Bill LeFurgy
Takoma Park, MD, USA
wlefurgy@gmail.com
Lee, Susanna. (2020). Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History. Johns Hopkins University Press. 224 pages, $27.00
Article List | Book Reviews
RSS feed for this sectionReview of Northern Exposure: A Cultural History by Michael Samuel
Samuel, M. (2021). Northern Exposure: A Cultural History. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 208 pages, Hardcover, $38.00
Review of Digital Madness: How Social Media is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis – and How to Restore Our Sanity by Nicholas Kardaras
Dr. Douglas MacLeod
State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology
Cobleskill, New York, U.S.A
MacLeoDC@cobleskill.edu
Kardaras, Nicholas. (2022). Digital Madness: How Social Media is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis-and How to Restore Our Sanity. St. Martin’s Press. 273 pages, $23.99
Decentering the White Narrative: Felicia Chavez and the Anti-racist Writing Workshop
Caroline Malone
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S.A
cmalone1@vols.utk.edu
Felicia Rose Chavez. The Anti-racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Haymarket Books. 2021. 216 pgs., Hardcover $67.50
Protected: Book Reviews: The Benefits of Book Reviews and a Note from the Book Review Editor
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Editor: Roxanne Henkin
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Review of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, by David Gooblar
Review of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, by David Gooblar
Gooblar, David. (2019). The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
272 pages, Hardcover, $29.95
Tyler Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA., USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com
In his new book The Missing Course, David Gooblar writes toward college teachers and administrators alike when he asserts that a more student-centered learning environment is far more effective than a lecture-based classroom. Applied active learning, he asserts, is crucial to student success. Unlike much recent pedagogy scholarship, which contends that a lecture-based classroom is standard for a reason (time-honored “effectiveness,” efficiency, routine), Gooblar favors an engaged and immersive experiential style of teaching. He argues that “[i]n the not-too-distant future, it is now imaginable that researchers will refuse to study lectures as a mode of teaching because to do so would be an unethical imposition on the poor students who have to suffer through them.” He emphasizes this point by noting that some pedagogy scholars are already beginning to agree, and (like him) are treating the experiential model as a foregone conclusion, moving from “the active learning versus lecturing question and focus[ing] instead on determining what kinds of active learning work best” (p. 15). Continue Reading →
Reading Hong Kong in a New Light: Anna Tso’s Hong Kong Stories
Holly H. Y. Chung
The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
hollychung@hsu.edu.hk
Book 1: Culinary Charades
Alpha Academic Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1948210010
Book 2: The Summer of 1997
Alpha Academic Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1948210027
Book 3: Unforgettable Neighbours
Alpha Academic Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948210034
Book 4: Taming Babel
Alpha Academic Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948210041
Book 5: Herstory
Alpha Academic Press, 2019. ISBN:978-1948210058 Continue Reading →
Embracing the Darkness: A Review of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic (2019)
Book Review: Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press, 2019. 225 pgs., $28.00.
Julia Watts
The University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
jwatts4@vols.utk.edu
When Ebony Elizabeth Thomas was a child, her mother told her, “There is no magic.” As a black girl, Thomas was expected to know and accept reality. For her, there were no fairies or princesses or mermaids; there were no white knights on equally white horses. These fantasies were for white people who had nothing better to do than escape into the imaginary worlds created by and for them. Thomas was taught that magical stories were not for black readers, and she, like the speaker in one of Nikki Giovanni’s (1970) most famous poems,” “…learned/black people aren’t/suppose to dream” (lines 3-4). Continue Reading →
Taking Back the ‘F’ Word: A Book Review of The (other)F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, edited by Angie Manfredi
Laura Davis
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Knoxville, TN, USA
ldavi129@vols.utk.edu
Manfredi, Angie (Editor). The (other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce. Amulet Books, 2019. 224 pgs., $18.99.
“Your body is perfect. Yes, yours. Exactly the way it is, right now in this second.”
In The (other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, editor Angie Manfredi brings together thirty voices, from middle grades and young adult authors to fat influencers and pioneers, to provide young adult readers with differing modes of storytelling – personal essays, poetry, and visual art – to celebrate the “fat” body. Across the anthology, authors and illustrators from diverse backgrounds convey their experiences with fat bodies. The variety of concepts throughout the anthology celebrate the uniqueness of the human body and champion owning all aspects of identity. With Bill Maher proposing “fat-shaming doesn’t need to end, it needs a comeback,” books like Manfredi’s push back against fat-shaming and encourage those who are fat to “realize there’s nothing wrong with being fat” (p. 1). Continue Reading →
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