The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens

A teacher's review

Published in 2005.

More informative than Boys and Girls Learn Differently, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life is a fascinating look into the specific reasons why boys are doing so poorly in school nowadays. Very, very awful if you did not know - Boys are the overwhelming majority of special education students, are more likely to drop out, and are much less likely to attend college.

Gurian's strategies to help come off as a bit vague - few concrete solutions are offered. As a teacher, I want to know what a 'boy-friendly' classroom looks like. Precious few good examples are provided. But, enough information is provided to at least alert the teacher that there is a problem and that he or she needs to be on the lookout for struggling boys. I would imagine, like most things in education, the answer is not simple and it requires quite a bit of individualization, which is difficult if, like me, you see upwards of 200 kids in the course of a day.

Read as a companion to Christina Hoff Sommers The War Against Boys. It lacks her hard edge but it is very informative.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life.

Reviewed on July 27, 2006.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

A wonderful science debate cradled in a hard-to-swallow action story

Published in 2004 by Harper Collins.

State of Fear is really two books. One is by Crichton the science essayist. Crichton's scientific comments about the environmentalist movement are most interesting and well-put. This is the only work of fiction that I've read with actual footnotes in it! Crichton throws down the gauntlet in this one and wants you to look into it for yourself. If only Dan Brown had done the same with The DaVinci Code!

Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

Crichton the story-teller is not at his best here. The plot is, for all practical purposes, merely a shallow medium to carry forth Crichton's scientific arguments. It does that but it is not, in and of itself, terribly interesting. If the scientific debates were removed from the book, the action could not carry the book on its own merit.

Read it for the different perspective on global warming, not for the plot. I give the scientific debate (with footnotes) 5 stars, the plot just one star. That's an average of 3 stars.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: State of Fear

Reviewed on July 27, 2006.

Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents by Michael Gurian

A teacher's review

Published in 2001.

I found Boys and Girls Learn Differently: A Guide for Teachers and Parents to be a useful and fascinating introduction to the general strengths and weaknesses of males and females in the classroom.

Some may laugh or poke fun at the relatively old ideas that Michael Gurian is presenting as new in the areas of male/female brain differences. These may be old ideas in the biology lab, but someone needs to walk over to the schools of education across the country and inform them because the 'tabula rasa' theory (the mind is a blank slate and gender differences are entirely a product of culture, not nature) is alive and still kicking hard.

The only complaint I have is that Gurian refers a lot to seminars and ongoing experiments in school designs that will be helpful in teaching to the strengths and weaknesses of girls and boys. However, he comes up a bit short in providing concrete examples of how to help both boys and girls.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on July 27, 2006.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Boys and Girls Learn Differently: A Guide for Teachers and Parents.

The Jester by James Patterson and Andrew Gross

Patterson switches up big time

Published in 2003.

Known for his murder mysteries, James Patterson and co-author Andrew Gross decided to try something new and have given us The Jester, a fun, fast-paced adventure set in war-torn medieval Europe.

Hugh De Luc is a happily married innkeeper until he heads off to fight in the Crusades. The gruesome fighting and wanton disregard for life change and sicken him so he deserts and heads home only to find his wife taken captive and his infant son dead.

At this point, Patterson is on more familiar ground. Hugh De Luc must find out who did it and try to bring him to justice. Unfortunately, medieval customs and laws interfere with that search. Throw in some religious relics and a menacing group of French knights who believe they are condemned to hell and you have the indgredients for a fine book.

Patterson's descriptions of medieval life ring true, although the ending may not have worked out so well in a real medieval scenario. Nevertheless, it was lots of fun and a big improvement over the Women's Murder Club series.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Jester.

Reviewed on July 16, 2006.

The Pilots by James Spencer

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An excellent book of vignettes about World War II's Pacific Theater

Published in 2003 by Putnam Adult

The Pilots consists of a series of short stories, mostly about American pilots of B-24s in the Pacific Theater in World War II. The stories are all related to one another but any one of them is also a stand-alone story on its own (in fact, the author notes in the back note that 5 of the stories were previously published independent of one another in magazines). The dust jacket liner notes call it a novel-in-stories.

Spencer's book consists of 15 vignettes about the lives of two pilots. The first one is about their childhood. It is by far the weakest of the stories. It has the least to do with the war, but it is a decent little story about the Great Depression. The rest of them give us a little taste of the action in the air over the Pacific but also a sense of life back on base and on the atmosphere of the pilots on leave in Australia.

The book is a breeze to read and quite enjoyable. As a memoir in fiction, one can assume that some of it really happened to Spencer, some of it is based on things he heard about and some of it he just made up. Either way, I enjoyed it.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Pilots by James Spencer.

Reviewed on July 10, 2006.

The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 by Herbert M. Kliebard

Bias holds the score down for this book

Third edition published in 2004.

The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 by Kliebard is a classic in the world of college textbooks about American educational history and curriculum. However, if I might be so bold to say so, it is not a classic due to its own strength but rather to the paucity of books that cover this topic.

I have no problem with Kliebard's choice of years to write about (1893-1958) since they are the years when debate over what should be the proper curriculum in America's schools was at its most fierce, beginning with the Committee of Ten report in the 1890s, he documents several movements and ends with the federal government assuming more control over education right after the Sputnik incident caused the American government to doubt the quality of teaching science and math students were receiving.

Kliebard is a professor of education. This shows when he tells this story to his readers. Although he knows his material backwards and forwards, he clearly is an apologist for John Dewey and he has little tolerance for any other education movement. He openly mocks many of them as tools for social control by the ruling class. Other times he pulls out sexist and racist quotes that are intended to excite the reader into disliking educational movements. While it is a dependable (but cheap) tactic to score a few points in a debate, it is a very poor way to write history. It also distorts the true study of some of these movements.

John Dewey (1859-1952)

Any history student can tell you that America in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a racist and sexist place. It serves no purpose to drag those facts into the discussions of the policy debates of the time. Rather, it clouds the issue behind the offending words and phrases. This book was the source of much discussion in a graduate level class I took and many of the students become upset with the words and phrases of certain educational movements and then utterly dismiss their main ideas. Thus, the true study of the philosophies of curriculum becomes obscured in the name of partisanship.

The only exception to these tactics is John Dewey. Kliebard admits in one of his prefaces (he has included each preface from each of his 3 editions of his book in this edition) that he is a big fan of Dewey. Unfortunately, Kliebard does not make it entirely clear why. He talks about Dewey's University School and some of the innovations in rather vague terms. Many other times in the book he points out that Dewey is incorrectly interpreted by other movements who claim Dewey as one of their own, but he does little to explain why this well-written, widely-published educational philosopher could not clearly lay out a plan that would not be misinterpreted by so many. Mr. Kliebard, if Dewey was so great why couldn't he more clearly express himself, especially when it came to curriculum for the secondary level?

So, this book gets a grade of 3 stars. He loses points for being biased in his reporting of history. He gets extra credit for being one of the few to document this facet of American history in a fairly reader-friendly format.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958.

Reviewed on July 9, 2006.

1421: The Year China Discovered America? DVD

Surprisingly well-balanced approach to a controversial theory 

Published in 2004 by PBS

I fully expected the DVD of 1421: The Year China Discovered America? to be a whole-hearted film adaptation of the book without any criticism of the central thesis. If you are not aware of the thesis, British naval officer Gavin Menzies proposes that the gigantic Chinese "Star Fleet" not only explored the Indian Ocean and the coasts of Africa, India and Arabia, but also went around South Africa, into the Atlantic and eventually landed in the Caribbean, North America and South America. Menzies asserts that they went around Tierra Del Fuego, entered the Pacific and eventually returned to China, thus being the first the circumnavigate the globe.

The DVD is very sketchy about the latter half of this trip (The Pacific Ocean leg). The first hour does a strong job of explaining why you may have never heard of Zheng He or his fleet. It also tells about the voyages that historians are confident that Zheng He completed. This lasts about an hour.

Zheng He (1371-1433)

The second half of the DVD focuses on the suggestion that Xheng He went to the Americas. Menzies lays out his case and the casual observer comes away convinced.  

Then, the experts are brought out and Menzies solid case becomes more of an interesting speculation, which is really where this belongs. Under close scrutiny, this fun bit of theory develops a lot of holes (including New World and Old World diseases, a topic not even mentioned by the experts but that occurred to me).

It turns out that Menzies has very little solid data to hold up his proposal. That being said, it should not be entirely dismissed. I encourage Menzies to address the shortcomings that were brought up and make the necessary adjustments to his thesis. Will he? I certainly hope so.

I rate this DVD 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: 1421: The Year China Discovered America?

Reviewed on May 29, 2008.