Nathan Day
Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year
By Esmé Raji Codell (Algonquin Books, 2001)
For teachers and the general public alike, Esmé Raji Codell’s Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, which chronicles Codell’s first year of teaching in an inner-city Chicago charter school, is a refreshing antidote to the fantasy of the inner-city schoolteacher as a dedicated, creative, inspirational miracle worker in the mold of Hilary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers or Edward James Olmos’s in Stand and Deliver. The primary reason for this is that Codell is a dedicated, creative, and inspirational teacher, yet her first year of teaching does not end with a slow clap leading to a standing ovation, students standing on their desks in salute, or state-high marks on standardized exams. Even the goofy craziness, selfless investment of time outside the school day, instructional skill, and personal charisma Esmé brings to her work is sadly, as she discovers, not enough to prevent children from falling through the cracks in the public-education and social-services support networks, to dissolve the blockheadedness of well-meaning but narrow-minded administrators, or to ensure that every student performs at the legally mandated grade level on a standardized test.
As an inner-city teacher who is less creative and wacky, and possibly less instinctively skilled, than Codell, I found her book to be both inspirational and reassuring. It was instructive — and funny, and heartwarming — to see her incorporate elements of physical and imaginative play into her lessons. It was also a relief to see her lose her temper in front of her students; I was reassured to know that this happens to even the most gifted teachers. But anyone who draws pleasure from reading engaging, conversational prose will enjoy Codell’s account of her careen through her first year of teaching. Readers will also experience a firsthand account of the obstacles faced by teachers of disadvantaged children — and by the children themselves.
Codell does not fail as a teacher. It is clear that she uses her creativity successfully to engage struggling children in their schoolwork, as when she constructs a time machine for students to sit in while reading historical fiction, teaches her students the distributive property of multiplication using cha-cha steps, or insists (to her principal’s chagrin) on being called Madame Esmé rather than Ms. Codell. Still, her efforts are not enough to solve the problems at her school, or save every single one of her students.
Nathan Day is a high school English teacher at César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, Parkside Campus in Washington, DC. An outrigger canoe enthusiast, he has been teaching for six years.
Brian Sholis
Sprawling Places
By David Kolb (University of Georgia Press, 2008)
In this polemic, philosopher and place theorist David Kolb deploys unconventional thinking in the service of what turn out to be commonsense ideas. Kolb finds distinctions where others assume homogeneity; his baseline act of discernment is to recognize that suburbs are neither small villages nor large cities, and therefore should be approached as unique phenomena. Kolb rejects the many critics who, because they are looking through the lens of arcadia or the metropolis, find America’s sprawling zones devoid of intricacy—or, worse yet, “nonplaces” unworthy of consideration. Instead, he marshals many theoretical sources to argue that such places have inherent “complexity” worth amplifying. He employs this term in several ways: the structural, which largely encompasses the natural and man-made environments; the social, in which citizens negotiate with each other and the structural backdrop; and what might be called the technological-economic-political, that (mostly) invisible network of links that underpins connected life in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging these forces requires active engagement: “Places should be inhabited with more lived sense of their complex internal multiplicities and linkages, and with more self-consciousness of the multiple forces and pressures at work.” The book seems aimed primarily at the community of thinkers with whom Kolb engages, as well as architects and urban planners, and on occasion it is tough going, particularly in the first two chapters. But Kolb gains momentum as he begins a sustained analysis of themed places and suburban environments. This investigation draws in particular on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and extends to suburbs some of the claims made by Manuel Castells (for networked societies) and Henri Lefebvre (for cities). Discussing Disney parks, New Urbanist villages, and haphazardly planned suburbs as they currently exist, Kolb puts forth brief suggestions, from creating architectural follies in pocket parks to altering zoning and tax regulations, for “grasp[ing] creatively the possibilities offered by contemporary places, without undue nostalgia or elation.”
A hypertext available at Kolb’s website offers further considerations of the topic.
Brian Sholis, a writer based in Brooklyn, is editor of Artforum.com and coeditor of The Uncertain States of America Reader (Sternberg Press, 2006).
From the Editors
Thanks, New Haven Register…
…and Donna Doherty specifically for the generous profile of our publication that appeared in today’s paper. The actual physical newspaper included this snazzy photo of editor Mark Oppenheimer, publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Mark’s daughter Rebekah in dramatic lighting:
What the article says is all true too. So, Greater New Haveners: If you’re interested in submitting, we’re looking forward to hearing from you. If you’re interested in subscribing, we thank you in advance. And if you’re just here to read what we’ve published and posted so far, welcome. Take your time and have a look around. We hope you like what you see.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Jeremy Ravi Mumford
Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey
By Philip Lutgendorf (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Primates are our animal cousins, but most of us know them only on a photo-album basis. In India, people and monkeys live cheek by jowl, and relations are strained. Monkeys are dirty, aggressive pests, pelting pedestrians with nuts and climbing into open windows to grab anything not nailed down. Yet one of the subcontinent’s most beloved divinities is the monkey-god Hanuman. The hero Rama’s sidekick in the national epic Ramayana, Hanuman is revered in his own right in temples and household shrines throughout India.
Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, has written a fascinating study of Hanuman. Unlike traditional scholars of Hinduism who focused on theological texts, Lutgendorf is interested in everyday religious experience, where so-called “minor gods” such as Hanuman often loom larger than major ones (such as Shiva and Vishnu). Lutgendorf pursues the monkey-god through religious practice but also films, television, comics, and the garish Technicolor prints that small businesses distribute as complimentary wall-calendars. (One of these adorns the book’s cover.) He also includes Hanuman’s biography from popular legend, analyzing the many variants of each episode. According to one version, when the infant Hanuman decides to swallow the sun, the earth is cast into darkness until he coughs it up. In another version, he swallows it and is destroyed, but the gods reassemble him from tiny pieces, and in a third he puts it in his mouth but spits it out because it tastes like meat and he is a vegetarian. (His powers extend to his monkey-mother, who destroys a mountain with a jet of breast-milk.) At times, Hanuman seems an Indian version of Godzilla, a fearsome, destructive, but lovable creature, blurring the boundary between animals, humans and gods. Hanuman’s Tale brings him in his many forms to a western audience.
Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.
Christopher Arnott
Harold Robbins’ The Looters
By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)
Harold Robbins’ name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist’s friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug’s name is dwarfed by Robbins’s. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn’t deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug’s complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins’s novels great is a true literary crime.
In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period — in the 1970s and 1980s, after he’d moved on from his derivative-of-John O’Hara melodramatic page-turners — Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage — he put out that he was a Jew who’d lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy’s school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)
Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: “Joni sucked on John’s penis and wept at the same time. ‘We’ll never — why couldn’t you have just gone to Harvard?’” (In that passage, from Tycoon, it’s worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins’ essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: “We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves.”
There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.
Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.
Matthew Swanson
Tales of Woodsman Pete
By Lilli Carré (Top Shelf Productions, 2006)
Strictly speaking, Tales of Woodsman Pete is a comic, and it is funny and action-packed and presented in a series of frames. But it’s also touching and tragic, tender and wrenching—a stellar example of the sheer range of possibilities implicit in this surprisingly expansive medium.
Let there be no doubt: Lilli Carré is an artist. Her words are pure literature: intelligent, economical, unexpected. On the visual side, her line is confident yet simple, resembling a woodcut incision; her figures are unassuming, endearing, and utterly distinctive.
Our hero Pete is a thickly bearded hunter who lives alone in the woods surrounded by things that he has killed: his best friend Philippe (an inanimate bear rug), some mounted deer heads, and the specter of a wife slain accidentally (by buckshot or pollen, we never find out which). Pete monologues endlessly in search of conversation, ever nostalgic for missing companions but cheerfully unaware of his complicity in finding himself alone. When Pete’s house is crushed by a falling tree, the narrative frame shifts to examining the lives of the blue ox Babe and his pal Paul Bunyan (presumably the one who caused the tree to fall on Pete’s house), who is gloomy from reading Proust and depressed that, because of his bulk, it takes so many beers to get sufficiently drunk. We learn of Paul’s problems with women, not a few of whom he has “mistakenly crushed” in the act of attempting intimacy. Paul—like Pete—leaves a heavy footprint, invariably annihilating the things around him without agenda or animus. He just doesn’t fit in this world.
The narrative shuttles back and forth between Pete and Paul, two sides of a coin, united by their full beards, their utter sincerity, their love of skipping stones, and their dogged pursuit of something undefined. They are dreamers both, and both marooned in solitude. We are left wondering whether Pete is dreaming Paul or Paul is dreaming Pete. Ultimately, the pleasure lies in the question itself.
At twenty-four years of age, Carré has loudly crashed the indie comic world, and is particularly well known in her hometown of Chicago. She also makes short animated films, one of which has shown at Sundance. She’s a genius in the comics medium, but would likely be a genius in any medium. Her Pete is a worthy introduction for the curious—an incisive, delightful primer in what’s so exciting about comics these days.
Freelance writer Matthew Swanson makes books with his wife, illustrator Robbi Behr, in a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.
Rebecca Onion
Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940
By John Alexander Williams (Stanford University Press, 2007)
Even though present-day enviros may protest that their movement is for all people, in the beginning—the early twentieth century—the conservation movement had some pretty unsavory roots. In the United States, the picture wasn’t pretty—scientific racists like Madison Grant and William Hornaday loved the mountains and wildlife of the American West, even while they hated the un-American immigrants they thought were ruining everything. In Germany, things look even worse—the Nazi regime was noted for its conservationist ethic, or at least its conservationist rhetoric, which associated purity of the German race with purity of the homeland (this is a topic that historians like Frank Uekotter and Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier et al. have chewed over at length). John Alexander Williams enters this fray in his book, in which he tries to reject the narrative of a backwards-looking, antimodern German environmentalism that led inexorably down the road to racism and Nazism. To that end, Williams uncovers various groups operating in the early twentieth century that tried to equate environmentalism with the liberation of German workers. These groups included nudists (whom we have to thank for some fantastic photographs of naked Germans doing group calisthenics), hiking clubs, and youth culture organizations.
Williams succeeds in showing that a range of different ideas of “nature” existed in Germany during this era, and that some of them were very much linked with socialism and seemingly blameless, un-Nazi-ish impulses toward personal freedom. Williams’s argument tries to save environmentalism from Nazism partially by showing how environmentalists who thrived in the Weimar era were put out of commission by the Nazi program. The freedom-loving socialist nudists, for example, were reduced to trying to survive with a variety of political strategies, including writing letters to Nazi leaders, as one such nudist did, praising the Hitler salute for its calisthenic properties (“the salute makes it impossible to have a crooked or rounded back”). Williams’ strategy sometimes leans overmuch toward an admiring glorification of socialism, but overall the book scrambles the green Nazi image enough that environmentalists can heave a momentary sigh of relief.
Rebecca Onion is a freelance writer and a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Carlene Bauer
Mandarins
By Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Translated by Charles De Wolf; Archipelago Books, 2007)
Everyone knows the name of the man who made Rashomon. But no one knows the name of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Japanese literary legend responsible for the stories on which Akira Kurosawa based his film. Reading Mandarins, a new collection of fifteen Akutagawa stories translated by Charles De Wolf, will make you wonder why he’s not as well known as Mishima and Kawabata. He writes with melancholy, passion, tenderness, and irony of a country and its people making the transition to modernity; his elegant prose never buckles, even under the more melodramatic moments. “I must say that I have grown weary of all that is called modern enlightenment,” a character says, and Akutagawa himself, who committed suicide in 1927 at the age of 35, wasn’t convinced that the new Japan was better than the old one. His men hold out for love only to be cuckolded, his women sacrifice their talent to familial love, and even the landscape suffers—a family’s once-grand garden withers from neglect while they chase after money. The stories, some of which are based on the classical Japanese folk tales Akutagawa loved, bring to mind the Russians he also revered, but with that fatalism relieved by a capacity to be consoled by the world’s occasional, accidental beauty: a moon whitewashing a river at night, a young woman tossing an armful of oranges to her brothers from a train.
That last image comes from the title story, which turns on it, and which I regret mentioning in the way I might regret giving away what happened this season on The Wire. We’re very, very enlightened now, but hardly any writer working today could make you feel that in describing a visual detail you’ve spoiled a plot twist. Or would cede narrative power to the pleasure taken in beauty—pleasure unapologized for, and unadorned by sentiment.
Carlene Bauer has written for Salon, The New York Times, and n+1.
From the Editors
Thank you, Stranger
If you’re here because of the lovely post about the New Haven Review by Paul Constant at The Stranger, thanks for coming by. Mr. Constant is the books editor at Seattle’s only newspaper, and we’re delighted by his enthusiasm. We only hope that we can live up to his expectations.
Retroactively, we also owe a great deal of thanks to John Stoehr, arts editor at the Charleston City Paper, first for an engaging and generous essay that mentioned us back in August 2007, when we released our first issue, and then for another mention in January in a piece about the future of newspapers. Many people visited our old website (now defunct, happily) due to him.
So thank you both, Mr. Constant and Mr. Stoehr, and welcome to all of you who came by on their advice. Look for our next review, coming in just a few days. Meanwhile, we’re currently copyediting the print edition (Issue 2) and preparing to send it to the printer. It should be out in early May. Then we party. Then we do it all again.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
From the Editors
Thanks, National Book Critics Circle
We just got a nice shout-out from Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. If that’s what brings you here, then welcome.
It’s true: in addition to our print version, published twice annually, we’ll be posting reviews of unfairly neglected books on our website. A couple things: 1) By “neglected,” that doesn’t mean Walter Kirn dissed the book in the Times and nobody else reviewed it. It means the book was missed by the Times, The New York Review, Washington Post Book World, etc., etc. As in, nobody’s heard of the book. In our hopper we have one review of a book also reviewed in The Nation, but it’s a book of poetry, so our hearts went out to it. 2) If you want to get in touch with us, navigate around our site at left—you’ll find a mailing address and emails. 3) A small correction to the NBCC post: we’ll be running one review every Monday, not four. They got confused because there are four up right now (see below). But those were posted over a period of four weeks. In time, we may begin posting more than once a week. Meantime, we are looking to put up an RSS feed, so you can just get yourselves a little helping of neglected-book-review to start your week every Monday.
Thanks.
Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.
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