No comments about Recollections of Waterloo College.

2 comments about Yo! Joey!.

1. A must read for anyone interested in public education. Joe Batory gives the reader an insiders look about what really happens in the day-to-day life of a superintendent. Joe's love and concern for children comes alive in this book. As a member of the Upper Darby School Board who served with Joe, it is a pleasure to recommend this book. This outspoken educator took on all critics of public education to advance the cause of public education.



2. A must read for anyone interested in public education. Joe Batory gives the reader an insiders look about what really happens in the day-to-day life of a superintendent. Joe's love and concern for children comes alive in this book. As a member of the Upper Darby School Board who served with Joe, it is a pleasure to recommend this book. This outspoken educator took on all critics of public education to advance the cause of public education.

No comments about Robert Edwards Holloway: Newfoundland Educator, Scientist, Photographer, 1874-1904.

No comments about The Grace of Passing. Constantine H. Andrusyshen. The Odyssey of a Slavist.

2 comments about The Invention of Jane Harrison (Revealing Antiquity).

1. Mary Beard's The Invention of Jane Harrison (2002) perfectly illustrates the frightening, hilarious, and absurd situation occurring the world over in academia today. The book's publisher is none less than Harvard University Press; Beard clearly has connections in high places.
   
   Beard has unearthed-I use 'unearthed' here in its figurative sense--a lot of 'new'--or, 'recent,' 'current'--'information'--by which I intend to suggest 'information' as a new paradigm in a process of 'evolution'---about Harrison---by which I specifically refer to not 'Jane Harrison' 'herself' but to the constellation of thoughts, theories, and 'historical' ideas which we generally assume to be 'identical' with its 'subject'-by this I am suggesting that the unconscious 'assumption' of a biographical 'subject' by both 'author' and the 'assumed' reader is a fallacy--by 'fallacy,' I suggest not its 'original' meaning of 'guile' or 'trickery' but its present-day usage of a plausible 'idea' based around-I use 'around' in the figurative sense in this case--a false inference-with which 'she,'-- by which I refer to 'Beard'-who is not 'identical' to a living person but an abstract idea we agree to refer to as 'Mary Beard'--could have made remarkable use.
   
   As 'Beard'--not the facial hair worn by men but the 'author'--is a Cambridge 'scholar'-in itself an 'elitist' formulation worth challenging-'she,'--'author Beard,' and not the conceptual formation which 'we' are using as our 'subject' and here referring to as 'Jane Harrison'--might have made better use of if 'turned over'-in the figurative sense--her 'findings'--by which I intend to suggest that elements of existence-by 'existence' I do not make use of Sartre's conception of 'such' or imply an 'existential' 'imperative'-can be 'lost' and 'recovered' though perhaps, as man--men and women inclusive--are limited to five (5) 'senses'-'senses' being an idea formation worth 'investigating'--have always been, in 'fact' present but not until 'now'-not the moment I am writing, creating, and 'thinking' this--but the moment it is conceivably 'perpetually'--that is to say, 'infinite' but not in the theological sense--being absorbed in the literal--I use 'literal' literally here--sense--not to be mistaken for 'senses' above--by its presumed 'reader'-or 'readers'--
   
   If the reader can stomach 150 very small pages of comparably loopy, backtracking, and second-guessing text, as well as Beard's inability to write a straight sentence without multiple unnecessary qualifications, then this book, which confidently assumes nothing, might find an audience, if potential readers are willing to force their way through and finish the book exhausted but none the wiser.
   
   The Invention of Jane Harrison is primarily about Mary Beard and her conformist thought processes, and presents Harrison--when it finally forgets itself and remembers to deliver her up--as a kind of stuffed partridge in an Edwardian museum display case.
   
   Pretentious, smug, and yet so well-mannered and genteel, this book rightly belongs on no one's shelf. In taking on such an eminent subject, Beard mortally underscores her vacuity as a writer and thinker. Ignore the logrolling praise this project has received. For cynical careerists only. Everyone else, run for the hills.



2. Jane Ellen Harrison, a pioneer for women in classical studies in British academic circles, has had a fluctuating reputation in and out of her profession. Her "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion" (1903) had a good reception among the scholars who dominated work in ancient Greek religion in the first half of the twentieth century, but its sequel, "Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion" (1912), had to wait decades for appreciation, by which time its use of social anthropology was more than beginning to show its age. Awareness of her work may be strongest among: (a) feminists; and (b) those interested in the myth-and-ritual "school" with which, along with Gilbert Murray and F. M. Cornford, she is generally associated. (This "Cambridge School" is a debatable grouping, since its suppposed members had different agendas, and went their own ways, but the designation is a sort of "cultural fact" in itself.) Jane Harrison also wrote a small body of personal reflections, more intriguing than revealing. The development of her public image, and its relation to reality, is the "invention" that provides this book its focus.
   
   A biography by her friend and collaborator Hope Mirrlees was announced not long after her death in 1928, but never appeared. A full treatment had to wait for Sandra J. Peacock's "Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self," in 1988, which revealed a good deal more than earlier sketches. These tended to be laudatory, or else dismissive remarks on the obsolete views of a dead colleague. Harrison had left no students in professional posts to defend their teacher, her male proteges having been part of the generation lost to World War I. Meanwhile, some of her opponents moved into influential positions, or simply passed on their hostility to their own students.
   
   Beard attempts a re-evaluation of Harrison's life, career, and place in the history of classical studies. Parts of her presentation of academic infighting and jealousies seem to fascinate those already familiar with the players, or interested in group dynamics, and evidently bore others, but these accounts, based on ample documentation, seem more solid than her speculations about Harrison's closely-guarded inner life. Beard's reflections on the muddled evidence and the myth-making process at work in official biographies will be of interest mostly to those already acquainted with the literature.
   
   A major problem with Beard's argument is that so much of Harrison's posthumous reputation rests on people and movements outside the circle of professional classicists. E. S. Strong, her preferred rival for Harrison's position as a leading woman in the academic world of the time, was a hard-working archeologist specializing in early Italy. Besides the problem of associating with the Fascist regime during the years in which Harrison's posthumous public reputation was being promoted by her friends, Strong was not dealing with matters of great interest to a wide public. Harrison, with her analysis of Greek myth and religion in terms of basic human needs and anxieties, and her use of ancient popular culture and superstitions to re-interpret familiar classics, was surely a better candidate as a heroine whose work, while sometimes difficult to follow, was often exciting. I found Beard's work informative, and frequently very interesting, but too narrowly focussed to explain Harrison's continuing prestige.
   
   Since I originally read this volume, it has gone into a paperback edition, much more reasonably priced for its length; in this format, it may be more attractive to those interested in the history of classical scholarship, women in academic life, and several other topics with which Mary Beard deals.
   
   (Reposted from my "anonymous" review of June 14, 2003.)

No comments about African American Teachers.

No comments about With Unfailing Dedication: Rural Teachers in the War Years.

No comments about Harold Temperley: A Scholar and Romantic in the Public Realm.

No comments about Henry Marshall Tory, A Biography.

1 comments about Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt (Library Alabama Classics).

1. This is a fascinating story of a kind that used to be fairly common in Black America. In the late 1800s, a rural Black Alabaman named William J. Edwards was inspired and mentored by Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute (now University). Edwards, one of Washington's students, decided to go to his hometown and start a similar school for ex-slaves and their children. This is the story of how he did it, and what he learned form his experiences.
   
   Pretty inspiring stuff. What is especially interesting are his views on what "Negroes" needed to overcome the adversities they faced at the time. This book is of added interest with the fact that Edwards was the great grandfather of filmmaker Spike Lee. In either case, an inspiring and historical read.