Biblio Reviews

To date, I have not watched even one minute of James Cameron's historic blockbuster, Titanic (1998). I may be one of the few, for even my 12-13 year-old students have seen it and have recommended it to me. While it irritates me that Kate and Leo and Cameron's Titanic are cemented in their mind as the definitive Titanic story, I can appreciate the fact that the film provides them with an anchor for visualizing and understanding the events detailed in Walter Lord's  A Night to Remember  (1955), truly " the  classic account of the final hours of the  Titanic. " I had not heard of  A Night to Remember  previously and was scheduled to teach it. Not a fan of the book's structure--the minute-by-minute account through no fewer than twenty different perspectives--my colleague sold me the book as a complex bore of a read. For that reason, she only ever taught excerpts of it. Going into the reading, I was tentative because it had been made so unappealing. Far f...

I have been rooting for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ever since I found out about her about five years ago. It was through her TEDTalk, " The Danger of a Single Story ," shared during a a professional development about what's been an ongoing conversation in my school district about school culture / cultural proficiency. That TED Talk is probably my favorite so far, if only because it applies more readily to the subject that I teach: English language arts. As such, it is a Talk that I share with every new group of students that I've taught. Though in 2008 she was the recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Adichie wasn't as well-known as I thought she deserved to be. So, it was with joy that I read the many positive reviews of  Americanah  (2013) posted for CBR. I was like, "Yay! She's on her way!" Deservedly so, as evidenced by  We Should All Be Feminists (2014), a transcription of her 2012 TEDxEuston Talk . What Adichie calls for i...