Educators Books

Eugenia Ginzburg was the first Russian Communist to write extensively about being caught in the "meatgrinder" of Stalin's purges. It took her a long time to figure it out: "We were creatures of our times, of the epoch of magnificent illusions."

"Within the Whirlwind" is the second volume of her memoirs. I have not read the first, but the editors say she pulled her punches then, hoping for publication at home (which didn`t happen). She avers that this volume is only the truth. Not the whole truth, she admits, but nothing but truth.

This seems credible.

At least, her memoir is readable. I forced myself to go 100 pages in Solzhenitsyn's "GULAG Archipelago," but it was unreadable. Ginzburg's memoir is windy but readable, basically a series of vignettes of encounters during 18 years of exile/imprisonment in the Soviet Far East.

Her pen portraits of fellow zeks (political prisoners), free workers, apparatchiks, common criminals and commandants are deft, though there is no way to be sure how realistic they are. Each story has a point, often about little expressions of humanity or courage breaking out in what was otherwise a hellhole.

Like all memoirs of the great slave societies of the 20th century, Ginzberg's is shaped by survivor bias.

Although she spent some time in the more brutal camps -- felling trees where the temperature came to 40 below, on little food -- her background (teacher of literature, musician) got her easier posts most of the time, where she ate somewhat better and had some shelter. Also, she was never beaten or tortured.

The same survivor bias shows in memoirs of prisoners of the Germans and Japanese. The ones who did not get jobs in kitchens or offices seldom survived to write memoirs. (A.J.P. Taylor accepts that 2 million died building the White Sea Canal; they left no memoirs.)

The capsule story is that Ginzburg had two sons. One died of starvation in Leningrad. She adopts a foundling daughter and falls in love with a German doctor. After her final release, she stays in the east because Anton, her new husband, has not yet finished his endless sentences.

Later, when they are allowed to go back to European Russia, where Ginzburg's first, undivorced husband turns out to have survived both the Germans and the Russians, she skips over whatever arrangements were worked out.

Among many interesting tales, there are some broader generalities that come through that might surprise American readers.

One is that not everybody in the GULAG was an innocent zek. There were huge numbers of what Ginzburg calls common criminals, a not unexpected residue of tsarism and civil war. The zeks were terrorized by the criminals, in some ways even more so than by the Party.

During the war, the zeks were wild to fight the Germans. The notion, promoted today by some neocons, that the Russians would have revolted against Stalin if given the chance is not supported here.

In the end, Ginzburg takes a lenient view of her persecutors, viewing the common run of them as misguided, weak, ignorant. Her hatred is reserved for the few actors at the top.

Thus she excuses herself from a great earlier crime. She and her first husband were stalwart Communists until the knock on the door in 1937. In an epilogue, Ginzburg says she did not know much about what had been done to the kulaks.

In one sense, this may be believable. She was teaching literature in college far away in Kazan. In another, it is not. The drumbeat of hatred against the kulaks and wreckers was part of her daily life. It required a determined failure of imagination to avoid drawing conclusions.

Even after her first 10 year sentence, she was still failing to imagine. And that, to me, is the heart of the book -- a failure to imagine.

Eugenia Ginsburg was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in 1937 on a false charge of terrorism at the height of the Stalin purges. In her first book 'Into the whirlwind' she describes her arrest, her interrogation, her mockery of a trial and two years in solitary confinement in prison. She was then transported to Magadan in the far East of Russia to a labour camp, and the first volume ends as she is beginning to cope with the undescribably harsh conditions in the camp.

'Within the whirlwind' describes the next fifteen years until her return and rehabilitation. She describes how her life was saved by gaining work as a nurse in the camp hospital where she met her second husband.

This book leaves the reader astonished how Evgenia could describe her life with such humour and at the same time with such human understanding. All the time, however, the reader is reminded of the inhumanity, lying and deception of the Stalin regime.

At one stage, the vice president of the USA, Henry Wallace, visits the camps, and the prisoners are removed and the guards temporarily take their place and manage to convince the gullible American that the camps are manned by well fed and enthusiastic pioneers.

Eugenia returns to Moscow, her life destroyed, having lost one of her sons. She ends on a note of optimism, that the truth will be told in her native land. She died however in 1977 and never saw her books published in her native land nor the destruction of the communist regime.

This book is now out of print, which is a pity. Everybody interested in Russia should try to get hold of a copy and read it and ponder on the demons that helped produce the country as it is today.

This book shocked, sickened, and inspired me. I never realized how terrible Stalin's purges were until I read Ginzburg's historically accurate and emotionally compelling memoir. Unforgettable characters, disturbing mental images, and harrowing brutality made up the Soviet Gulag and Ginzburg's book showcases them beautifully! Outstanding memoir!!

I happened to come across this book in Austin, TX. The cover art was interesting and well done, very colorful, and it caught my eye. This guy has quite a tale about being in the Peace Corps in Morocco, among other things. There is a fascinating account of a meeting Mr. Moran had with Paul Bowles. He writes of personal experiences that were sincerely entertaining, and the man knows how to write. There is a sense of surrealism of this period of time, from 1981-1984 or so, that mirrors a similar mood of the early Reagan years. For a testament of the changing world around that time period, "Younger Than That Now" captures it as well as can be done. This book deserves to be read. It's just a great, all-around piece of writing.

"Pure kif,"the legendary expatriate musician and writer Paul Bowles told me,"is the best thing in the world for a troubled mind." Younger Than That Now chronicles Michael Moran's hallucinatory trip through the labyrinths of Boujad,Morocco,where the Peace Corps volunteer lived and taught from 1981 to 1983. Part lyric,part fact,this book lays bare the inside workings of the Peace Corps and shows how each volunteer,no matter how estranged,struggles to make a difference.Through all the talk, repentance,and endless travel,one thing remains constant:Moran's experience is never PC.

Michael Moran writes an interesting book about his two years in the Peace Corps in Morocco. Although this book doesn't actually tell you much about the Peace Corps itself (something that Moran actually doesn't seem too interested in, despite his two year commitment to the program), it does show you one way a Peace Corps experience can go -- which is to say, he pretty much turned the two years of "service" into an opportunity for him to travel and have some experiences worth turning into a book later on. What makes this book worth reading is that Moran writes well and does not try to spare himself. He presents himself as a real person who is, at alternating times, naive, determined, pretentious, sympathetic, arrogant, or young. But throughout it all, he is intelligent and honest as he portrays his struggles with Moroccan culture and with his own life, a self-consciousness ultimately represented through his relationship with a Scottish woman, Janet Graves.

A note: Don't bother to read the synopsis on the back of this book -- it isn't an accurate portrayal of the main themes or struggles of the book.

I do believe that other Peace Corps writers (such as Thomsen in "Living Poor") allow their experiences to change and influence them. As Moran says in his introduction (excerpted above in the Editorial Reviews), he doesn't think that the PC really changes people, but rather dramatizes their flaws. I believe this viewpoint of his is a result of the mentality he had going into the experience-- he seemed to have been dissatisfied and somewhat lonely in his American life, and was seeking an escape in a somewhat strict and self-righteous way that didn't allow for him to be changed by the culture around him. Ultimately, I'm sure he did change, as we are all changed by our experiences, but don't expect this book to be a telling of how those changes occur. It's simply an interesting read about two years in an expatriate's life, but its honesty and the adventures contained within it will be captivating nonetheless.

Starts slowly when Harlan gets falls in love with the million+ Washington papers he had just cataloged and buries the reader in an avalanche of names, places, dates of Washington's early political career as the Presidential "referee" for an entire race.

But Harlan redeems himself with chapters on Washington's dealings with his family, his school, his fund-raising, the world (he made three trips to Europe and was the most widely known African-American in the world), and his attack under mysterious and still unexplained circumstances in New York City.

Harlan does a better job in this volume than the first of explaining the contradictions of Washington's leadership style ("separate but equal" accomodationism) in a region and country increasingly violent and dominated by white supremacist feelings. The ultimate end of Washington's other-cheek economic self-help style was racial exclusion and unimpeded trammeling of rights.

His flaws must be acknowledged, but in the end the flaws magnify the worth of the man. I go back to that humble farm in western Virginia and the reconstructed "cabin" at the National Historic site (rougher and even more rudimentary than the mental image the word evokes) and imagine the journey that young boy made from slavery to freedom, from ignorance to education, from insignificance to leadership. From these beginnings to his end (at an early but aged 59), Booker T. Washington's greatness can not be doubted.

_I think you will make a mistake if you will let your mind dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other racial prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things. If one gets in the habit of continually thinking and talking about race prejudice, he soon gets gets to the point where he is fit for little that is worth doing. In the northern part of the United States, there are a number of colored people who make their lives miserable, because all their talk is about race prejudice_ Booker T. Washington in a letter to his daughter Portia then living and studying in Europe.(117)

I am greatly impressed with this text, BOOKER T. WASINGTON, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. Professor Louis R. Harlan earned the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for History with this biography along with the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. The principle source is the Booker T Washington Papers in the Division of Manuscripts of the LIbrary of Congress, a rich, expanding collection of approximately a million letters, speeches, reports, newspaper clippings, and other documents. Professor Harlan is the editor of the published source that extends, currently, to 14 volumes. This material is available on-line in an Open-Book format at the site maintained by the University of Illinois Press (www.historycooperative.org/btw).

This book begins in 1901, when Booker T. Washington at the age of forty-five was approaching the zenith of his fame and influence, and ends with his death in 1915. It is a biographical study in the sense that its focus is on the complex, enigmatic figure of Washington, the most powerful black minority-group boss of his time. It also recounts the inner life and struggles of the small black middle class in that generation once removed from slavery, as a coterie of college-bred black men and women challenged Washington's powerful coalition of northern, white philanthropists, southern white paternalists, black businessmen, and such members of the black professional class as he could attract to his side.

Washington's wizardry - his skill of maneuver and ability to make the most of bad circumstances - was his strong point as a leader. His greatest failing was his inability to reverse the hard times for blacks during what whites called the Progressive Era. The same era which the historian Rayford Whittingham Logan (1897-1981) called the nadir of Afro-American history. As Washington's influence declined in his last years, W.E.B DuBois, a strong critic of Washington, and the founders at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sought relief through the court system.

It was this legal strategy of the NAACP in the 20th Century that culminated in the successful Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and it is Washington's work-ethic, self-help, self-improvement and particularly, style of accomomdation that have been forgotten or discredited. This text helps us remember what Washington accomplished, however, more importantly, Professor Harlan's meticulous investigations reveal that the character of Washington is difficult to articulate succintly.

Washington's correspondence with the large donors to Tuskegee does not reveal a conspiracy, either large or small, to prepare Tuskegee's students to become wage-workers in the corporate structure. The typical donor sent his check rather than his advice.,...Washington's efforts at Tuskegee Institute were to train students to become independent small businessmen, farmers, and teachers rather than wage-earners or servants of white employers. At the same time, it is clear that Washington flattered and cajoled the very rich and never challenged the appropriateness of their status at the peak of the American success pyramid.

Tuskegee became a mecca for not only Africans but West Indians and Asians. As his writings were translated into many foreign languages, he became the most famous black man in the world, and his fame drew foreigners to him like a magnet. All manner of men, American missionaries, European colonialists, Afican nationalists, Buddhist reformers, and Japanese modernizers sought to enlist his aid. On the one hand were whites who sought to aid in introducing plantation agriculture into colonial areas. On the other hand Africans and Asians hoped to find in Tuskegee industrial education and Washington's philosophy of self-help a source of strength to resist the political and cultural impreialism of the Europeans. Washington sought to accomodate all of these contradictory propositions.

While intrepid research has uncovered new material that lends fresh insight, rather than illuminating Washington for compassion to his motives, the added light only casts more shadows. Utterly at variance with the Sunday-school morality he publicly professed, there was also a more feral, more power-hungry Washington, inordinately involved in politics, and particularly the poitics of patronage. Few people, even those affected, such as W.E.B DuBois and Mary White Ovington, knew the extent to which Washington refused to meet our preconceived notions of how a great leader should behave.

Inexplicable human fraility, aside, as a guide for the black community, Washington had a concrete program of industrial education and the promotion of small business as the avenue of black advancement "up from slavery" and into the middle class. This program may have been anachronistic preparation for the age of mass production, urbanization, and corporate gigantism then coming into being; but it had considerable social realism for a black population which was, until long after Washington's death, predominantly rural and southern. It gave purpose and dignity to black working-class lives of toil and struggle, and also was well attuned to the growth and changing character of black business in Washington's day. He championed the emerging black business class as the leaders of black communities, and they in turn, through the National Negro Business League, became the backbone of Washington's following.

Washington's followers found hope in his message that fortified them in hopeless situations. During his time, he was exalted as a type of Moses who would lead his people to the promised land as welcome participants in the mainstream of society. For many in the US and around the world, his teachings were a type of deliverance from their oppressive circumstances. Moses had quite a few faults, as all deliverers do, and one of these faults prevented him from entering the promised land of Canaan. Even with all of his great abilities to accommodate the ruling class majority, his ability to conquer overwhelming obstacles, Booker T. Washington's inability to accomodate the strategies of the NAACP, who were themselves uncompromising, weakened his effectiveness.

After reading this remarkable text, I see Booker T. Washington as a man with great accomplishments and failings perhaps as great. Even with his shortcomings, he was exceptional as he provided his followers hope and lifted their spirit. Professor Harlan has brought to life a man of enormous complexity, who will never be completely understood or known which makes Booker T. Washington much like the people of which I claim familiarity.

PEACE

Ms. Charlotte Hawkins Brown is an educational pioneer whose life story is relevant today. This book and another one written about her, "Charlotte Hawkins Brown & Palmer Institute: What One Young African American Women Could Do" is testimony of her love for education and her tireless and creative ways to build a school for poor, children in the Jim Crow South.

Visionaries like her create a legacy for many, many children and families in the South and other parts of the country enabling them to transcend the despair of ignorance and poverty and become the hope that she and their parents saw in them as young children and young adults. I, too, encourage this book for students at all levels to learn about her life, to inspire you, and become awe-struck with the tenacity she possessed in a very dangerous and dark time in our history. Her life inspires us to look around and take whatever actions we can to help others achieve an education. Ms. Charlotte Hawkins Brown's life demonstrates that no matter where you are you, too, can create meaningful solutions in service to others who desire to achieve an education and/or overcome poverty and a better life. Just imagine, if she had access to the money that Oprah does today how much more she could have done?

As other readers have stated, attention educators, administrators and charter school faculty and organizers -- this is a life story that needs to be studied for lessons and best practices that can be culled and tweaked for use today. Peace

My students (I teach African-American studies) found this book very inspiring. This is essentially the story of Ms. Hawkins-Brown and her efforts to bring a school to the impoverished blacks of North Carolina, and how she succeeded in the darkest days of Jim Crow and lynching. It is an interesting added tidbit to consider that she is an ancestor of the singer Natalie Cole.

This story is similar to those of Booker T. Washington, Mary Mcleod Bethune, Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins, Mary F. Wright, and many other founders of Black southern shcools at the time. It is a shame that stories of this kind have not been passed down to inspire the youth as they were prior to the 1960s. Books like this may hopefully rekindle these traditions at a time when such role models are so strongly needed.

I found the book very helpful in developing a comprehensive educational and support system for the church. The chapters by a variety of authors brought good insights through experience, rather than theory. Very helpful.

Gangel and Wilhoit address many important aspects of Christian Education. In the book, theology and family dynamics are freshly engaged. However, the theory is concretely displayed through relevant contemporary issues that are also discussed. Christian Education is a family-wide objective (no matter who actually receives the teaching), and this book is a helpful tool for that mission.

This book is a real treat to read. I am impressed not only by the writing of this author. She actually has a real movie story in the works. I have read other works by Estella -- This is well written as usual, tasteful, entertaining and family oriented. Thank You so much

Come Out The Wilderness: Memoir of a Black Woman Artist.

This is a book worth reading, however, the first 100 pages are a little slow. The Artist (Stella) is the only girl among five brothers, and is one of the only African American students in her Catholic school. Her attempts to deal with and overcome Sexism and Racism in her home, school and marriages makes for good reading. In her first marriage she is forced to choose between the man she fell in love with and marriage and the person he became. He had problems handling his work related stress caused by racism. His other problems include her holding out sexually until he agreed to marry her, the early birth of their first child and dropping out of college.

This is a handy little cookbook with clear instructions. Some of the recipes may be a bit dated, but plenty to choose from. The illustrations are clear and easy for my 5 year olds to follow.

I use this book in my classroom as a cooking center. The illustrations and words are easy enough for a kindergartener to use and create a wonderful snack. Some great examples are gingerbread and cherry cheesecake. All of the recipes can be done using an electric skillet, kitchen cups and a few ingredients.

This book is a great read, especially if you work with children or are an educator. The author did a great job. However, I gave this 4 stars because it has so many punctuation errors that I had trouble reading certain parts. I was very disappointed because this book is probably on hundreds of shelves in the world. Writeread press published this book, and they did a horrible job. There are typos and there are missing quotation marks when dialogue is being presented. For such a great story and a heck of a read, it should be written by a much better publisher. Was very disappointed in that, but I still thought it was a great book. The abuse that the author and the rest of the children in this book was so unfair and it made me shake my head while reading, page after page of the torture of this sadistic woman who claimed to "care about children".
Please take a great look into this book. You won't regret it

Read this incredible story out of curiousity, and just couldn't put it down. A fascinating story with no precedent. Highly reccomended S.X.

'You know I have a lump inside here,' my sister Cookie said, looking down and pointing to a spot above her left breast. We were sitting in the living room of my mother's two story condominium in Santa Clara, California, where they lived together. We were talking, as we had so many times since I had moved back to California seven years earlier. Cookie was sitting in her Lazy Boy recliner doing her usual thing: smoking.

So begins the final chapter of Janet Rossi Tezak's stirring memoir "Do I Dare? published by iUniverse, Inc. Rossi Tezak subtitles her recent work "A Memoir of One Woman's Life Journey," that could as well have been called 'a memoir of on immigrant family's life journey.' In the conclusion of her story, Ross Tezak goes on to narraate the ordeal of going through the co-diagnoses of suspicious mammograms by both her and her sister. As if that weren't burden enough, we learn, too, of her older sister's mental disorder that the family lovingly coped with during life.

Interestingly interspersed with her life experiences is the poetry and photographs that make up this montage of Rossi Tezak's life journey. It is the kind of book everyone would write if we were capable of gleaning those gems of experience from the vast, often dull experiences of the everyday. Her photographs are of the old fashioned sort that those of us who are of a certin generation remember fondly, taken by and with our own families--glimpses into our pasts that cause us to reminisce and for a short second or two, cause us to wish we were back again in happier times or circumstances. Her poetry is yet another theme of her memoir and it, too, reflects the black and white with which we used to see the world long before psychedelic visions that turned into the Technicolor reality rendered so vividly by technology. In "Obsession," she writes:
When I in school,
I wanted to say it,
write it down;
I didn't give a damn
if a comma,
colon,
was proper. . . .
Rossi Tezak's poetry reads like a literary daguerreotype of her thoughts through life's journey with her family--sepia in tone and color, black and white in reality and fact.

Early in the book we learn from whom she inherited her storytelling gift--her grandfater Papanon, who "was the storyteller in the family. I loved hearing his stories about when he had to go fight in World War I on the side of Italy...." The author fondly descriibes her grandfather as a "slight man barely 5'2" who had a long roman nose and who carried a hump on his back caused, it was believed, by carrying heavy knapsacks on his back during World War I. Rossi Tezak goes on to tell readers:"He had come to America at the age of 10, but he hadn't become an American citizen. When the war broke out, he had to go back to Italy. His whole family, wife, and four daughters came with him. At one point, he became a German Prisoner of War, and his wife and his four daughters went back to the town of my grandparents'birth, Laurenzano near Naples, to live out the duration of the war. The author illustrates this narrative with a photograph of "Papanon as a prisoner of war" and the reader sees Papanon sitting in an army tent as he glares at the camera while eating from his mess kit.

Rossi Tezak also relates in her memoir the various facets and signposts of her life, growing up in New York and Florida and eventually finding her way to the Monterey Bay and becoming an English teacher at the local community college. We learn of the struggles to find her own identity as she tried to escape the shadows and reality of juggling her artistic pursuits with work and family, and yet remain true to her faith, her husband, her children, her siblings, her mother. Rossi Tezak's memoir thus becomes a blueprint of the dilemma that the artist in each of us faces as we struggle to understand the dichotomy that separates desires and needs from reality. We are torn between love and having it all and if there is a philosophical frailty in American culture, it is the belief instilled in us that we can indeed have it all. Our acceptance of reality comes at a later age in life when we discover that while we didn't achieve it all, it was a pretty good life after all and if we didn't win the derby it wasn't because we didn't run.

That is the lesson the reader takes from Rossi Tezak's memoir. It is a literary monument to that struggle that we as humans encounter, talk about, write about. The memoir is provocative but caring and understandingly woven to help the reader reach into his or her own psyche and relive the personal journey we all take.

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Tezak looks back on the kinds of decisions so many women must make--what work to do, when/whom to marry, how to deal with family--and constructs a quest and an arrival. This is the kind of narrative many can identify with, while enjoying the insights that a long perspective gives. She has captured so much of the feeling of times and places, while giving the reader an openhearted sense of what it is like to be young and curious; at the same time, she shares her doubts and regrets and reminds us that growing up is what we all have to do--each in her own way.
Not of the "scissors, drugs, and abuse" genre, this is simply an honest account of a woman's life.

Provides excellent insight for all individuals helping others with brain injury cope with their disability. A must for educators dealing w/ a student who has suffered a brain injury.

Should be compulsory reading for all teachers of kids with TBI.
Really great book.Parents however shouldn't have to teach teachers about TBI