About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Donald Yacovone
Positive New York Times Book Review Yacovone’s thesis is a compelling and convincing one: that Northern publishers, universities, religious authorities and social activists were more responsible than Southern ones in disseminating an enduring ideology of white supremacy and Black inferiority ... Yacovone ably surveys the deep wells of racism within Northern progressive movements during the 19th century ... While such scholarship is not new, it is useful to document how these strains of thinking were present in textbooks. A problem throughout Yacovone’s book, however, is that textbooks are almost the only evidence he calls upon from the sphere of schools ... Yacovone also makes some puzzling choices as to which thinkers and writers to emphasize.
Justin Driver
Positive The New York Times Do children who are undocumented immigrants have the right to a free public education? (They do.) Under what circumstances can teenagers be searched or suspended by school staff? (A very wide variety.) Can districts draw school zones in irregular shapes in order to achieve racial diversity in the classroom? (They can.) These are among the most divisive issues I’ve written about in a decade of education reporting. Indeed, they are among the most divisive issues in American life. And as Justin Driver explains in his indispensable The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind, the highest court has ruled on each of these questions, profoundly shifting the American legal landscape not only in classrooms but outside of schools as well ... If there is a criticism to be made of The Schoolhouse Gate, it might be that its organization, in which cases are clustered by topic instead of dealt with chronologically, dulls some of the impact of this historical shift, and makes it harder for the reader to see connections among some of these constitutional issues ... Still, this is a minor complaint. Driver has performed a service in assembling the stories of so many important education cases in one encyclopedic, fair and elegantly written volume. It will remain on my desk for years to come.
Nicholson Baker
Mixed The Washington Post Substitute faithfully re-creates the grinding, sometimes stultifying routines of classroom life, from shushing the class to cleaning the dry-erase board. Unfortunately, this comes at considerable expense for readers ... The resulting book too often reads like a transcript, albeit one that highlights both the tedium and charm of teaching school ... Baker clearly loves kids, and the funniest, most poignant pages of Substitute capture their intelligence, humor, sweetness and exasperating energy.
Adam Cohen
Positive The New Republic Cohen’s narrative of the legal case that enshrined these [sterilization] practices is a page-turner, and the story it tells is deeply, almost physically, infuriating...It is unfortunate that Carrie Buck remains a cipher at the center of her own story, one told through the well-documented lives of four powerful men. But considering the limited material Cohen had to work with...the format of Imbeciles makes sense, and Cohen deals with his subject sensitively.
Linsey McGoey
Mixed The New Republic Bill and Melinda Gates hold heavy sway over public policy, yet no one elected them to any office. It is crucial that they, and other large donors, be held accountable as philanthropists. This is the worthy goal of an impassioned new book by Linsey McGoey ... In the first half of the book, she reviews the history of large foundations, persuasively demonstrating that corporate titans, like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, approached philanthropy in ways that were fundamentally \'selfish\' ... In the second half of the book, McGoey narrows her lens to the Gates Foundation’s work on U.S. K-12 education and global health. If she makes one overriding critique, it is that the foundation ignores the preferences of local communities as it pursues its agenda ... A skeptic of genetically modified foods, McGoey does not make clear that the scientific consensus suggests they are safe for consumption. She emphasizes that the foundation once held shares in Monsanto, and acknowledges that it has since divested from the company ... No Such Thing as a Free Gift is filled with evidence, all of which has been reported elsewhere, of financially self-serving charity on the part of Canadian executive Frank Giustra and other associates of Bill Clinton, as well as companies like Nestlé, General Electric, and Walmart. But none of those names are mentioned in the subtitle of McGoey’s book, only the Gates name is. And what McGoey does not prove is that Bill or Melinda Gates seek financial gain from their charitable activities. Instead, she insinuates ... McGoey seems not to have interviewed Bill or Melinda Gates (they are very difficult to access), and seems to have had only limited cooperation from the foundation in responding to her questions and critiques. Nor does she provide original analysis of the foundation’s financial documents ... A full investigation of the Gates Foundation would need to weigh the organization’s goals against its considerable achievements, which receive little ink in No Such Thing as a Free Gift.