Amy

I appreciate the way Julie Landsman approaches this book, discussing her challenges, mistakes, successes, and joys of teaching students from several different cultures. What I think I enjoyed most was the way she allowed the voices and stories of her students to be prominent. She doesn't try to say that she has race relations figured out; instead, she asks a lot of questions and examines her own hopes for her students and the ways people can interact.

This is a thorough and wonderfully readable analysis of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” including the context of events leading to the letter and its aftermath. The Letter was never included in curriculum for my high school or college classes, so although I am familiar with some of its most famous passages (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” for example), I have never studied it. I was personally convicted reading Dr. King's message for myself, especially because of his focus on the Christian beliefs I share.

As this is Aristotle, one of the classics, supposedly the greatest of all perspectives on literary criticism, I was expecting to be blown away. My reaction instead was mostly indifference. There were a few interesting nuggets, but it was otherwise unappealing. In fact, his breakdown of what makes good poetry, specifically tragedy, read to me as formulaic and very limiting. Perhaps I would need to actually study the classics and philosophy as a whole to get a better grasp on this, but this didn't exactly whet my appetite for such study.

I'm not a mother, so maybe I shouldn't have even tried to read this book. But I was attracted to the idea of a book about the ordinary day. But I spent the first half of the book frustrated by some of the decisions the author made and the second half pulling bits of interest out of long chapters of reflection and description. Maybe it will be worth revisiting if I become a mother one day and am getting ready to let go of my children.

Although I am not the target audience for this book, I read it so I could know whether I would recommend it to a boy who might be reluctant to read. I definitely think I would. There are so many different authors giving so many different eperspectives on boyhood, there is bound to be an author that a boy would connect with. And hopefully after getting a taste of a few of these authors, he will want to read more of their work and become a reader for life.

This book was fine, but nearly as interesting as I was hoping for given the title and its status as a New York Times bestseller. It may just be that I'm not the target audience for the book, as Anna Quindlen is writing about being older and looking back at her life. I just had a hard time getting through it.

Similar to Pat of Silver Bush, this book is a disappointment compared to other L.M. Montgomery books. In particular, there wasn't really a storyline to this book. It was just a string of anecdotes told over the course of 11 years of Pat's life. This might be fine if the characters were compelling, but unfortunately, Pat and Rae lack depth to make me feel really invested in their outcomes.

I love Peanuts, so I was super excited to read this book. Unfortunately, the name and description led me to believe the book would be very different than it was. I imagined the author would examine the comic strips of Peanuts and show the kind of biblical/theological stories being told through these parables. Instead, the book was primarily about the author's own theological thoughts, and Peanuts strips were picked out to illustrate his points. I'm also not sure I agree with some of the primary arguments. However, the writing was engaging, and it was fun to re-read the Peanuts strips sprinkled throughout.

“The Dollmaker” is troubling and tragic and utterly engrossing. It is filled with acutely difficult situations, everyday challenges, and misunderstandings with heartbreaking results. I kept looking for hope throughout the novel and couldn't find any, yet I also couldn't stop reading. It is so well written and Arnow creates such a rich world through sparse language.

I read most of this book for a class on special education, and it really helped me understand the experiences of students with learning differences in a new way. Each of these autobiographies from students themselves was compelling and provided insight into the experiences of these students. By providing the perspectives of many different students with a variety of experiences, the book helps to show what many students with learning differences share in common as well as how widely varied their experiences can be.

This is an excellent, very readable look at the purpose of education. Fareed Zakaria argues that higher education should be about helping students to think critically, that majors such as art history and anthropology don't only prepare students for the limited positions of art historian and anthropologist but rather open students up to a broad range of possibilities, accessible to them because they are able to use a wide variety of intelligences and look at ideas from multiple angles. This is in contrast to skills-based curriculum, in which students are taught specific skills that will likely be outdated five years after they graduate and prepare them for only a specific field. I certainly understand the importance of students learning technical skills, but what I appreciate about Zakaria's outline of a liberal education is his argument that much like athletes cross-train to become better in their chosen sports, students should cross-train in other fields to become even more prepared for their chosen careers. In addition, Zakaria's chapter on knowledge and power gave me hope in a time when I see power being used without knowledge in very scary ways.

This was my first Hemingway (and his first novel), and there might be others of his works that suit me better. I know he won a Pulitzer and a Nobel prize, so maybe I should try some other books, but I wasn't enamored by The Sun Also Rises. I understood why Rory Gilmore calls him “the painful Ernest Hemingway” in an episode of Gilmore Girls. The writing is sparse and the plot is twisted and absurd. I did like it more as it went on, and I'm sure it is a good book for parsing for themes in a literature class, but it wasn't a book for me in casual reading.

The style of this book was interesting, told from the perspective of five different members of Robert Scott's South Pole team. But there was not enough development in any of the perspectives to make me really care about the characters or the expedition. The descriptions of the atmosphere were vivid and horrifying. But I knew the team was doomed from the start, and there was nothing in the book to compel me to continue reading other than my own insistence on pushing through. There also wasn't enough context as to what was happening. The story jumped right in, and I had no clue what was happening of why. The best part was the end, and I'm impressed with Bainbridge's ability to imagine and believably depict the last stages of despair and madness in the crew.

In my work in leadership education, I've been embracing the idea of leadership as a process and the difference between the individual as a leader and the process of leadership. This work articulates those concepts well and gives great insight into how that distinction can make a difference in supporting students from a variety of backgrounds in growing as leaders with leadership capacity. Very useful for my work.

I mistakenly came into reading this book thinking I would really identify with it, having grown up as a girl jock myself. But this book is really about Strauss and his own reconciliation with having daughters who play sports. I appreciate his perspective, having grown up in an era when girls weren't really able to play a lot of sports and now having daughters for whom sports is a huge part of their lives. But the whole book felt like Strauss was trying to unravel the mystery of why his daughters do or don't act the same way as he does (I'll play basketball until I die! How can she just quit?). I would love to see a book like this from the daughter's point of view.

Dan Barry finds the meaning behind all of the details in this otherwise meaningless game – a minor-league baseball game that would blend in with the hundreds of other games in the dozens of other seasons, except that it became the longest game in professional baseball history. The factors that had to coincide to lead this game to seemingly never end are remarkable. But what made this book so enthralling is the masterful way Barry weaved together stories about all of the people involved. As a batter walked up to the plate, we learned how he got to this place, and, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, we also were able to see what significance this game would have in the player's or manager's or fan's lives. Beautifully done.

Light, lovely, delicious. David Lebovitz intertwines his experiences and observations of Parisian life with recipes, all of which I would like to stop and cook right now. As a tourist in Paris, there were so many things I missed out on that Lebovitz points out from living there, and it makes me want to go back to Paris with fresh eyes. And eat all the chocolate!

The main thread of this book surrounds one woman's desire and plan to build a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan (years before the actual Brooklyn Bridge was built). Tied to this plan is the deeply flawed central character, Prue Winship. While the details of the bridge idea are interesting, it is the relationships between Prue and her sisters, her husband, and her friends in the town that drew me into this book. I also enjoyed a different perspective in historical fiction.