Review of 'Charter Schools in Action' on 'Goodreads'
No rating
holy shit this is frustrating too! why am i only reading books that make me grimace and put down said book to rub my temples in anguish? i talked to ryan about this book while sitting at a bar in a casino hotel in waterloo iowa and he was able to sum up the pro-big-business/slyly-but-rabidly-anti-union perspective of the authors after i said maybe two words on their dastardly obfuscations.
yikes. a real drag so far. poorly-told rehashing of several well-covered histories, really superficial investigation into major counter-cultural events, a bit depressing. but, it has clued me into the Desperate Bicycles, which has been a fun discovery.
blargh. done with this one. pretty bland.
ok ok if you're a 17 year old with little exposure to any type of alternative western culture, this might be a good place to start, so long as you can suffer through the stifling prose. sorry!
i was stranded in the jungles of southern naperville for an afternoon, so i moseyed my way on over to the public lib and found this interesting little gem to tie up an afternoon. particularly fascinating to me is the dramatic relationship between bakunin and marx, up to and including bakunin's expulsion from the first international. at one point marx's feelings are hurt cause bakunin doesn't respond to marx's gift of a copy of the recently published Capital, and bakunin has to respond in a letter assuring ol' karl that they are indeed friends and it had simply been an oversight. charming. can't wait to get back into this one.
Hm. A little inspiring, a little tame. Probably much more invigorating to the aspiring peace teacher. But more pointed and aggressive than I'd expected from a columnist from the Washington Post.
I told Ryan I was reading this and he made some grumbling noises about people who do other careers, then teach for a year and write a best seller. This is a bit better than what I imagine that lot to be, but still an important critique. On the other hand (and maybe most personally relevant to me now...) McCarthy concludes by stating that the only way he was able to be so successful in bringing Peace Studies to such varied audiences (public high schools, colleges, law schools, prison schools) was by NOT making it his primary career. Interesting. Sorta how I feel about culture making in general? IE the corrupting influence of the wage/salary/"living"?
I'm keeping it on …
Hm. A little inspiring, a little tame. Probably much more invigorating to the aspiring peace teacher. But more pointed and aggressive than I'd expected from a columnist from the Washington Post.
I told Ryan I was reading this and he made some grumbling noises about people who do other careers, then teach for a year and write a best seller. This is a bit better than what I imagine that lot to be, but still an important critique. On the other hand (and maybe most personally relevant to me now...) McCarthy concludes by stating that the only way he was able to be so successful in bringing Peace Studies to such varied audiences (public high schools, colleges, law schools, prison schools) was by NOT making it his primary career. Interesting. Sorta how I feel about culture making in general? IE the corrupting influence of the wage/salary/"living"?
I'm keeping it on the shelf, I suspect I may revisit over the coming years.
wow. the sort of stuff generally written off as left-wing crank-isms. to the contrary, the final lines of the first essay (delivered, of all things, as a speech at acceptance of the NY State Teacher of the Year award 1991!):
"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
The preceding essay is structured around the "Seven lessons universally taught" - Confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and one can't hide.
Review of 'The I.W.W. and the Paterson silk strike of 1913' on 'Goodreads'
No rating
this started out a bit dodgy, her take on the chicago/detroit split of the original iww betrayed a hardcore partiality toward the chicago group - the rest of the focus of the book (so far) justifies this, sorta. fascinating and surprisingly fun! good narrative structure, and the characters are amazing and intense. ----- wow, i'm really happy to have stumbled upon this book, and that i stuck it out through the long drawn out post-strike chapters. anyone remotely interested in our vast history of radical thought and action should examine carefully the last few chapters, the back-stabbing and finger pointing that followed this disaster of an undertaking (which the generally quite iww-partial author admits was the beginning of the end of the eastern branch of the organization as well as the city of paterson, nj), but also the more insightful conclusions that have been drawn in the near century since …
this started out a bit dodgy, her take on the chicago/detroit split of the original iww betrayed a hardcore partiality toward the chicago group - the rest of the focus of the book (so far) justifies this, sorta. fascinating and surprisingly fun! good narrative structure, and the characters are amazing and intense. ----- wow, i'm really happy to have stumbled upon this book, and that i stuck it out through the long drawn out post-strike chapters. anyone remotely interested in our vast history of radical thought and action should examine carefully the last few chapters, the back-stabbing and finger pointing that followed this disaster of an undertaking (which the generally quite iww-partial author admits was the beginning of the end of the eastern branch of the organization as well as the city of paterson, nj), but also the more insightful conclusions that have been drawn in the near century since these events took place. also exciting just for the experience of witnessing the broad array of radical characters who trounce their way through the story as it unfolds- including John Reed, who helped author and direct a Madison Square Garden pagaent about the strike starring struck workers, playing to a sold out audience! wild!
very rare that i read a book which simultaneously makes me wish i was more politically active and that i had taken more philosophy classes. rare, and pleasant!
such a wealth of information, much of which i've been literally craving to find in one concise spot for quite a while, but so awfully awfully written and awkwardly paced. then there's the fundamental concern for this (is it too early to call this a "style" unto itself? is it more than revisionism? hyper-revisionism?) "peoples history" business, ie if you plainly state your intentions and subjectivity as a historian and author, does that validate the blatant framing of historical incidents and characters to fit within that perspective?
a mixed bag? decidedly. a fantastic jumping-off point for further reading into any of the numerous case studies portrayed? most certainly.
every now and again i hear somebody referred to as a modern-day studs terkel. and i have to clench my teeth to contain my distaste for the notion that ANYBODY out there is doing work this freaking good (yes, including david barsamian).
