Library

« previous | news index | next »

"Are Men Necessary?" and Four More New Simmons Library Diversions Books

Posted February 22, 2006

“Are Men Necessary?” and Four More New Simmons Library Diversions Books

This week’s Diversions Collection books include Teacher Man, Are Men Necessary?, Shalimar the Clown, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.

Teacher Man: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

View the Cover Illustration (use back button to return)

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela’s Ashes and continued in ‘Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt’s 30-year teaching career in New York City’s public high schools, which began at McKee Vocational and Technical in 1958. His first day in class, a fight broke out and a sandwich was hurled in anger. McCourt immediately picked it up and ate it. On the second day of class, McCourt’s retort about the Irish and their sheep brought the wrath of the principal down on him. All McCourt wanted to do was teach, which wasn’t easy in the jumbled bureaucracy of the New York City school system. Pretty soon he realized the system wasn’t run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. “I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study.” As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write “excuse notes” from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It’s about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt’s many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn’t hurt some politicians to read it, too.

Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide by Maureen Dowd

View the Cover Illustration (use back button to return)

KIRKUS REVIEWS: Sex is a topic generally considered unsuitable for polite conversation. Ah, but the intrepid New York Times columnist, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, steps up to the plate to hit some fly balls well out of the field as she discusses sexual realities and absurdities, doing so with the same verve and nerve with which she handled the other hot-button topic—politics—in her 2004 best-seller, Bushworld. Dowd is hilarious, cutting, and provocative—in other words, perfectly willing to express her vision of the truth without an ounce of reservation. And isn’t that why readers gravitate to her? Her new book arises from her New Times columns, and her observations on how men and women relate lead to pithy commentary on the contradictory path feminism has taken (“the new urban legend is about a young man who loses a girl by asking her to split the check”), the superior suitability of women as political leaders (“women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day”), and other topics more timid conversationalists would stay away from. Thank goodness she doesn’t.

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

View the Cover Illustration (use back button to return)

BOOKLIST: Before the eyes of his grown daughter, a former (and famous) American ambassador to India is stabbed to death by his enigmatic chauffeur, the Shalimar of the novel’s title. What contemporary novelist knows more than Rushdie about the political-religious tensions besetting the globe since the middle of the twentieth century and, specifically, how such tensions not only affect personal lives but also, in many instances, create the lives many people lead? The historically shaped lives of Maximilian Ophus, born into a wealthy Jewish family in Strasbourg, France, and later a Resistance hero and vastly popular diplomat, and Shalimar the Clown, who grew up in the devastatingly beautiful (but Hindu-Muslim disputed) Kashmir region of India, intersect, and why one is compelled to take the other’s life seems to be the perfect material for Rushdie’s cosmopolitan, sociopolitical consciousness. To characterize the novel as “rich” seems inadequately broad as a general description of a Rushdie book, including this one. Let it stand, however, as a cogent descriptor of Rushdie’s sheer and magnificent talent. His beautifully metaphoric language and sly sense of humor keep his complex plot, with its layers of personal and cosmic meaning, tightly woven.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

View the Cover Illustration (use back button to return)

BOOKLIST: Lincoln redux. Nevertheless, popular historian Goodwin offers fresh ground by which to judge the almost overdone sixteenth president. She is fascinated by the “growth of Lincoln’s political genius,” which resulted in two rather startling situations having to do with his career. First, that despite “coming from nowhere,” he won the 1860 Republican nomination, snatching it from the anticipating hands of three chief contenders, all of whom were not only well known but also known to be presidential material: William Seward, senator from New York; Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio; and Edwin Bates, distinguished politician from Missouri. Second, that once Lincoln achieved the nomination and won the election, he brought his rivals into his cabinet and built them into a remarkable team to lead the Union during the Civil War, none of whom overshadowed the prairie lawyer turned president. Goodwin finds meaningful comparisons and differences in not only the four men’s careers but also their personal lives and character traits. She extends her purview to the women occupying important space next to them (the wives of Lincoln, Seward, and Bates and the daughter of the widower Chase). The knowledge gained here about these three significant figures who well attended Lincoln gain for the reader an even keener appreciation of the rare individual that he was.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs

View the Cover (use back button to return)

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Imagine, the original Berserkers were “savage Norse soldiers” of the Middle Ages who went into battle stark naked! Or consider the Etruscan habit of writing in “boustrophedon style.” Intrigued? Well, either hunker down with your own Encyclopaedia Britannica, or buy Esquire editor Jacobs’s memoir of the year he spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition—that’s 33,000 pages with some 44 million words. Jacobs set out on this delightfully eccentric endeavor attempting to become the “smartest person in the world,” although he agrees smart doesn’t mean wise. Apart from the sheer pleasure of scaling a major intellectual mountain, Jacobs figured reading the encyclopedia from beginning to end would fill some gaps in his formal education and greatly increase his “quirkiness factor.” Reading alphabetically through whole topics he never knew existed meant he’d accumulate huge quantities of trivia to insert into conversations with unsuspecting victims. As his wife shunned him and cocktail party guests edged away, Jacobs started testing his knowledge in a hilarious series of humiliating adventures: hobnobbing at Mensa meetings, shuffling off to chess houses, trying out for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, visiting his old prep school, even competing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Indeed, one of the book’s strongest parts is its laugh-out-loud humor. Jacobs’s ability to juxtapose his quirky, sardonic wit with oddball trivia make this one of the season’s most unusual books.

  • These recently published works, selected for your reading pleasure, may be borrowed for 14 days.

  • The Diversions Collection is located on the first floor of the Simmons Library, near the Circulation Desk.

  • To request a book that is currently checked-out, find it in the on-line catalog, then click the “REQUEST” button.

 

contact us | staff | hours | ask now