I read a number of interesting books this summer including a preview of Moo! That book does not contain a lot of vocabulary, one word to be precise, but Moo! is full of story, personality, and a variety of punctuation marks. It's written by David LaRochelle and illustrated by Mike Wohnutka in a wonderful pairing of friends. It comes out this month. It's a Mooooving story that will have you punning in no time.
The best book I read this summer is the UNWINDING by George Packer.
An enormous amount of money has been transferred from poor, working class, and middle class families to the very wealthy during this time and Packer does one of the best jobs I have seen of showing how this impacts things like schools, libraries, jobs, businesses and shopping.
One number he provides give a powerful indication of how dramatically things have changed: the six heirs to Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, have as much wealth as the bottom one hundred million Americans. Six people compared with one hundred million. That is directly connected with what's happening in our schools in libraries and THE UNWINDING shows how this happened.
5 comments:
John, thank you for the recommendation of this book. I am going to check it out of the library today!
Great recommendation, John! An important topic (schools and how we teach our children) that I fear will continue being ignored in our current political climate. Regardless of someone's political beliefs, I'm frustrated and disillusioned by the fact that we seem to be ignoring so many issues important to ourselves and our children. It seems to be getting worse, not better... I will continue to try doing my part in my own community. What other choice do I have?
I second what Mark said. I, too, am often frustrated and disillusioned. I'm afraid that these feelings can easily allow me to sink into apathy. Thanks, John, for reminding us of important issues which we shouldn't ignore.
P.S. And thank you, John, for the nice words about MOO!
Such a timely subject. I'm so relieved my kids are out of k-12, it is all just scary.
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