3 comments about Still Learning: Spiritual Sketches from a Professor's Life.

1. A compelling account of a handful of events (at middle-age and beyond) coming into the life of an English professor, husband, son, father of four, mentor to hundreds of students and friend of hundreds more. Lessons learned: the power of faith and prayer, patience, the never-ending need for new friendships, the devotional wisdom of Christian meditation, and the blessings that come with putting down roots deeply into the soil of one family, one church and one university over the course of one life.



2. For a small audience, "Still Learning" has some very redeeming qualities. But I would imagine that, for the general reader, the book would be disappointing. The central problem is that Kiely seems to lack an intuitive understanding of what "creative nonfiction" is, or at least should be. This book is much more a straight autobiography of the author's middle age. The problem with this is that I don't see why any general reader would be particularly interested in Kiely's life. I personally found much of the book interesting--but only because I know Kiely personally. As a student of Kiely's at Harvard, I found him to be a wonderful teacher, and an even more wonderful man; indeed, he was one of the few Harvard professors who possessed an innate kindness and humility. Thus, for those of us for whom Robert Kiely represents the best qualities of Harvard, and the best qualities of a teacher, the book allows us a glimpse into the life of this very special man. But if one hasn't had the pleasure of being his student, I simply don't understand why anyone would be interested in such a detailed description of his life. Basically the book is a memoir of how great it is to be a privileged Harvard professor. Fine. I wish I could have that life too. But only those who have an interest in Kiely himself, or Harvard generally, will find this book interesting. In his subtitle, Kiely refers to his book as "Spiritual Sketches." For spiritual sketches, I would much sooner recommend something more along the lines of "Learning to Fall," by ALS victim Philip Simmons, who, like Kiely, was an English professor (and, like Kiely, was an Amherst alumnus), but who, unlike Kiely, writes with a profound sense of what creative nonfiction is meant to do.



3. Prof. Kiely is a deeply learned man whose faith has been a guiding source in his life. Even for the non-believer, his memoir is instructive and moving to read given his sensitivity and good humor.

No comments about Taking Social Research to the Larger World.

3 comments about I FLUNKED SANTA CLAUS.

1. This book was absolutley amazing from one cover to the other. It's the real account of one womans life through the depression, world war II, and teaching in our problematic public high school system. I strongly recommend this novel for anyone who's seeking to understand this womans era and generation!



2. I Flunked Santa Claus was written by Joyce Holsclaw, an 80-year-old woman who was an early feminist, a single parent, and a demanding teacher. With humor and irony Joyce engagingly recounts over seventy years of her experiences, blending a zany sense of humor with insights into the social and political events of her times. A very fine and entertaining autobiography.



3. This book made me never want to put it down. If you are over 50 you'll love every word of it. It will make you both laugh and cry. That's how true it is.

No comments about A World Apart.

1 comments about Between Revolutions: An American Romance With Russia.

1. This memoir is as compelling as a novel. It describes the author's stay in Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) as an English teacher in 1982, and in particular her romance with Kolya, a Russian living in St. Petersburg. She describes a return trip the following summer to see if the relationship had a future, and I was completely engrossed by the story. This is a very candid memoir, and Alberts is very honest about her own insecurities. In addition, the memoir is an accurate portrayal of life in the Soviet Union (at least according to my wife, who spent her first forty years there, and who also read the book).

No comments about Directory Of American Scholars: Index (Directory of American Scholars Vol 6: Index).

No comments about The Suffragette's Daughter: Betty Archdale: Her Life of Feminism, Cricket, War And Education.

No comments about The Education of a Waldorf Teacher: Beyond eBay.

3 comments about Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of BaseballÆs First Black Major Leaguer.

1. To properly understand the Twentieth Century American civil rights movement, one must understand how and why a similar movement failed during the Reconstruction years following the Civil War. Likewise with baseball history--to properly appreciate Jackie Robinson breaking the major league color line in 1947, one must understand the less salutary 1884 experience of Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker.

   Walker, born of middle class mixed-race parents in Ohio in 1857, attended and played baseball at integrated colleges in the early 1880's. In 1883 he left school to pursue a professional career with the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Baseball teams of the era determined whether to employ African Americans on a team-by-team basis, and Walker's presence on Toledo drew only occasional attention from fans and opponents.

   In 1884 the major league American Association absorbed Toledo as an expansion team. Walker, by then an excellent defensive catcher, followed his team into the Association to become the first black major leaguer. Injuries hobbled Walker, however, and eventually cut his season short. The Toledo club folded after the season.

   Walker returned to the minor leagues in 1885, but faced hardening racial prejudice which blocked his return to the majors. In 1889 the minor International League, in which Walker then played, joined the majors in adopting an unwritten, unofficial color line. By then Walker's career was winding down anyway.

   Walker's subsequent life defies easy characterization. He patented four inventions, published a book, and owned a successful opera house--but also struggled with alcohol, served jail time for stealing from the U.S. mails, and stood trial (but won acquittal) for his role in a knife fight.

   Author Zang integrates Walker's varying experiences into the larger mosaic of declining race relations in the America of his era. Indeed, Zang often ventures too far from the facts of Walker's life--interesting enough in their own right--into airy sociological speculation. He perhaps over-emphasizes Walker's mixed-race parentage as bringing about the "divided heart" of his title. His book nonetheless serves as a valuable testimonial to a fascinating and forgotten life.




2. David W. Zang's "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a detailed biography of a talented, tormented, late 19th century catcher: Moses Fleetwood Walker--America's first black major league baseball player. "Fleet" Walker was born in Mt Pleasant, Ohio on Wednesday, October 7, 1857. This simple fact is mentioned on the first page of "Divided Heart." It is from this unassuming birthday that Zang begins his interesting, but confusing, discussion fo Fleet Walker. After mentioning Walker's birth, Zang tries to explain how Walker's life follows the lines of the nursery rhyme: "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace, Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go......" According to Zang, "it might have appeared that [Walker's mother], a midwife, used the nativity as a practicum and elected to give birth across the first four days of the week."(2) Following this, Zang attempts to connect the sixty-nine years of Walker's life to the nursery rhyme by saying " For as sure as he carried a full measure of woe, Fleet Walker was unquestionably fair of face, full of grace, and possessed of an ambition that would banish his dreams to distant places....Walker had overwhelmed the simplistic prophecies of the nursery thyme to such an extent that the possibility of a four-day birthing could not be dismissed out of hand(2)." This is only one of many, needless, airy speculations (as another reviewer called them) that wander from the solid facts of Walker's life. Because of these, the true essence of the man, Fleet Walker, is lost in "Divided Heart." The facts of Walker's life are intereting enough without Zang's meandering commentaries. Throughout the book, Zang points to several beliefs he has about Fleetwood Walker. He believes that Walker had a "divided heart," as he puts it; but he never pointedly explains what he believes this divided heart to be. The reader is left to wonder if the divided heart existed because Walker was considered a mulatto (mixed race of black and white), or if the divided heart existed because Walker wanted to belong to the white race and to the black race, but never fully belonged to either. Sometimes, the "divided heart" seems to belong to the author, who never fully explains why the story of Walker's life should be important to a reader today. After reading, it might be difficult for the reader to understand the importance, too. Walker was, indeed, the first black man to play major league baseball. He played collegiate baseball for Oberlin College in 1881, and for Michigan University in 1882. He also played professionally for the minor league New Castle, Pennsylvania, Neshannocks. When Walker began playing for the Toledo ball club of the Northwester League in 1883, the state was set for him to become the first black major league baseball player. How was this possible? In 1884, the Toledo club joined the American Association. At the time, the American Association was considered a major league. In a brief, but unusually clear way, Zang explains the process: "The American Association had been formed in the winter of 1881 with the avowed intent to become a major league rival to the National League, a status it won with an 1882 agreement meant to keep them from raiding National League rosters(40)." Because of the agreement, Walker became the first black major league baseball player. Due to injuries, Walker lasted only one season with Toledo. He never again played major league baseball, nor did any other black man until Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947. After the first two chapters, which explain Walker's rise and fall from major league baseball, Zang shows how Walker's life turned into an aimless, but somewhat successful life of entrepreneurship, invention, race theory, and jail time. He played more baseball for some minor league teams, ending his career with the Syracuse Stars in 1889. Afterward, according to Zang, Walker did "temporarily lose the attention that had been his... he would reclaim it in dramatic and unhappy ways." Walker became a mail clerk, a murder defendant, a convicted mail thief, an inventor, an author on the subject of repatriation of blacks to Africa, and an opera house owner. Generally, the state of Ohio is shown to be a hospitable home to a black man in the late 1800's. Zang excels in showing the history of Ohio's Quaker population's rejection of racism, and in showing how Walker thrived in several businesses in different towns in Ohio. The last two chapters show how much affection Zang has for Walker. Zang's details in the end give some needed energy to Walker's story. Zang even explains the cost of the lid for Walker's casket. Unfortunately, Zang's writing does not follow a chronological timeline closely enough to be easily read. For clarity's sake, the reader will turn pages back and forth to put events in some order--a job usually fulfilled by an author. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a complicated, detailed biography of a complicated, historical figure. Too bad Zang never explains "WHY?"



3. It will come as a surprise to most baseball enthusiasts, but Jackie Robsinson was not the first African-American to play baseball in a major league. That honor fell to Moses Fleetwood Walker who achieved college baseball stardom while a student at Oberlin College in the 1880s. But Walker was expelled from professional baseball because of the devastating and pervasive racism of the day, including ill treatment by his team mates, his opponents on the field, and Cap anson, a star of the Chicago White Stockings, who drove Walker and the few other African-Americans in the major leagues out of the game, where blacks wanting to play baseball formed the Negro League teams and were excluded from the major league teams until Robinson's barrier breaking inclusion so many years later into the exclusive club that was professional major league baseball. Walker was more than just a gifted baseball player. In addition to being an outstanding athlete, he was also an inventor, a civil rights activist, an author, and an entrepreneur. Born on October 7, 1856 in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, Walker died on May 11, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a superbly written and enthusiastically recommended biography by David W. Zang of a truly remarkable life filled with accomplishment and frustration, triumph and tragedy, and which now has made into an audiobook CD featuring the impressive narrative talents of Andrew L. Barnes.

1 comments about Women/Writing/Teaching.

1. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, the field of feminist composition began to expand rapidly as women writers and teachers explored the possibilities of autobiographical literary criticism and the relationship between feminist theory, gender studies, and writing pedagogy. Numerous books appeared concerning these subjects including The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, a collaborative work by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphey Zauhar; Cynthia L. Caywood's and Gillian R. Overing's Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity; and Feminine Principles and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric, written by Janet Emig and Louise Wetherbee Phelps. In reaction and response to the issues raised in these works, Women / Writing / Teaching, using a new approach-that of autobiographical writing-enters the conversation concerning feminist pedagogical practices. This style of delivery, as editor Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, Professor of English and Coordinator of the Composition Program at the State University of New York, New Paltz, indicates "prompts us to lay 'claim' to our lives (to use Patricia Hampi's term); to connect past and present; to reflect on and to re-envision our experiences; and to authorize and to shape our complex identities as feminist writing teachers" (3).

   As a woman, a writer, a first year composition teacher, and a feminist, I approached Women / Writing / Teaching with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Used to the sterile, proscribed language of English academia, I expected, from both the book's title and its classification under feminist theory, to delve into a dense, untenable mass of postmodern jargon; however, I discovered a wonderfully rich, full-bodied collection of autobiographical essays that explore the complexity of women's lives and their multiple identities as wives, daughters, mothers, writers, women, teachers, and professionals as well as their development of authority. The poignant and at times heart-wrenching personal narratives, written by some of the most prominent researchers and authors within the field of feminist composition studies (such as Lynn Z. Bloom, Ann V. Dean, Min-Zhan Lu, Adrienne Rich, and Nancy Sommers), forced me to examine not only my own various roles but also my own sense of voice. Coached (and coerced) by the academy to write according to a particular standard of style and delivery, I was first shocked and then liberated by the use of the personal "I"; however, upon reflection, I realized, with some measure of sorrow, that I had no idea how to even begin to express my own sense of self, which effectively had been erased from my writing. As I continued to read the essays in Women / Writing / Teaching and simultaneously to explore my own feelings toward the construction of my multiple identities and their influence on my writing and teaching styles, I found a new sense of purpose, a desire to emulate the vision of feminist composition pedagogy illustrated within these narratives.

   Heralded by Marilyn Shapiro for its expression of "true love and excitement about the teaching of writing," Women / Writing / Teaching explores the ways in which women teachers forge connections between themselves and their students, between the private and public spheres, between the personal and academic, between the classroom and the world outside, and finally among past, present, and future. In addition, this collection of essays addresses numerous issues of growing concern among female scholars in the field of composition studies and includes a comprehensive bibliography dedicated to the study of feminist composition and autobiographical writing. In addition, despite the absence of an index, the text, divided into three sections entitled "Silence and Words, "Authority and Authorship," and "Visions of Embodied Teaching," respectively, is accessible and easy to navigate.

   Directed toward women writers and instructors of writing, the collection presents a feminist vision of writing instruction that incorporates the past and present experiences of female writers and encourages the inclusion of their multiple identities as women, as teachers, as writers, as members of specific classes and ethnicities, and as participants in particular cultures. By crossing the boundaries of these identities and by intertwining the elements of writing and teaching, the authors in this anthology introduce a pedagogical approach that recognizes, as Schmidt indicates in the introduction to the work, the "need to merge autobiographical reflection, contemplations of the writing life, and critical examination of our pedagogical practices in order to more fully comprehend our complex lives and struggles as feminist writing teachers in the academy" (3). These essays advocate a breaking of the silence, the emergence from decades of female oppression in an effort to establish women as figures of power and authority within the professions of writing and writing instruction.

   The moving self explorations, the incredible stories of suppression and subjugation, the empowering narratives of female success and authoritative identity development interwoven with humor, grief, pain, and exhilaration illuminate the essential power that women have to create and re-create themselves within their writing and their classrooms. In addition, these personal narratives illustrate the ways in which the diversity of individuals and their experiences can enhance the writing process and bring new vision to their students. Thus, the power of Women / Writing / Teaching lies in its ability to stimulate personal exploration and growth, an experience that no female writer or teacher should miss.