It is impossible to be unarmed when our Blackness is the weapon that they fear. The Hate U Give (2018) is a powerful movie. Its ultimate power stems not so much from its indictment of institutional and systemic racism but from its… Read More ›
books
Recalling the Books I Read in 2018
During 2018, I read about 9,000 (!!) student writing assignments, at least a thousand or so articles, and 35 books, listed below. In addition, I “read” and studied lots and lots of popular cultural texts (songs, movies, tv shows). American Fascists:… Read More ›
Book Review–“Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences”
Last night I read Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences published by Penguin Books. The author–Leonard Sax–has a Ph.D. and a M.D., so I expected a monograph of quality. However, I’ve never… Read More ›
Notes on: Comprehension and Paper vs. Digital Reading
Some professors and critics of change denounce various e-readers as the enemy. In what I would deem a misguided, ill-informed move, some syllabi will “prohibit” students from reading books for said classes on a Kindle, iPad, or similar device. Discussions… Read More ›
Recalling What I Read in 2017
During 2017, I read about 5,500 student writing assignments, a few thousand articles (some of the best can be found here), and 56 books. In addition, I “read” and studied hundreds of songs and around fifty or sixty films. The… Read More ›
Book Review–“The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated”
I read James Emery White’s The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (2014) this morning in preparation for a new specific topics course I am teaching this spring–Atheists, Other “Heathens,” and 20th C. United States. White writes from the… Read More ›
Book Review – “Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South”
Thanks to “Google Scholar Alerts,” I learned first thing this morning that I officially have another publication–although just a book review I wrote in March 2017–under my hat. This publication is an academic book review of Adrienne Berard’s Water Tossing Boulders: How a… Read More ›
Drugs, War, and Nazi Germany
Last night I finished reading Norman Ohler’s fascinating and best-selling Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (2017, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Ohler describes the relationships between Adolf Hitler and drugs, Nazi soldiers and drugs, and German society and drugs. In addition,… Read More ›
