Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done (guest review)

I recently received a surprise book in the mail, which I passed on to my friend Louise, as it sounded like her type of book (and I already have a towering pile waiting for my attention). Happily, she also agreed to review it. Here then is her review...

Both as a former third-grader and as an adult who reads stories to children, I thoroughly enjoyed Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done (rhymes with phone). Parts of Close Encounters are laugh-out-loud funny, others are moving, and one chapter in particular is downright sad. Done’s sense of humour had me giggling out loud on the bus and gasping with laughter at my desk. His descriptions of the trials and tribulations of a male third-grade teacher are priceless.

One thing bothered me though—the author’s tendency to address his female students as sweetheart and honey. It creeped me out. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to the professional stance now expected of adults working with children, but I wouldn’t dream of calling my audience members by anything other than their names.

Aside from that, I would recommend this book to anyone who knows a third-grader, remembers being in the third grade or just needs a good laugh. The stories in this book ring true, and the author is honest and generous in his telling of them. Done says that he started this book when he wrote some tips for a niece who was going into teaching. I think other new teachers might benefit from his 20-plus years of experience.

For other reviews of this book, head over to these blogs:
A Bookworm’s World • Better with Books • Bonggamom Finds • Fabulous Miss S • Mama’s Mouth • Selfish Mom • Starting Fresh

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book for Louise to review!

Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg (Brogan’s review)

Here is my sister Brogan’s second review...

I actually picked Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg off the library shelf (where I work)—which, despite my occupation, is a rare way for me to come across a new book to read, especially one that flies to the top of my to-be-read pile. I was attracted to it because years ago I read and loved Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen, which is also about the hearing child of two deaf parents.* Hands of My Father is the story of Myron Uhlberg, born in 1933 in New York City. He tells his unusual story of being the eldest born to two deaf parents, and as such, as soon as he began to speak, he began to interpret for them.

The parts I loved most about this book were when he focused most intensely on his parents’ story, and their struggle, given the prejudices of the day. The history of New York in the 30s and 40s was filtered through this other lens of deaf-versus-hearing world, and the hearing world comes across as cruel and intolerant (people assume his parents are mentally impaired).

At about the midpoint of the book, there seemed to be a lull, where Uhlberg filled in the gaps with various remembrances of his life and boyhood, which felt self-indulgent and frankly a little boring. The strength of the story was in the relationships within the family, the tangle of responsibility and love, the pressures of interpretation. (I wondered if this was unfair of me, to be less interested in the son than in the parents, but I still think this was a weakness in the text, where the narrative felt adrift and didn’t pick up until a couple of chapters later.)

I also thought the book focused quite heavily on Uhlberg’s relationship with his father and left me with questions about his relationship with his mother. Did she not interact with the public world in ways that required her son to interpret for her? It’s not that she isn’t present—her storytelling is vivid and intimate, as reported by Uhlberg.

Overall, I thought Hands of My Father was worth reading for its insight into another world, for its love. One of the most touching stories in it was when Uhlberg described a serious accident his father had. When they returned from hospital, his mother flung herself into her husband’s arms:

As young as I was, I understood what her reaction meant: she had not, after all, lost her only partner in silence in this alien hearing world. And even at that early age the thought came to me: What would it be like if one of them died and the other had to go on living? How would they endure the loss?

I knew deep down that in some way I had aged this day, and that I now understood the isolated world of my deaf father and mother as I never had before. (p.194)

In this way, the book is as much the love story between Uhlberg’s parents as it is anything else. It’s a beautiful and moving story, for the most part delicately told.

*I recommend that book, too.

Visit these blogs for other reviews:
Adventures in Motherhood • Blogging for a Good Book • Life Is a Patchwork Quilt • mango missives • Tales from a Teaching Mama

Assembling My Father: A Daughter’s Detective Story by Anna Cypra Oliver (Brogan’s review)

I am happy to announce that my sister Brogan has agreed to write a few reviews for my blog! I’m hoping she will contribute them on a semi-regular basis (maybe once a month or once every two months?). Since we don’t live in the same city, she won’t be helping me whittle away my to-be-read pile; however, if this review is any indication, she will be expanding my wish list! Without further ado, here is Brogan’s first review.

I was drawn to Assembling My Father: A Daughter’s Detective Story by Anna Cypra Oliver mostly because the idea of “assembling one’s father” seemed perfectly reasonable. It sounded familiar, really, as many of us probably wonder about our distant fathers, who they are and how the combination of the things we know about them works into a whole.
This story, though, is more specifically about Anna’s father, who committed suicide at 35. She was five years old at the time and had mostly lived with her mother, so her own memories of her father were virtually nonexistent.

I found the book gripping. There seems to be a double mystery to it—one, perhaps obvious, why? Who was Lewis Weinberger and how did he come to the point of killing himself? And two, more difficult to peg, is a feeling that his daughter’s reconstruction might yield a living, breathing man, even though this is obviously impossible. She searches for him so intently one comes to believe she will in some sense find him, and we want that for her as much as she wants it for herself.

I want to place myself inside my own history, draw the map of its roads so I can travel far and find my way back again. I want to reenter memory at the place where my mother veered off. More than that, I want to trace the man whose features bore such resemblance to my own that I am instantly recognized as his daughter. . . . To be curious, one has to be open—to language, to the leap of association, to influence, to experience, to unsanctioned discovery. Above all, one had to suspend judgment. Anything I discovered about my father would only confirm that he was a sinner and a lost soul: he was Jewish and probably an atheist; he took drugs; he killed himself. (pp. 56-57)

Anna’s parents were hippies in the early 1970s, living with Anna and her brother in a shack with no running water outside Taos, New Mexico. After her parents split up and Lewis killed himself, her mother moved on to two abusive relationships before becoming a fundamentalist Christian when Anna was 12. Tracing Lewis’s life thus also becomes a tracing of his non-life, of what happened in his absence, in the space where his responsibilities as a parent were not taken up. I didn’t sense that Anna harboured any anger towards her father about this, which was the part of the book I found most problematic. The survivors, after all, are the ones who have to make life choices, even bad ones, and it seems too easy—even as I found myself doing it—to blame the mother.

Anna holds back from cliché, though. She also doesn’t try to oversimplify. People’s motivations are complex. People’s memories sometimes contradict other people’s memories; the real story is often not as exciting or satisfying as the family myth about a particular event. She absorbs this complexity with her infallible voice, which is not really just her voice but the simple honesty of her quest, her sureness of purpose—slow, intent, and compassionate. I liked that she made me feel contradictions. (I found myself wishing my dad’s friends would talk to me the way her dad’s friends talked to her—quickly followed by: but no, I can’t mean that.)

Assembling My Father is broken up into chapters, each beginning with a quote from an architectural reference (her father was an architect) and then titled with an excerpt from that quote, usually something poetic, in fact far more poetic than you would think would come from an architecture textbook (“Mozart’s House,” “Glacial Fauna”). Each chapter is further broken into sections, each titled (sometimes down to one paragraph!). I enjoyed the overall effect, though this might not work for those less into words.

The book also includes many photographs, at times too many. When someone writes about a picture, I want to hear their interpretation of it or their feelings about it. Especially if the photo is right there, why would I want it exceedingly literally described? It wasn’t until looking more closely at the one particular instance that really bugged me (which I only did for this review) that I realized I just wished the photo and its description were not so close to each other.

Overall, though, Assembling My Father is a brilliant book. I think what I liked best is the recurring images, the memories that cycle and spiral and change over time, but represent certain “archetypal” moments—the key stories a family tells about itself, or a daughter tells herself about her family. In this book, the spiral grows, adds layers and becomes something it wasn’t, from the first tight coil where the story started.

Guest post: Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine (a review)

I’m excited that my friend and fellow LibraryThinger suncloud9 is allowing me to post one of her reviews on my blog, because I think she’s a fantastic reviewer. (I’m trying to encourage her to start her own blog.) Without further ado...

Every so often a book comes along that is so abundant with heartfelt honesty, one cannot help but re-evaluate one’s own life and find some new insights along the way. Between Friends: A Year in Letters is such a book. Two long-time friends, Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine, decided to spend fifteen minutes every two weeks writing longhand letters to one another. In a world of emails and text messaging, what ensued was an honest, thought-provoking account of what it means to be a woman, wife, mother and creative, aging being in this fast-paced, youth-oriented society of ours.

Berry, who emigrated from Ireland to England to Canada in the early 70s, worked as a teacher and counsellor for years. Now retired, she lives in B.C. with her husband, poet Christopher Levenson. A writer/activist/feminist, she candidly offers her upbringing and struggles in Ireland as the catalyst for her later efforts to strike a balance between her roles as wife and mother, and her need to be true to her passionately creative self.

In contrast, Levine, now in her eighties, comes from a Jewish background, but in her reflections, focuses more on the socio-political climate that has helped influence and define her. A retired professor of Women’s Studies at Carleton University, she received a Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case in 1989 for her many contributions to the feminist cause.

It should be noted that the September 11th attacks occurred during the writing of some of these letters, and both Berry and Levine touch on the horror of the event and the many thoughts and feelings it evoked for them.

Both women are excellent writers, Berry assuming a more personal voice in her letters, Levine a more schooled tone. This diversifies the text enough to keep the reader engaged throughout, even when, occasionally, both women stray from one theme to another without fully completing their thoughts. Regardless, Between Friends is a rich, expressive, candid read, and one that I highly recommend. I love this book and have added it to my permanent collection.