Many people live in cities, but what allows an urban citizen to claim that they live in an urban neighborhood? Knowing your neighbors? Giving a neighbor a key to your place while your away? Being recognized by the guy at the deli, the woman and the market, and the other local trades? Participating in local…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Measure What You Value and Value What You Measure
Few works on higher education have generated as much press and interest as Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago, 2011). Reviews, attacks, accolades and discussion have accompanied its publication and we are now seeing the ultimate measure of interest in higher education: the conference. Within months…
In Search of an Interesting College Student . . .
Exactly how ineffective is higher education? How much is wrong? Please, please, let me count the ways. A book a week, a screed a fortnight and an expose daily seem to be populating the media, each of which take a different tack highlighting the many woes of American higher education. In this melange of negativity…
Who Is The Party Pooper?
Craig Brandon’s The Five-Year Party makes me think of reheated coffee: sometimes necessary but always bitter, acidic, and thin. A former journalism professor at Keene State, New Hampshire, Brandon has assiduously collected bad new and bad results throughout higher education in order to populate this book. He weaves together the negativity into an extraordinarily bleak…
Poor Options, Smart Choices
If, sadly, a twenty-two year old is killed by a bus, the news media will quickly report the untimely demise of a man. Ask a group of middle-aged Americans about a twenty-two year old who lacks a full-time job and lives in his parent’s house, and they would be unwilling to call that person an…
Playing in the Shallows – Just What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?
I read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr in an old-fashioned format: hardcover book. It wasn’t an accident, either. Carr penned “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for The Atlantic, and the article generated a good deal of thought and discussion around the house. We tend to be Google-philes and the “gee-whiz” factor of what emanates from…
Netherland
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is a very good novel. A post 9/11 narrative, a book about post-modern living, love and family, a buddy story, a novel about exiles (modernism, anyone?, a love story, a narrative about New York City – it is more than fiction, it is literature. Snobbish, perhaps, but outstanding fiction can transcend itself and…