Books

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

An End to Inequality by Jonathan Kozol

Seven Essential Quotes Competent teachers do not need to make that choice. They know that children need to be prepared to go out and earn a living when they’re no longer children. The question that many of them ask, however, is whether students who are only six or eight or ten years old ought to be perceived as just so many economic units in a corporate society, and...

Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque

“A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We’re living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!” Wanderers should have no...

A Little Life by Hana Yanagihara

JB wore a perpetual expression of mild disbelief while at his job, both that he should be working at all and that no one had yet thought to recognize his special genius. You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more...

The Five Best Books I Read This Year and One to Avoid

For the first time since 2011, I didn’t get to my goal of 75 books read in a calendar year. In fact, I didn’t even get close, with 53 being a best case this year. There are a number of reasons why I didn’t read as much as I like to, but I’m going to give most of the blame to Meredith Grey and the months-long funk that led to watching way too...

As My Books Fly Out, My Treasures Remain Shelved: The Elfstones of Shannara

When I was very young, I dreamed that I would one day own a home with a library. It was a strange dream for a kid from a working class family, but I had rather vivid and specific expectations for what my library would one day look like. It would have been filled ceiling to floor with heavy, leather-bound books, hold a reading chair with perfect light, and definitely...

The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future by Linda Darling-Hammond

Good teachers create little oases for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling educational snake oils when...

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it. If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill. “Let...