This headline article in today’s Times is a must read: http://tinyurl.com/7jhsxbq The very short precis is the headline — the education gap today is more one of class than of race. As one Stanford professor put it, “We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race.” This is a very personal issue for me because our town is truly black-white integrated in population — while in the past many suburban towns whose black population… Read More
Yesterday’s guest in my Non Fiction class at Rutgers was Sally Walker, who is not only a fine writer of books for younger readers, but a lively guest speaker. In fact I’m afraid our discussions, comparing notes, bits of disagreement proved all too entertaining for the class. Sally’s stories of working at the Smithsonian, then being invited to participate in digs, contributing insights into a Smithsonian exhibition, and then writing made a very significant larger point: many experts want to communicate with a wider public, perhaps especially young people. They know they are doing exciting work, they want to share… Read More
My last post was about the individual — well this weekend Evgeny Morozov, whose book on The Net Delusion, I have recommended here before, wrote a fine Op-Ed on the Facebooked, Social Networked, Googled net: http://tinyurl.com/76m3zpr The idea that the net is not a clearn open door, but rather is as sticky as, well, a web — where you leave traces of yourself all over the place for others to gather, collect, analyze, and sell — is hardly news. Indeed the world of parents, teachers, and librarians quickly raised alarms about chat rooms and predators. But Morozov — with charm… Read More
I am reading a book all of you should read, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands http://tinyurl.com/28wrobt I mean you should get it and read it as quickly as you can. It is so powerful it effects everything we do. The book is about that region between the then USSR and Poland where 14 million people were slaughtered by the Nazis and the Communists between 1930-45. We think we know the Holocaust, and we do know many individual stories — which is wonderful. But as Snyder points out, the camps deceive us. The camps were both slave labor sites and death machines. Both… Read More
Yesterday Candace Fleming Skyped in to my NF class at Rutgers, and we spent a lively 90 minutes talking about her books, her process, her passion for giving young readers history in new ways that may spark new questions. By the end we began talking about the book she has just finished, and she told us that it has something new for her in it: within the book itself she writes about her own journey in creating it. That sounded wonderful, perfectly in key with the Common Core (which she did not know), and a real hand out to her… Read More
I am a bookseller’s dream: when I see a review of a book that looks interesting or important, I buy it — even if it remains on my shelves, unopened for years. But there it is when I need it. Such was the case with Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, a history of Europe in the 20th Century. received wondereful reviews, http://tinyurl.com/72cfl7c (this one by Tony Judt, with whom I had studied this same period in grad school) and so I bought it, but there it sat, waiting for me. As some of you know, in writing about J. Edgar Hoovrer… Read More
I am teaching two sections of Materials for Young Adults at Rutgers this semester, one one campus, one online. After we do our introductions, the first real class is always spent exploring “what is YA?” — we look at age range, emotional and physical development, voice, style, subject, coming of age as defined in different places and times, whether or not to include books not defined as YA, etc. My students always do a good job of recognizing that these many shifting categories do not neatly overlap, and so defining YA literature is necessarily an ongoing process. But this year… Read More
This week we celebrate Edith Wharton’s 150th anniversary – and last week Apple launched its new enhanced book authoring tool. What do these two have in common? An opportunity and a warning.
When Edith began writing, literary print publishing in America still used a model familiar to everyone who has read Dickens – serialization in magazines, followed by publication in a bound book. An author, then, had two editors – the magazine gatekeeper who got her into print and out to the public, and the maestro of the book. Edith was talented, rich, distracted, eager to be a big… Read More
It was a rough weekend here in our house — at the crossing point of many binary decisions. Sasha is preparing for his first middle grade midterms; Marina has been reading very carefully through the scope and sequence of our ELA program for those same Middle Years; the NFC and AFC playoffs filled a good part of Sunday, and ALA has been meeting in Dallas. By much too late Sunday night when the Giants defeated the 49ers, Sasha collapsed in sobs (the two teams which lost Sunday — San Francisco and Baltimore — are coached by brothers, he had been… Read More
In case you didn’t follow Apple’s Education day as it happened, here is a summary: http://tinyurl.com/85fxh6y Basically Apple is providing tools that make it easy to create enhanced ebooks — but these can only be bought and sold through the iStore — and is getting into the e-textbook business, working with several major textbook publishers. On the one hand, you and I — individual authors, illustrators, editors, but also teachers, and librarians — can easily create materials that make use of text, sound, art, animation, video, etc. This has the potential to be terrific. On the one hand, it now… Read More
