Of interest mostly to those concerned about the health of American higher education, but Chace’s quiet, modest voice is...
A guided tour of academe, from the author’s years as a student at Haverford in the 1950s through his recent retirement as president of Emory University.
Chace, who has hitherto published only scholarly titles, began this memoir after he stepped down as the head of Emory. (He returned later as a professor of English.) He entered Haverford in the fall of 1956, was suspended for a year—college authorities were not amused by his “borrowing” the dining-hall silverware—and finally got his B.A. in 1961. After that, he made fairly consistent progress up the plane of academic life: a Ph.D. from Berkeley (earned during its wildest free-speech days), a stint at Stillman College in Alabama (where he was arrested during an early civil-rights demonstration), a job at Stanford (he taught the school’s first course in black literature on barely a moment’s notice), a segue into administration, an appointment to head Wesleyan University (some success, some failure), a transfer to Emory for nine of his most gratifying years. During his administrative career, the author continued to teach, generally courses on Ulysses, and so brings a broad perspective to his commentary on higher education today. Chace sees some things he doesn’t like, especially big-time college athletics, which he calls a “cancer.” He also worries about the state of his own particular academic specialty, English-teaching, which in his judgment has nearly abandoned its traditional emphasis on literary history for a food-court curriculum, political correctness and the arcana of literary theory. In sum, however, he is sanguine, dismissing portraits of dissolute campus life like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons as “grotesquely cartoonish.” Although the subtitle’s characterization of Chace’s experiences as “adventures” is perhaps over-generous, he did hold some nitro he needed to handle carefully: Gay unions proclaimed in a college chapel? Tenure for all? Investing in South African businesses?
Of interest mostly to those concerned about the health of American higher education, but Chace’s quiet, modest voice is intelligent and appealing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-691-12725-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
