Month: September 2005
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The Railway Children by E. NesbitPuffin Books, 1994 (originally Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1906)
Such a charming story about three city children who move to the country with their mother when their father suddenly has to go away. Peter, Roberta, and Phyllis (the latter two known mostly as Bobbie and Phil) have various adventures in and around their small village: they befriend the stationmaster and the porter at the…
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Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne TrussGotham Books, 2004 (originally Profile Books, 2003)
This weekend, I saw a cash register with a scrolling display that made me want to scream: “Thank’s for shoping at [store name].” Errors in spelling and punctuation jump out at me and grate on my nerves: it’d be fair to say that I’m a stickler when it comes to language and its usage. Somehow,…
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Deliver Us From Normal by Kate KliseScholastic, 2005
Charles Harrisong lives in Normal, Illinois, and feels like his family is weird beyond helping. It’s not even that his family is so weird, although his younger siblings can be loud, his mom is sometimes embarrassing, and his older sister is independent and quirky. It’s more that Charles is acutely aware of what lies behind…
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Happiness and Education by Nel NoddingsCambridge University Press, 2003
In this smart and eloquent book, Noddings argues that happiness should be taken seriously as one of education’s aims. She argues that our society presently seems to have an economic view of education: people go to school in order to go to college and people go to college in order to get better jobs (and…