A few recent blog reviews of “Whatever It Takes,” from TeacherJay, Jonah Lehrer, the Feminist Review, and sociologist Jon Witt.
Posts Tagged ‘reviews’
Blog Posts
Thursday, January 15th, 2009City Journal Review
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Kay S. Hymowitz reviews “Whatever It Takes” for the City Journal.
Jay Mathews Review
Friday, December 19th, 2008Jay Mathews, education columnist for the Washington Post, reviews “Whatever It Takes”:
Paul Tough has devoted several years to writing about poverty, but much of the time he is really writing about schools. This is apparent in his insightful book “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.” You don’t see the words “schools” or “education” in the title, but be assured this is one of the best books ever written about how poverty influences learning, and vice versa.
O Magazine review
Sunday, December 7th, 2008Now online: a brief review of Whatever It Takes from the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine:
Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes (Houghton Mifflin) brings you inside the Promise Academy and into the mind of a visionary who has known failure (his school continues to struggle), yet has the nerve to keep the future squarely in view.
Amazon Blog
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008Today on Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, notes on “Whatever It Takes,” plus a Q&A with me and Geoffrey Canada.
When I saw this summer that Tough had written a book about Canada, my radar screen lit up like the Fourth of July. And the book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, turns out to be excellent: a well-told distillation of a very complex story, and an admiring but level-headed profile of a remarkable man. Canada’s project, the Harlem Children’s Zone, is an incredibly ambitious attempt to make sure that no child really is left behind in the 97-block neighborhood it serves, working with everyone from expectant parents to hard-to-steer adolescents to foster an entire culture that supports the basic task of educating poor kids and breaking the cycle of generational poverty. As the book shows, the project has had some remarkable successes in its first few years, but they haven’t been uniform or easy.
Christian Science Monitor
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008The Christian Science Monitor reviews Whatever It Takes:
Tough helps readers feel the tumble and energy of classrooms where inner-city children are mastering math equations and foreign languages, where they’re being nurtured and challenged with the high expectations more typical of the suburbs.
Wicked Local Rockport
Monday, October 20th, 2008Wicked Local Rockport, a Massachusetts paper, reviews Whatever It Takes:
It’s a tense, at times heartbreaking page-turner that details the work of a dynamic man and his remarkable drive, the students and their struggles, the leading studies in education that interest and inspire Canada and the interplay between Canada and the vigilant overseers and philanthropists who monitor and intervene.
New York Times
Monday, October 20th, 2008The New York Times reviews Whatever It Takes:
When it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough’s book. The children of the uneducated and impoverished too often bear a gloomy inheritance, their futures set in stone from an early age. Within Canada’s 97 blocks, Tough finds a different kind of legacy — one shaped by parents who have learned to pay attention to their children’s developmental needs. With a support network unlike anything else in America, the children of Harlem can envision a future so many others expect as a matter of course.
Washington Post Review
Monday, October 13th, 2008Donna Foote reviewed Whatever It Takes in the Washington Post Book World yesterday, describing the Harlem Children’s Zone as “a social experiment so radical and potentially transforming that Barack Obama has promised a ‘few billion dollars a year’ to replicate it in 20 cities should he become president.”
She called the book “a you-are-there recording of the project’s development, amazing growth and potential promise — and an informed primer on the correlation between race, poverty and the achievement gap in America.”
L.A. Times Review
Saturday, September 27th, 2008In Sunday’s L.A. Times, Erin Aubry Kaplan reviews Whatever It Takes:
Journalistically, Tough does a nice job of balancing theories and research on race, education and poverty with the unglamorous, on-the-ground fight to make Promise Academy and the whole Harlem Children’s Zone enterprise pull the neighborhood out of the gravity of its urban pathologies — to kick into a high enough gear for residents to achieve what Canada calls “escape velocity.”
Though much of “Whatever It Takes” focuses on strategy, it’s the acute awareness of the overwhelmingly black staff, students and parents of just what they’re up against that makes this book absorbing and frequently touching. Within that awareness are small but steady epiphanies that are the real core of Canada’s work but that simply can’t be measured by test scores: parents learning to regularly take their kids to museums, problems collectively solved in math class, story conclusions read aloud by second-graders.