two women stage their kiss once again, “and Mike stepped out of the elevator. Without pausing or even breaking a smile, he casually said, ‘Oh, hi, girls,’ and continued down the corridor. Touché! ” (77).
​Anyone like me, who has followed the career of Ms. Andrews from Mary Poppins until now, will appreciate the depths to which she mines her soul to share once again with us her life and her talents. It’s quite a ride. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
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A Writer's Wit

1/23/2020

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I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you. 
​Karen Abbott
Born January 23, 1973
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K. Abbott
TOMORROW: My Book World | Julie Andrews's Memoir, Home Work
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A Writer's Wit

1/22/2020

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                                                The leaf’s boundary
            is a pane of thick, waterstained glass, yet
            its shadow becomes permanent
            against your mouth; it can separate
 
            your hair, your thin definitions, stars.

​Sheila Zamora
Born January 22, 1947

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S. Zamora
FRIDAY: My Book World | Julie Andrews's Memoir, Home Work
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A Writer's Wit

1/21/2020

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What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.
​Gretel Ehrlich
Born January 21, 1946
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G. Ehrlich
FRIDAY: My Book World | Julie Andrews's Memoir, Home Work
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Moscow Moscow Man

1/17/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes. I’ve been to fund-raisers in private homes that look more like art museums, houses where people own bathtubs made from gemstones. I’ve visited families who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and were tearful and grateful just to have a working refrigerator and stove.
​Michelle Obama
Born January 17, 1964
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M. Obama

My Book World

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​Towles, Amor. A Gentleman in Moscow. New York: Viking, 2016.
 
Any novel in which every word of each chapter title begins with the letter “A” must hint of a certain organization, for this is itself a difficult task. Limiting oneself to only one letter is sort of a self-imposed puzzle-making signifying the author must dig deep to formulate apt titles with his hands tied. At first, one may think that this is a historical novel, and, in a sense, it is. But if it is such, it is also much much more. Some historical novels come off like a literary paint by numbers. History provides the scaffolding and the lazy author must paint characters and story inside certain lines. Not so with Amor Towles’s rendition of this tale from the first half of the twentieth century.
 
In script form, the novel begins in 1922 with Count Rostov’s “hearing” in front of Soviet officials. There, referring to him as a Former Person, they strip him of his aristocratic status by confining him for the rest of his life to the famed Moscow Metropol Hotel where he has already lived for four years. Things could be worse (think Siberia, think death camp), because Rostov has a lovely large suite of rooms at the hotel. But when he arrives back at the Metropol, the Soviets further strip him by confining him now to a small room in what he refers to as the belfry on the sixth floor, a place where butlers and other servants used to live. He has just enough room for the iron bedstead found there and a few heirlooms he brings from his lavish suite below. Thus begins this era of his life. Oh, and if he should ever step outside the Metropol, he, the Soviets tell him, will be shot on sight. To say much more is to enter spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that Count Rostov deepens friendships with hotel staff members. He establishes an intermittent amorous relationship with a Russian film star. He meets a precocious nine-year-old who grows up, and, because of difficult circumstances leaves her  five-year-old daughter to his care until she can return. Which she never does. He becomes the little girl’s Papa, providing the orphan the same kind stability that his grandmother had provided him when he was left an orphan. The novel is rich with historical and cultural references, all in the service of providing readers with a clear view a particular era, one that may not have really ended. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Julie Andrews's Home Work

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A Writer's Wit

1/16/2020

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Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
​Susan Sontag
Born January 16, 1933
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S. Sontag
TOMORROW: My Book World | Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow
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A WRITER'S WIT

1/15/2020

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I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.
​Frank Conroy
Born January 15, 1936

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F. Conroy
FRIDAY: My Book World | Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Russia
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A Writer's Wit

1/14/2020

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Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp.
​Yukio Mishima
​Born January 14, 1925
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Y. Mishima
FRIDAY: My Book World | Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Russia
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'Maiden Voyages' a Misnomer

1/10/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
John Dalberg-Acton
Born January 10, 1834
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J. Dalberg-Acton

My Book World

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​Morris, Mary, editor. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers. New York: Vintage, 1993.
 
Morris’s title seems, even after reading the book, a bit of a misnomer. Maiden voyage always evokes thoughts of adventures on the open seas. Instead, the title is a bit of a pun: fifty-two travel tales by, it turns out, women of all ages, not just maidens. However, the book is enjoyable for the variety of narratives it contains, from rather staid ones from the likes of Edith Wharton to bawdier ones by people like Box-Car Bertha. Then there is the piece by Anna Leonowens, the Anna of the Anna and the King of Siam, the musical, The King and I! Beryl Markham, aviatrix, writes the following about her elephant hunt in Africa:

 “There is a legend that elephant [sic] dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?” (232).
Perhaps anthropologist, Margaret Meade, dispenses the best advice concerning travel: “Whether one learns to receive a gift in both hands or with the right hand only, to touch the gift to one’s forehead or to refuse it three times before accepting it, the task is always a double one. One must learn to do something correctly and not to become absorbed in the doing. One must learn what makes people angry but one must not feel insulted oneself. One must live all day in a maze of relationships without being caught in the maze. And above all, one must wait for events to reveal much that must be learned” (276). Sage.

What editor Mary Morris may be trying to indicate is that women travel through the world differently than men. Author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison indicates so in this passage from her Italian travels, a passage that only a woman could write:
“After dinner, in a dim lounge, I watch Two Women [1960], a movie with Sophia Loren. I am joined by the Italian woman who smokes. Out of an abundance of feeling I cry, not so much because this is the story of a rape, not because of the girl’s loss of innocence and the mother’s rage and grief, but because the injured girl is singing, her voice, frail, a song my grandmother used to sing: ‘Vieni, c’è una strada nel bosco . . . I want you to know it too . . . c’è una strada nel cuore . . .  There’s a road in my heart . . . .’ The woman who smokes is crying, too. I am thinking of my daughter. When she leaves, the woman kisses the crown of my head. We have exchanged no words. Men have stood on the threshold and not come in. I never see her again” (333).
Only women could have traveled through the world in this manner, something all men could learn from. Other writers included in the collection are Vita Sackville-West, Isak Dinesen, Freya Stark, Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Christina Dodwell, Helen Winternitz, and Annie Dillard.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow
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A Writer's Wit

1/9/2020

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Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
​Lascelles Abercrombie
Born January 9, 1881

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L. Abercrombie
TOMORROW: My Book World | Mary Morris's Maiden Voyages
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A Writer's Wit

1/8/2020

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Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
​Stephen Hawking
Born January 8, 1942
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S. Hawking
FRIDAY: My Book World | Mary Morris's Maiden Voyages
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A Writer's Wit

1/7/2020

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Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
​Zora Neale Hurston
Born January 7, 1891
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Z. Hurston
FRIDAY: My Book World | Mary Morris's Maiden Voyages
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Mo Rocca's Raucous Obits

1/3/2020

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Courage is found in unlikely places.
​J. R. R. Tolkien
Born January 3, 1892
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J. R. R. Tolkien

My Book World

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​Rocca, Mo. Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving. New York: Simon, 2019.

My partner and I watch CBS Sunday Morning  every week. It is sort of our church. One of my favorites personalities is Mo Rocca, who, of late, has begun to produce podcasts called mobituaries, in which he eulogizes a personality who has been underrated, underappreciated, or completely forgotten. Having listened to his podcasts religiously (not a pun), I just had to give his book a go!
 
In some ways, each mobituary in the book reveals as much about Rocca’s demented but lovely mind (he and I should stage a love-in for Barbra Streisand to see who adores her the most). He moves easily from forgotten politicians to forgotten men and women, such as early the earliest African-Americans to win seats in  Reconstruction-era Congress. He memorializes actors, his one of Audrey Hepburn just killing me, because, having been born the same year as my Dutch aunt, 1929, the same years as Anne Frank, Hepburn’s story only deepens my understanding of that period. Mo Rocca is witty and gay (in every sense). I love the child-like intensity with which he pursues his work, ferreting out all he can about his subjects. I have to confess that I probably love his podcasts better than the book, because there he interviews a variety of people, and he uses a variety of audio clips to broaden his portraits. He jokes with these folks, jokes with listeners, yet always maintains a seriousness about, and, most of all, an empathy for his subjects. Still
. . . I love his book, and everyone should read it (I gave copies as Xmas gifts). In his own wacky way, Mo Rocca portrays personalities that are courageous, winsome, and in most cases bold. As is he.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Mary Morris's Maiden Voyages

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A Writer's Wit

1/2/2020

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It is possible that only human beings, of all living species, do not live entirely in the present.
​Isaac Asimov
Born December 2, 1920
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I. Asimov
TOMORROW: My Book World | TBD
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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