Reviews (4)

Excellent Description of the Everyday work of the Spirit
Garret Keizer's book, A Dresser of Sycamore trees is a thoughtful and carefully written book which describes the "everyday" work of the Holy Spirit in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Keizer's descriptions of his friends and neighbors in this small town are tremendous. He does an amazing job seeing God's presence in his everyday work and ministry as a vicar of a small church and a high school English teacher. He reminds me of what St. Francis is quoted to have said, "Preach the gospel. If necessary, speak." Garret Keizer preaches with his actions and through his descriptions of the lives of "ordinary" people. This is a must - read.

Taking the ordinary to the Divine....me
Garrett Keizer's story will settle even the most adventurous spirit from searching to enfolding an inner Spirit much more gratifying.

Soon to be a classic, sincere, humble, excellently written
I am shocked that the publisher would describe this book as "a surprise critical sensation." It's prose alerts us to one Christian's view of the invisible Christ, manifest in people, things, and incidences. It is excellently, thought provokingly written. I cannot with my own words evoke the message of this book, so I will defer to the author, in a quote from his work. . . ."It is about mysticism and orthodoxy, ordinariness and sanctity, unity and diversity and about the intersection of all these things in a design that looks to me like a cross." -pg. 150 Read this book because it is about a common man doing the uncommon and thereby transforming his world, our world, into a place "set apart" for divine possiblities.

A Model for Anyone considering Ministry or Ordination
The story of a man who was a deacon and priest almost without knowing it, and how he ultimately came to be ordained to serve a rural town and church as their priest. Moving and poignant for persons called to serve as deacon or priest who have already been ministers. ... Read more

Book Description

Writing about oneself, says Patricia Foster, "engages in truth but depends on the imagination, on the life just beneath the skin, a life that's impressionistic and fragile." These eleven closely linked personal essays are at once an absorbing chronicle of a life fully undertaken and a model for anyone who has contemplated self-investigation through autobiographical writing.

The book's three sections each convey a stage of Foster's journey-still ongoing-toward new levels of insight and maturity. "Inside the Girls' Room" takes us back to Foster's life in the rural South from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Here she reveals the mixed messages and stereotypes of southern womanhood by which she was raised-and from which she fled. With adulthood, Foster moves to "Inside the Writing Room," a place dotted with discoveries about autobiography as a path to creative expression and inner coherence. Finally, at the place in her life Foster calls "Inside My Skin," autobiography helps her to explore and to claim her cultural identity. Returning to her native South, she holds a writing workshop for a group composed mostly of middle-aged black women, visits a beloved maid from her childhood, and returns to old haunts as a witness to her concerns about race and class.

This gathering of lyrical essays explores the intelligent, intuitive heart of a woman struggling to claim both her identity and her place in the world. ... Read more

Book Description

An important autobiography that reveals the story of William Sanders Scarborough who rose out of slavery to become a renowned classical philologist and African American icon. ... Read more

Book Description

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. With razor-sharp precision, Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment. A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher. ... Read more

Book Description

Each year since 1983 the American Council of Learned Societies has invited one of America's leading scholars to deliver the Haskins Lecture, in honor of Charles Homer Haskins, a distinguished scholar and teacher who was instrumental in the founding of the ACLS. In this volume, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the ACLS, Douglas Greenberg and Stanley Katz bring together the lectures presented by ten of America's most distinguished scholars. Each lecture is a personal and intellectual glimpse into the "life of learning" of such leading scholars as Maynard Mack, Annemarie Schimmel, and John Hope Franklin. The lectures focus on self-reflection of lives dedicated to learning, rather than on scholarship in the usual sense of the term. Ranging from being forced to learn Latin to painful memories of war and racism, the lecturers all recount stories from their eventful lives. Each offers thoughts on the body of work he or she has produced and the forces, personal and intellectual, that have shaped it. The scholars bring something of their disciplines to the lecture, sharing not only personal anecdotes but their love of learning. ... Read more

Book Description

"Intellectual biography at its best. Nelson has presented us withthe whole Meiklejohn, warts and all." --E. David Cronon, co-author of TheUniversity of Wisconsin: A History.

This is the definitive biography of Alexander Meiklejohn, one of the mostimportant and controversial educators and civil libertarians of the twentiethcentury. A charismatic teacher and philosopher with extrordinarily highexpectations for democratic self-government in the United States, Meiklejohn wasboth beloved and reviled during his long life. Brilliant and dedicated, he couldalso be stubborn and arrogant, and his passion for his own ideals led tofrequent clashes with prominent and powerful critics.

The son of reform-minded, working-class immigrants from Scotland, Meiklejohnrejected the spiritually agnostic and politically instrumentalist philosophiesof his Progressive-Era contemporaries, many of whom, he argued, simply tookdemocracy for granted. As dean of Brown University at the outset of thetwentieth century, he lamented the disintegration of the old classicalcurriculum and questioned the rising influence of amoral science in modernhigher education. He served as president of Amherst College during theculturally turbulent years of World War I, a director of the famous ExperimentalCollege at the University of Wisconsin during the late 1920s and early 1930s,and as a delegate to UNESCO after World War II. An outspoken defender of theFirst Amendment during the McCarthy era, he was honored with the PresidentialMedal of Freedom in 1963. Alexander Meiklejohn was a self-proclaimed idealist living in an increasinglypragmatic age, and his central question remains essential today: How caneducation teach citizens to be free? ... Read more

Book Description

Overflowing with passion for her work as a scholar and teacher, Alessandra Comini romps through six decades as an unconventional art historian in this illustrated memoir. The author of award-winning books on Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Ludwig van Beethoven, Comini reflects on the formation and flowering of her distinguished career. Beginning with her colorful background as a refugee from Franco's Spain, then Mussolini's Italy, she describes her music-loving family's adjustment to a World War II Texas. A series of fortuitous experiences lead to what would ultimately be a turning point in both her life as well as in Schiele scholarship: the discovery, half a century after Schiele's incarceration in a provincial Austrian jail, of the actual cell in which he had been imprisoned.

Comini invites readers to join her in the same zestful pursuit of cultural history that has repeatedly earned her the honor of being voted "outstanding professor," first by her students at Columbia University, then later at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Her research and quests take the reader around the world and back. From the islands of Corfu, Madeira, Rügen, and Tahiti, and the cities of Lisbon, Rome, Oslo, and St. Petersburg, Comini pursues such diverse and distinctive personalities as Rosa Bonheur, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Vaslav Nijinsky, Egon Schiele, Isadora Duncan, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Käthe Kollwitz.

For those who wonder what academics do besides teach and publish, Alessandra Comini's memoir will inspire readers with its compelling account of an extraordinary life and career still passionately in progress. 30 black-and-white illustrations. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

An important book, but it lacks style, depth and cohesion.
After hearing a speech of Clarke's on the radio, I was looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, it let me down.

Clarke's writing lacks style - I frequently was wondering if I was reading a high school composition rather than a book by the great orator.

There is a complete lack of continuity and cohesion throughout the book. Topics change from paragraph to paragraph. One gets confused if he is writing about himself, his life, the people he has known or his unpublished books. Any given paragraph may include some or all of these in a rather haphazard manner.

In reading this, I especially hoped to sink my teeth into understanding more about Clarke, more about the Africana movement, more about the history of the African people. Instead, I got some anectdotal stories and superficial glimpses. There was no significant depth to the content of this book.

In spite of my disappointment with "My Life in Search of Africa," it is an important book to read. History has typically been approached from a European (white) perspective, and it is essential that we get beyond that approach, that we learn more of the rest of the world, and that we learn from and about the people enabling that knowledge.

i hate the book!
well i realy hate thebook, why are you asking me that question about the book. leave me alone! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

The Definitive Kokopelli
This is the definitive book on the phenomenon. If you want a discussion of the real "Kokopelli" rather than a compendium of fanciful and spurious "new age" ideas, this work provides that and more. Along the way you will gain interesting insights into Hopi culture, and how the Kokopelli phemomenon may have started and grown. Nicely illustrated. ... Read more

Book Description

A legendary figure in his own lifetime, Rabbi Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-1797) was known as the "Gaon of Vilna." He was the acknowledged master of Talmudic studies in the vibrant intellectual center of Vilna, revered throughout Eastern Europe for his learning and his ability to traverse with ease seemingly opposed domains of thought and activity. After his death, the myth that had been woven around him became even more powerful and was expressed in various public images. The formation of these images was influenced as much by the needs and wishes of those who clung to and depended on them as by the actual figure of the Gaon. In this penetrating study, Immanuel Etkes sheds light on aspects of the Vilna Gaon's "real" character and traces several public images of him as they have developed and spread from the early nineteenth century until the present. ... Read more

Book Description

Stuart Hall has been an inspirational figure for generations of academics. His early work on the media, his influential use of Gramsci in understanding Britain in the late 1970s, his unique and influential analysis of Thatcherism, and more recently his work on race and new ethnicities, have helped to make universities places where ideas and social commitment to change can co-exist. This collection invites a wide range of academics who have been influenced by Hall's writing to contribute not a memoir or a eulogy but an engaged piece of social, cultural or historical analysis which develops the field of thinking opened up by his enormous contribution.

Contributors include: Michele Barrett, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Nestor Garcia Canclini, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, Henry Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, Gail Lewis, Angela McRobbie, Doreen Massey, David Morley, Bill Schwarz, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Charles Taylor, and Lola Young. ... Read more

Book Description

Immediately after graduating from Carleton College (in Northfield, Minnesota) in June 1939, John Hlavaceksailed for China to teach English at the Carleton-in-China Middle School in Fenchow, Shansi Province. After five weeks of training in Chinese at a language school in Peking, John and a fellow teacher traveled to the mission compound in what was then Japanese- occupied China. John spent two years teaching English in Shansi and Szechwan, then took a job driving Red Cross trucks to deliver medical supplies to foreign mission hospitals. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, John joined the American Military Attaché's office in China's wartime capital of Chungking. In 1944 he left that post to join United Press as a war correspondent. After China, John continued his foreign reporting from India, Jamaica and Cuba. He was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations during the 1957-58 academic year, studying at the Russian Institute of Columbia University. Today, John resides with his wife, Pegge, in Omaha, Nebraska.More Hlavacek family history can be found in two books written by Pegge: Diapers on a Dateline and Alias Pegge Parker. Both books are available through iUniverse. Diapers on a Dateline tells the story of Pegge and John's family life in India from 1952 to 1957. Pegge continued to write while raising five children, interviewing a fascinating array of celebrities. Spanning a time period from 1941 to 1961, Alias Pegge Parker includes a bonus: four chapters of Diapers that turned up after the book was published. ... Read more

Book Description

In his preface to this work, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, "If you want insight into what's right and what's wrong about the current debate over standards, you'd be well advised to start with the redoubtable Ralph Tyler." Finder's work is the first to chart the career of the man who developed the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Ralph W. Tyler, one of the most influential educators of the 20th century, held strong and closely argued views on issues we debate today-- tracking, class size, and how the school can cope with the demands of the public. ... Read more

Book Description

This study of the research university presidency is unusual in its frankness and honesty and varied in the types of cases discussed. The subject pool is significant because all are widely recognized leaders of major universities; together they represent some of the leading educational institutions in the country--those to which other college and university leaders look to set standards and model solutions to common problems. The book is also unique in that it combines a psychological/narrative framework with a task/problem-solving approach. ... Read more

Book Description

Written with complete access to the Durrell family archives and Gerald Durrell's private papers, this affecting biography follows its subject from an eccentric boyhood in Imperial India to the international prominence he gained in print and on television as one of the world's foremost animal conservationists. The younger brother of the famous novelist Lawrence Durrell, Gerald always viewed his own writing - which includes thirty-seven bestsellers, among them enduringly popular classics like My Family and Other Animals and A Zoo in My Luggage - as the means of financing his greatest passion: breeding animals in danger of extinction and returning them to the wild. In the 1980s, with the production of a dozen different television documentary series on zoology, most notably the widely acclaimed Catch Me a Colobus and Ark on the Move, Durrell's conservationist vision reached audiences around the globe, while the zoo he founded on the island of Jersey realized his pioneering mission to breed endangered species in captivity. It stands as a living legacy of the much-admired Gerald Durrell, who died in 1995 at the age of seventy. "Captivating and deeply moving but surprisingly candid biography." - Publishers Weekly (starred review); "Ambitious.... Rich material for a biography." - New York Times Book Review; "Affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait.... Botting does an excellent job of giving us Durrell the man, not merely the legend." - Toronto Globe & Mail; "Few current biographies read as well." - Denver Post. ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Durrell fans, this one's worth having !
Douglas Botting makes a fairly good job of Durrell's biography. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs, with numerous quotations from Durrell's personal notebooks thrown in for good measure,this book sheds a new light on the life of one of the most amazing men of the 20th century. However, this book is recommended for Durrell fans, and not for the plain inquisitive who want to bone up on the life and times of Gerald Durrell.They would do better to stick to the Gerald Durrell accounts .The author has a tendency of repeating parts of the Durrell accounts in his own words,and relying too much on the Durrell works as his guide( but then again it is difficult to pick up the thread of people and events as many as 50 years later, with a world war inbetween ). All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable 600-pager that Durrell fans will devour in no time at all. Judging by this one,the Gavin Maxwell biography should be well worth reading ..

In depth, lively biography
This must be one of the best biographies I have read about anyone. Douglas Botting is to be congratulated on his meticulous research and unbiased approach. He gives us a wonderful insight into this complex man's extraordinary life. All 607 pages are highly readable and I found it hard to put the book down. I particularly enjoyed the account of Durrell's happy go lucky, unconventional childhood in Greece surrounded by his mad mad family. As Gerald Durrell would have wanted, there is a lively quality about the telling of his story. There were so many facets to this man's character and Botting has been at pains to dig deep to bring these to the fore. Having read Durrell's books many years ago I found myself enjoying the adventures of his life all over again, but in a different way, now that I understand more about the man and his background. I feel this is a 'must' read for anyone who has enjoyed Gerald Durrell's books

Warm, intimate look at a wonderful man
I always thought of Gerry Durrell as my own secret discovery, and gave copies of his books to all my friends. Also visited the Jersey Trust twice....well worth it. This book reads like the diary of an old and dear friend, sharing much and explaining a lot. He was ahead of us all in his love for the endangered earth and its living creatures.

A detailed and inclusive biography.
Botting has done a first rate job covering the life of Gerald Durrell. One of the obstacles Botting had too overcome was the great familiarity of the various events in Durrell's life that Durrell himself recorded in his 37 books. Of course, not all 37 books were autobiographical, but a good many were and the reader who has read even just one or two of Durrell's books will get a sense of deja-vu. But where Durrell always molded his tales into humourous and engaging stories, Botting approached them as an historian. For the first time, we get dates and places. By the by, fans of Larry Durrell will find Bottings book an asset, as the lives of the Durrell brothers were - like many brothers - quite entwined.

Botting also does a first rate job in placing Durrell's achievment and accomplishments amongst his fellow conservationists: Gerald Durrell really was one of the great.

PS. Now only if Durrell's video series were available for home purchase.

This book contains little new information.
I have always loved Gerald Durrell's works, and thus was looking forward to learning more about him as a person. I am now bogged down half way through this large biography, and must report that I have learned little or nothing new of any significance. Indeed, the first half of the book consists largely of material from Mr. Durrell's own works. After pointing out several times that Mr. Durrell's writings were often inaccurate, Mr. Botting's reliance on them for his own biography seems somewhat inconsistent, to say the least. One can obtain the same information more enjoyably and more informatively from reading Mr. Durrell's (and, indeed, Jacquie Durrell's) own works. The essence of Gerald Durrell may be found in his own writings; it will not be found in this biography. ... Read more

Book Description

In this candid and delightful memoir, Alvin Kernan recalls his life as a student, professor, provost, and dean during turbulent decades of change in the hallowed halls of Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton. His vividly remembered account is a unique personal story and more-it is also a history of what has been won, and lost, in the culture wars of the second half of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

Death of the Ideal
Kernan's brilliant and tasteful book explores some of the most important issues facing our world today. As we move further and further into the democratic and technological age, the disintegration of basic values such as honesty, integrity, hard work, and fairness are disappearing more and more from our lives. Perhaps most importantly, these values are all but absent from our educational system. Kernan's exploration of the steady decay of meaningful scholarship and academic integrity--in students, faculty, and administration--at some of the world's most important research universities over the past fifty years provides a key for looking at our whole culture and the challenges it faces now and in the years to come. A haunting tale of loss, both personal and public, this book should be read by, and should give pause to, teachers, adminstrators, students, and parents at all levels of education. The decline of academic values affects us, and will continue to affect us, at all levels of society, and in ways that cannot yet be known, but at which Kernan hints with chilling prose and honest, forthright confessions.

Intellectual History at its Best
If anyone wants to know what life was like in the literary world in the second half of the twentieth century, this is the book to read. It makes the intellectual struggles of those years come vividly alive for readers. _In Plato's Cave strikes me and several of my friends, English Professors all, as the best book we have ever read about our profession.

In The Cave of Plato
This was an excellent book. This is one of the only books that someone should read to learn something. This book teaches about how the world can and sometimes will react. Through a livid writing process, Kernan describes his amazing career. This is probably the last great book of the 20th Century.

The Mote in the Middle Distance
Oh, come now, DC from California, don't be a curmudgeon. Anyone who dislikes students, critics, and the 1960s can't be all bad. Although I must admit that any writer so hackneyed as to title a moderately interesting memoir "In Plato's Cave" tends to put one off one's feed rather early on.

A Life of Literate Enlightenment, Academic Politics
Enjoyed this! Kernan depicts the literary and academic influences of his life in great detail, inspiring one to get a hold of the greats in the Classics and Criticism (again). The book would be of special interest to professors or English scholars, as the phases of Literary criticism over the last part of the 1900's is elaborated (I found this very interesting although I know I still don't understand what existentialism, deconstruction, etc REALLY mean...). One understands how his love for literature and humanity outweigh the Machievallian nature and silly politics inherent in academic institutions.Lastly, the author's way of writing is masterful, as one would expect of a life steeped in the literary tradition. ... Read more

Book Description

Originally published in 1870, The English Governess at the Siamese Court recounts the story of the five and a half years that Anna Leonowens, a young and adventurous Englishwoman, spent as a governess for the children of King Mongkut of Siam.Leonowens focuses on the fact that she and the King did not see eye to eye in the domestic sphere: for the first time in his life, he had met a woman who dared to contradict him, while she found the very idea of male domination intolerable. Eighty years after its first publication, Leonowens' account inspired the book and film, Anna and the King of Siam, and the musical, The King and I.The English Governess at the Siamese Court remains engaging as a story of adventure, fascinating as a picture of nineteenth-century Siam, and intriguing as an account of King Mongkut's private life. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

Anna's back...
I recently listened to an unabridged version of this book on CD. There was surprisingly little time spent on actual personal happenings between Anna, the king and the court. She really does get into the history, culture, art, customs etc. of Siam in the 1860s. Three quarters of the book is taken up with this very kind of detailed and endless information. Nadia May, with incrediable skill and a voice that is as prim and English as Anna's, adds to the diminsion of this narrative. Her amazing ability at pronounciation helps capture a real sense of time and place. If one is looking for the glamous story from broadway or the movies--be ready for a disappointment. For a person fascinated by the culture and history of this country as well as interested in the English view, then, get your walking shoes on and have a nice listen to Anna's story.

Mostly fiction, euro-centric w/ very little truth or facts
I am thai, and I feel that it is my obligation to make a comment about this book. In all fairness, I think it is a 'fun' book to read, providing that the reader is aware that it is mostly fictionalized. Anna wrote a much distorted story of her time as an English tutor in the royal court of Siam, mostly glorifying herself without concerns for any real accuracy. When I was younger I was fascinated because this book was/is banned in Thailand, and so I wanted to find out more and did an extensive research. I learned that Anna's account is mostly ego-centric, euro-centric, and sensationalized. She created many fictional details of her own life to make herself sounding glamorous (for example, she said she was a daughter of a high-ranking British army officer and a genteel lady,when in fact she was a ... child of a petty soldier and an indian prostitute. Her husband was a drunk, etc.) If anyone would bother to do more research, he/she would also find that King Mongkut (Rama iV) was a wise, gentle, highly educated monach with a supreme, long-ranged vision to lay the foundation to modernize Thailand and prevent the country from being colonized by European Imperialism. He was a priest and a scholar,who rather chose/preferred to live within religious confinement for many many years before he had to finally ascend to the throne as an old man after his brother passed away. FYI, With fine, white hair, he was a very thin and fragile-looking man---not at all what all the musicals and movies have portrayed him to be. Because of him Thailand is the only country in Asia that has never been colonized. And King Monkut would have done it with or without Anna being around! Mongkut's son, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) indeed carried on his father's legacy. Wise, modern, and highly educated(a result of his father's effort), King Chulalongkorn abolished slavery, created the first public university/public elementary and secondary school system and railroad and telecommunication system, reorganized the government and army infrastructure, etc---that is why he became one of the most beloved king in the Thai history. But all of this could not have happened without King Mongkut's vision in the first place. Anna's portrayal of King Monkut as a temperamental, insensitive tyrant/barbarian/womanizer is therefore downright offensive and insulting to the thais, NOT because we can't stand any criticism of our royal family, but simply because we know that most of her account is not true! About the violence/punishments/the concubine 'harem' of the royal court, please remember that this was a very different time. Such practices were common in many cultures and countries and not just in Thailand.

Fact or fiction? We will never know for sure. Worth reading
Anna Leonowens is a controversial figure even now. Her name may not even have really been Leonowen (but the more common Welsh Owens), her husband not dead from heatstroke in a tiger hunt, but from drink, and not a British army officer at all. Nevertheless, her account of her time in Siam as the royal governess is ever popular and fascinating reading.

Anna wrote several books, The Romance of the Harem being another. Both this and the Romance were novelized by Margaret Landon into the more familiar Anna and the King of Siam.

Part of the controversy stems from the fact that any criticism of Thai royalty is not tolerated in that country. The king is held in a religious esteem and is the heart and soul of the country. So Anna's casual remarks on the king's temper and habits are practically heresy to the Thai, hence, she and her writing are targets for criticism. And what's worse, her pupil Chulalongkorn or Rama V, is Thailand's MOST revered king--kind of a Thai saint. His portrait is found in nearly all Thai homes and businesses.

Having that as a background, it's still fun to read Anna's account of her time in Thailand. Though many people feel that Anna distorted or hid the truth about herself in many ways, the book gives a fascinating look into a magical land. Anna's writing is typically Victorian; the prose is a bit ornate and not as direct as the writing of Landon.

Fact or fiction?
While this book was extremely helpful in my research on Anna Leonowens I believe the reader does not get a true picture of her life because there are many gaps in the story. She fails to go into depth on the matter of her popularity with slaves when she often paid for their freedom. I recommend this book for people trying to get a sense of the history of Siam and some stories of her life, however, it may be that she never taught the king's children at all and never met the king. I would recommend Anna and the King of Siam for extensive research.

Amazing tale of a woman and her life as in the Royal Palace
In 1862 Anna Leonowens went to Bangkok with her child, Louis, to teach the royal children in English and western customs and ettiquette. She spent five and a bit more than one half years there. THis book is quite different from her other book (The Romance of the Harem) because it is written simply as a travel account. Se does reproach the king and share the prejudice of the day but the king is less slandered. She writes heavily. I reccomend this for anyone who has read Anna and the King of Siam or its movie version and the King and I. ... Read more