DWD's Reviews

Major Talents "Slumming" a Bit for Hollywood Saying that Huxley and Isherwood are slumming by writing a screenplay is really an unfair comparison to the Hollywood of then and the Hollywood of now. Hollywood has always produced junk, but back then they were also more likely to look for those scripts that wrote about the human condition, looking to make a picture that talked about bigger issues. The introduction and the product description on the back cover tell us that Isherwood and Huxley fled Europe for the comparative freedom of Hollywood. "Jacob's Hands" really is more of a Twilight Zone effort than a traditional novel. It can best be described as a John Steinbeck type of simple 30 year old farmhand has the power to heal animals and most people with has hands. But, this wonderful gift has a lot of burdens, too. Christopher Isherwood (left) and  Aldous Huxley The novel is clearly written for the movies. Lots of the description and scene-setting is ...

Published in 2009. Henry Jenkins has written several books dealing with technology, media, bloggers, gamers and the like. Now with Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century he has added education to the mix. Jenkins notes several important things about the future of education (which interested me as a teacher). Formal education must address technology. It cannot be just paper and pencil. Technology is part of the modern world's media - it is not just newspapers, books, magazines, TV and movies. There are blogs, social media and a new one I hadn't really considered: video games. Jenkins encourages the use of video games to teach. There are already several games such as Sims and the various history-based empire building games that teach rules and strategies for life. Jenkins cites the example of a young man who learned a lot about Rome (and through Rome, the structures of all societies) by playing an online game, Caesar 3 . The...

Published in 2006. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century. Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning The Road is literally a book about not much (as some other reviewers have noted) and it is a book about love, fear, despair, hope and sacrifice - which is everything a great book should be about. It is both bleak and engrossing. Set in a post-apocalyptic world of death and destruction that makes Mel Gibson's iconic The Road Warrior look like a hopeful romp along Sesame Street, The Road is bleak and spare, but I was driven to keep reading because I wanted to know two things: what caused the world to end and what happens to this boy and his father. I plowed through it in near record time and only one of my questions was answered. I rated this book 4 stars out of a possible 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Road by Cormac McCarthy . Reviewed on June 11, ...

Will formal education adapt and evolve to a new reality? Should it? Published in 2009. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age is a preview or extract of a much larger work the authors are currently writing. In reality, this should be read like a very long magazine article exploring how the digital age may affect and is affecting higher education in particular and to a lesser extent elementary and secondary education. The "book" begins and ends, to its disadvantage, with a lot of jargon-filled commentary such as: "We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution." Yes, yes, yes. This is college writing at its classic wordiness. Fortunately, once we get into the heart of the paper it gets quite interesting and more reader friendly. There are some big, important questions being asked here, such as, ...

Published in 2010 by Thomas Nelson Publishers Jack Cashill's Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG is, in most cases, an entertaining, fast-paced dash through the history of debt and lending. Negatives: It is correctly subtitled "A Cultural History of Credit & Debt, From Aristotle to AIG" because it is simply "a" history. It is not definitive, in any way. It is simply one part of a much larger story. Popes & Bankers focuses on Western Culture, especially Italy, England, Germany, France, Holland and the United States. Nary a mention of Asia, Africa, or even the Muslim world - I found only one passing comment about sharia banking. Cashill ignores nearly a billion people who follow a religion that outlaws usury. Cashill also ignores post-Marx Europe. Cashill covers lots of topics here, but has no index. Ignoring these topics creates as many questions as he attempted to answer in this book. Positives:...