Can small changes in strategy result in significant improvements? This new book for college instructors by James M. Lang argues convincingly that they can. While some of the techniques are not new – my mother asked her students to make predictions 40 years ago – all the strategies are supported … Read More
Month: June 2016
“I have often pictured her stage-managing a fashion show of monsters.”
As unlikely as it sounds, this quote comes from a letter of recommendation for an associate dean of student affairs applicant, who also happens to be the former lover of the creative writing professor who sends all of the letters in this hilarious expostulatory novel. His comments become “more elaborately … Read More
“[L]adies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described the differences in … Read More
“Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely?”
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in the sequel Everyone’s … Read More