Newspapers Books

Purchasing USE THE NEWS as part of our school's NEWSPAPERS IN EDUCATION week activities, I was reviewing the activities at home and found that many of them were exercises I could use with my 5-year-old twins. I'd recommend USE THE NEWS not only to classroom teachers looking for ways to get students involved with current events, but for parents introducing their children to the daily newspaper. The book covers every major curriculum area with lots of suggestions for individual, group, or class work. When I have to be out of the classroom, I always mark a few pages of USE THE NEWS for the substitute to complete with my students. This book has something for everyone!

It is surprising how often newspapers are overlooked as a valuable teaching tool. For one, newspapers provide immediate relevancy so as to spark student interest in current events around them. Besides, as newspapers are often written in plain, simple English, students will find them less daunting to read. This book gives teachers of English practical and creative ways to teach the language through the use of newspapers. For instance, the activities are created out of different sections of the newspapers -- from cartoons to editorials -- so that they provide a collection of challenging yet engaging activities to cater to different learners. The sample materials, combined with clear procedures and guidelines, make it a handy tool for the teacher. Definitely recommended for those teachers keen to explore new ways to enhance language teaching and learning!

We are indebted to John Hammond Moore for compiling and editing this fine collection of reportage, editorials, and one-liners written by the now obscure Robert Quillen (1887-1948), who, beginning in the 1920s, was for more than twenty years "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia" (xi) from his home in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

Quillen was born in Kansas, and briefly worked in both the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest before creating the Fountain Inn Tribune in 1911. By 1932 his work was being syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers.

Quillen the adoptive southerner was a facile writer. But he was not especially profound or consistent in his political, economic, and racial views. (Moore advises that some of Quillen's words "may shock or dismay the modern reader.") Not surprisingly as well, some of Quillen's humor--especially pieces using colloquialisms of the early twentieth century--seem dated seventy-five years later.

Nevertheless, there are many fine paragraphs in this anthology, well-constructed pieces that can take their place with the best American journalistic writing. I was especially moved by Quillen's obituaries.

Those interested in the history of the early twentieth-century South would also do well to peruse this book. Without even considering the gaping racial divide, Quillen's work emphasizes how different was the Fountain Inn of his era from exurb of today. Quillen constantly alludes to passages in the King James Version. He suggests that landowners provide vegetables to their tenants so that they won't get pellagra. He urges that prisoners not be tortured but taught to read. He warns that driving unlighted wagons or "flivvers" at night is against the law and might be fatal. He prefers tax cuts to paved streets and public education. In all, a book well worth reading by historians, journalists, and local history buffs.

Dinah Reynolds has returned to Midnight, Texas to run the family newspaper. Over the course of several weeks she must deal with the break-up of her marriage, the battles between her son and daughter-in-law, her neurotic mother, her aging but dynamite grandmother, as well as kidnapped house cats, her first love, and a plane crash in a field of Swiss chard. Hilarious at times, poignant at others, the story moves swiftly, never failing to maintain interest. The narrator's wry sense of humor and keen eye for detail bring the sights, sounds, smells and, of course, people of small-town Texas to life. Dinah might not do everything right, but she honestly wants to and that's what will make you pull for her.

It is full of newspaper cliping from when the war started until it ended. It is a worth while book and i learnd a lot from it. I am 10 years old and most of my friends like World War Two and it is very interesting.

This book contains hilarious signs like 'injured cow injures farmer with ax'. Some of the signs are real and some are not like the one above. In my opinion it is a very good and funny book. But some may find this book disturbing and I would say it also has dark humour.

I gave this book to my mom for Christmas. She has thoroughly enjoyed it. It is great for the 50-something crowd who are going through everything from learning computers to losing friends and family. It is also great for people who prefer to read small vignettes instead of getting bogged down by an entire story. Great reading

Seminal work on the Yiddish Presses role in the Americanization of Jewish immigrants, by Mordechai Soltes (1893-1957), of blessed memory. Originally a Ph.D. dissertation for a degree in sociology from N.Y.U.
Full of statistics and charts, as well as text.
Of historical interest in itself as an early work in the field of sociology and Jewish studies. The author was the father of well-know Rabbi, Avraham Soltes (o.b.m.) (author, Off The Willows), grandfather of Ori Z. Soltes (see book on Jewish Art) and me, physician of Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine.

This is a great book. I haven't read in years, so I was surprised when I was so into it. At times you feel like you are in Ford County, Mississippi with the characters, thinking you know what's coming next when the story takes a turn. It's a good book by Grisham.

I enjoyed this book because it was a great look at a small town in a very trying time. Grisham writes so very well and has a good sense of what it was like in those times not so very long ago. As some of the editorial reviews said, the book tells of a time, it doesn't necessarily fill with actions. One feels like you really got to know the characters. A slightly above average vacation read.

The Last Juror is a delightful story about Mississippi in the 1970s. The characters are well developed and fascinating. Don't miss it.

There's a place in John Grisham's heart where he yearns to tell about his South in the way that William Faulkner did. Grisham is no Faulkner, but his Ford County is an entertaining place to revisit for a nine-year story (last seen in A Time to Kill) that provides a picture of rural Mississippi at the end of the Vietnam War. Unlike Grisham's other books with legal-sounding titles, this book isn't primarily about the law and lawyers. Instead, a murder and its consequences stand as bookends to hold this story about changing Mississippi together.

The book is filled with more stereotypes than original characters, but the exceptions make the story rise above the average. The two vivid characters who make the book work are "Willie" Traynor, the young college drop out, who buys the Ford County Times out of bankruptcy and turns it into a vital part of the community. Traynor stands in for us as non-rural Mississippians in understanding what's going on. The most interesting character is "Miss" Callie Ruffin, mother to a family of professors, who was one of the first African-Americans to register to vote in Ford County.

In the background is a continual sense of dread as the local residents live in fear of the lawless Padgitt family which "owns" the sheriff and the county when the book opens.

This book is considerably more delightful if you listen to the unabridged recording read by Michael Beck who is able to turn simple narratives into Southern charm.

After giving up on John Grisham's books as all being rehashings of the same plot (I hadn't read one in a decade) I picked this up in a used book store on a whim. I was looking for something easy to read and predictable (something Grisham usually supplies) but instead found a thought-provoking, well paced book that exceeded all my expectations and made me remember why I liked A Time to Kill so much that I read 6 more of his books hoping he'd live up to it. Well, he finally has. The Last Juror is a study in the changes that have affected small town America (particularly the southern part). From forced integration and busing to an analysis of the impact of a thinly disguised Wal-Mart this book manages to be fair and judicious. I can see Grisham's own political opinions and leanings but he somehow manages to be respectful of those whose politics differ from his own. That's a gift. As I was reading the book I recognized Harry Rex and Lucian from having read about them almost 20 years ago. To be able to create characters that stay in the memory that long is also a gift. I hope he keeps it up, I just might buy another of his books if he does.

You need to have repose when you read this book so you can remember the details. Don't listen to it while driving a car and eating a sandwich and yelling at your dog in the back seat. I loved everything about it. Proulx admits to being a geographical determinist and Newfoundland reflects the characters of this story perfectly. The characters all blossom there in the harsh surroundings. Bunny changes. Quoyle changes and becomes a happy man. All the details are so perfect. Proulx is America's Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a mini-scale. I do wish she would write more books like this one. The names of the characters are so Dickens-like. I do not want to see the movie. I don't want Aunt to be Judi Dench and Quoyle to be Kevin Spacey. I want him to be a young Gérard Depardieu. PS. The film was a boring disappointment. Spacey and Moore did well with their roles but the story was too altered and most disappointing of all was the lack of Newfoundland scenery.

Thank goodness I am not the only one who feels this way about this book! I have started this book four times, only to be lured away by more interesting reads. It is just too much work to keep reading. I didn't want to feel like a dunce, since it is, afterall a Pulitzer Prize Winner, but thankfully I am not alone in my sentiments. The writing style is difficult to read and I don't really care for the characters either. I will spend my time on more appealing novels. After seeing similar reviews, I now feel justified in quitting!

I have found the best in art is not so easy, but the rewards of struggle and occasional victory can be life altering. Every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird tells of some enduring truth; I caught a glimpse of what I can only call God in The Color Purple. For me, The Shipping News is in that same strange space, that mortals such as myself only rarely glimpse. As high and cold as the stars or the bottom of the sea, out on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere, M Proulx gives us a Quoyle, thereby giving us ourselves.

I picked this book up years ago, when it first came out, and read the first few pages. But it always felt choppy to me, the short sentences (many of them fragments), and the storyline just seemed depressing. But a friend recently told me to give it another chance, and I'm so very glad I did. The short sentences grow on you, in the way Cormac McCarthy's sentences do, and soon it feels completely natural. And the storyline is compelling.

Although Quoyle at first seems pathetic, making mistakes at every turn, you soon see how very brave he is, strong enough to overcome the hardships of living in Newfoundland, starting a new life with his aunt and daughters. Both his character and the aunt's (I don't think she's ever named) are extremely well done. The short turns of phrase he uses to describe even the minor characters help you see all of them almost instantly. So after avoiding Proulx for a decade, I'm now suffering Proulx withdrawal, and I'm off to buy Postcards and Accordian Crimes. I can't wait!

This is the story about a man named Quoyle, an ugly giant of a man, a loser who grows on you like a dull landscape. At the beginning of the novel, he is without plan, without talent, and without the good sense to notice. A lumbering, large-chinned, clumsy loner, Quoyle decides on the death of his beloved yet wayward wife that something has to change. He leaves New York State with his two young daughters and his aunt for his ancestral home of Newfoundland.

I won't go on about the plot here because it just doesn't sound like very much, and such a description wouldn't get anyone but Newfoundlanders to read the thing anyway. The title of the novel refers to a weekly column that Quoyle ends up writing for a small newspaper in the coastal town of Killick-Claw. Initially, the column is simply a roster of vessels currently entering, moored in, or sailing from the harbor, but soon Quoyle, a man with a lifelong fear of water, begins writing about the boats themselves. The column doesn't so much play a central role in the novel as offer a metaphor for the novel. Each of the many and memorable characters sails into the story-line at some point and then is slowly revealed as a person beset by fears or by some dark secret and who tries to overcome them or at least live with them.

When I began reading the novel, I was distracted by the author's use of sentence fragments. For instance, one chapter begins: "The aunt in her woolen coat when Quoyle came into the motel room. Tin profile in a glass eye. A bundle on the floor under the window. Wrapped in a bed sheet, tied with net twine." My first reaction to such a passage is, "Excuse me? Would you mind running that past me again?" Call me a linguistically traditional old fart, but to me sentences have a certain completeness about them that can make even individual ones a joy to read. Granted, clipped sentences can add a certain immediacy to narration and can be used in juxtaposition to complete sentences to stylistically distinguish between, say, description and stream of consciousness. It took me quite a few pages to get over my distaste for the author's reliance on fragments, and eventually even I found myself deeply drawn into the novel and appreciative of Proulx's writing.

Proulx won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for fiction as well as a couple of international awards thrown in for good measure, so one more positive review from me shouldn't come as a surprise. What I find sets this novel apart from many others I have read recently is the substance as opposed to simply the style of the story. An acquaintance once said that no one under forty could possibly write an interesting novel, a comment that I resented at the time, having been in my twenties, and still don't assent to. I would, however, certainly agree that experience is a powerful tool for a writer, and, as is evident throughout The Shipping News, it is a tool which Proulx, 56 years old on the release of her first novel, applies masterfully. Few characters in the book could be described as exotic, but each character seems real, unique, and deeply human. Their quiet lives are revealed with patience and compassionate good humor.

I highly recommend this book.