Reviewing a Whirl of Books

Home , Jonathan Yardley, Kit Kittredge, Margo Jefferson, Michael Dirda, Michiko Kakutani, Reading Like a Writer

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Volume 8, Issue 4 Reviewing a Whirl of Books

CLEMENTE BOTELHO Study and respond to an author’s work from many perspectives — feature, interview and review.

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program About Reviewing a Whirl of Books Lesson: Writing a book review enhances Book World is awhirl with possibilities. Book reviews appraise reading skills; critical thinking; analytic, the latest releases and, occasionally, remind us of works that evaluative and explanatory abilities; and deserve dusting off for a second reading. Works for young composition fluency. adult readers, works of fiction and nonfiction, biography, global Level: Low to High affairs, society, science and travel. Subjects: English, Reading Related Activity: Journalism, AP English The Book World staff and guest critics direct busy readers to Language and Composition books that are excellent uses of their time or are questionable purchases. Books that would make great gifts, engage a child or please a Sinophile. Their reviews are mini-lectures, introducing new topics in history, culture, and the arts and sciences to be explored. In The Writing Life, authors share insights, inspirations and demons they have confronted as writers. They tell how a phrase mesmerized, a good pen directed, a translator improved and style developed. Book World editor Marie Arana provides a short bio that reveals another dimension of each writer’s life. This guide’s content includes book reviews to study as models, a close reading technique, guidelines to writing a book review, and exercises in reading charts and doing online research of publishing companies. Book World editors and reviewers chose their ten Best Books of the Year. Three of them are included in these activities — A Mercy, 2666 and Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. e- A reminder to Post INSIDE program teachers: If Replica you plan to use articles in this guide in the e-Replica format more than three months after their publication date, remember to bookmark them to use this school year.

NIE Online Guide Editor — Carol Lange Art Editor — Carol Porter

Send comments about this guide to: Margaret Kaplow, Educational Services Manager, [email protected]

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

Reviewing a Whirl of Books The Write Word

Enter Book World where you will discover book reviews, a schedule of Having a pool of words to consider when reviews to appear in the coming week in the Style section, and writers writing a book review can be very helpful. talking about writing. Online the Book World staff writes a “daily blog, These terms were used more than once in Short Stack, a conversation about literary news, gossip, history and Book World reviews. trends” and posts podcasts of interviews. Readers are encouraged to join Michael Dirda’s Reading Room, an ongoing discussion of books Accessible (washingtonpost.com/reading room). Attempt Competent Conventional Get Acquainted with Authors in dialogue with the author, asking Credible, credibility Both Book World and the questions and staying after to do a Discrepancy Style section of The Washington follow-up. Droll Post provide opportunities to Before or after attending one of Excruciating get acquainted with authors these events, students could read Exemplary through books about and by them, the featured work and write a book Flaw, flawed interviews, features such as The review. The review might include Genre Writing Life, and reviews. Collect comments made by the author in Imaginative, imaginable these for use with your students. his or her opening remarks and Inconsistent Older students should be Q and A. Interweaving encouraged to read the Style section In this guide, we provide a Juxtaposition and Book World. In addition photo pairing that could be done by Lucid galleries, podcasts and blogs found teachers with other authors Miss, near-hit, winner on www.washingtonpost.com that appear in The Post: a Narrative enrich the experience. December 4, 2008, feature and Nuanced KidsPost includes interviews with the November 9, 2008, Book One-dimensional authors of children’s and young World review. Toni Morrision is Ostensibly adult works to encourage students the only living American Nobel Over-simplification to begin the habit of reading and laureate in literature. In “Window Protagonist getting acquainted with authors. to the Soulful” Post writer Bob Sentimental Two of these features are included Thompson interviews Morrison Setting in this guide: “Giving Girls a Voice who has published a new book, Slow-paced in History,” an interview with A Mercy. Strategy “American Girl” author Valerie To add another dimension to Style, stylistic, stylist, stylings Tripp, and “‘Inkheart’ Comes to an the study: On washingtonpost. Syntax Emotional End,” an interview with com, teachers can also download, Trenchant Cornelia Funke. the first chapter of the novel to do The Literary Calendar in Book a close reading, discuss style and World indicates where and when consider Morrison’s establishment authors will be reading from their of time, setting and characters. recent works in the D.C. area, most Also use the podcast of a Book at no cost. Also included are special World interview and view a photo events such as the annual PEN/ gallery. Malamud Award Memorial Reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Read a Chart These can be great enrichment and “Washington Area Bestsellers,” beyond-the-classroom experiences near the back of Book World, for teachers, students and their families. Often students can engage continued on page

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page • In what ways does the teaser Read About It provide information beyond what charts ten bestsellers in each of the title provides? (If the title Dillard, Annie four categories: Paperback Fiction, and other information fill three The Writing Life Paperback Nonfiction/General, lines, no teaser is provided.) Harper Perennial. 1990 Hardcover Fiction and Hardcover • What information is provided Nonfiction/General. Discuss the in the key at the bottom of the Hass, Robert organization of the chart with chart? What validity is added Now & Then: The Poet’s Choice students. to the information knowing the Columns, 1997-2000 Before sending students to this source is an outside company? Counterpoint. 2008 page in the current Book World, • Why is the information provided you might use the reproducible in the charts helpful to busy King, Stephen found in this guide: “Focus on readers? On Writing Washington Area BESTSELLERS,” Before writing a book review, Pocket. 2002 one of the four charts found in this students could be asked to write a standing column. Note the format chart entry for the books they have Paris Review and information provided. Teachers read. This would be a lesson in The Paris Review Interviews II might also spend more time brevity and finding the right word Picador. 2007 discussing the two- to ten-word as well as following a format. After teaser, a short note that captures the entries are completed, students Prose, Francine an aspect of the book. could determine the categories Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Give students “What Books Are for the charts (or use The Post’s Who Love Books and for Those Who Want People in the D.C. Metropolitan categories) and classify their to Write Them Area Buying?” Answers are books. Harper Perennial. 2007 found at the end of these lesson suggestions. This reproducible Learn More About Publishing New York Times might be used to enhance reading Use the information in the Writers on Writing, Volume II: More or as a quiz following discussion of “Washington Area Bestsellers” Collected Essays from The New York Times the charts. charts or have students compile Times Books. 2004 In addition to the questions a list of publishers of the books found in the reproducible, you reviewed in Book World. Do small could discuss: publishing houses as well as large • Distinguish “paperback” and ones have titles on the lists? “hardcover.” Are books reprinted Divide students into groups as paperback after being popular to complete a Web search to hardcover titles? Which types of learn more about the publishing books are more likely to begin as companies. Give each group paperback books? three to four book companies • Some of the top sellers have to research. After completing been on the chart for many the online inquiry, classify the weeks and others are new. What publishers. factors might keep a book more Contact a published author or a than 90 weeks on the bestseller writers group in your community list? for a guest speaker. Topics would • Which three books have been on include how to get started as a the Washington Area Bestsellers published author, the benefits/ list more weeks than any others? drawbacks of smaller versus a Why might so many people in large publishing company and self- the D.C. area have purchased these titles? continued on page

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page students to think about a book’s The Writing Life content and readers. publishing/vanity press, and advice Book World provides a column, Book World editor Marie Arana conceived on overcoming writer’s block. “For Young Readers,” that gives a column written by writers about their short reviews of recent releases. writing experience. The Writing Life is Compare and Contrast These are often presented in a the first continuous series of its kind in an Bestseller Charts thematic grouping. Teachers who American newspaper. Buy or go online to locate the use the e-Replica format could best-seller book charts of other bookmark these columns for Arana writes in the newspapers. students to read and select a book introduction to The Compare and contrast the for a book talk. Book World also Writing Life, a col- information found in the keys to produces Children’s Issues. lection of selections their sales charts. For example, Many approaches could be taken from the column: “If The New York Times Book with these books. For example, the you strive to become Review key to its Best Sellers November 30, 2008, For Young a real writer, an origi- charts gives more information Readers column introduced four nal, you need to be on the source of its national books on the theme of “teens tried told clearly: There is book buying data. This includes by war, murder and prep school.” no magic formula. … those books that are not included Four to 12 students could select But if readers carry (“perennial sellers; required from these books to read, discuss away one lesson from this book it should classroom reading; text, reference the shared book and present their be that writers learn their craft, above and test preparation guides,” for books to the whole class. all, from the work of other writers. From example). The Boston Globe lists Teachers might also provide reading.” the Boston-area booksellers whose students with a list of young adult sales figures are used. works from which to select a book The Writing Life Group students to gather data to read. Students could be asked to Writers on How They Think and Work from their particular assigned follow the short review model for A Collection from publication. format, content and length. The Washington Post Book World Discussion may include: Edited and with an introduction • Do the charts provide the same Study a Book Review by Marie Arana number of best selling books? The purpose of a book review is Public Affairs. 2003 • Do some books appear in the top to let the reader know if a book will five of all charts? be worth the price and the time The collection is divided into six parts: On • In what ways may demographics to read it, based upon the reader’s Becoming a Writer; Raw Material; Hunker- influence buyers’ selections? knowledge and interests. It provides ing Down; Old Bottle, New Wine; Facing Local authors or subject matter? a quick overview of contemporary the Facts; and Looking Back. Authors in- Political or international issues? considerations, a comparison with clude Joyce Carol Oates, Nadine Gordimer, For example, why may Doris books on the same subject or genre Ntozake Shange, Julia Alvarez, Patricia Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and a sense of the writer’s style. Cornwell, Ray Bradbury, Umberto Eco, make The Boston Globe bestseller Collect sample professional Richard Selzer, David Halberstam, Tracy list before other papers’ lists? reviews from Sunday’s The Kidder, Bill McKibben, Frances FitzGerald Why had The San Francisco Washington Post Book World or and Jane Smiley. Chronicle listed The Kite Runner from daily newspapers. For your months before any other paper? convenience, several are included Encourage your students to collect this in this guide. In addition to the year’s The Writing Life columns. At the Introduce Book Reviews Toni Morrison book review referred end of the year, have them select their top to Young Readers to earlier, read reviews written ten to bind into their Best Insights on Writ- The author interviews in by two of the best critics in the ing From a Writer collection. Each student KidsPost and “My Book Review,” should write an introduction on being a found in this NIE guide, help continued on page writer.

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page the same book review. They may Pulitzer Prize in Criticism discuss: country: Michael Dirda’s review of • The book’s plot. Do they agree on Awarded since 1970, the award for The Journal of Hélène Berr and the main elements? distinguished criticism covers a wide Jonathan Yardley’s reviews of The • The theme, message and genre of spectrum of subjects — from art, Man Who Invented Christmas the work. Is the reviewer clear in architecture, books, drama and film, to and Lincoln: The Biography of a communicating this information? music and visual arts. The following Writer. • Which quotation from the book writers have won recognition for their In addition to being models of or paraphrase of the reviewer was book reviews. review writing, the Dirda review most effective in communicating introduces a book that would the book’s theme, time period, or The newspapers listed indicate where make an excellent companion to quality? they worked at the time of the award. a study of The Diary of Anne After students have read and Frank and the Holocaust; the discussed four or five reviews, 1998 Michiko Kakutani, Yardley interviews introduce have them list the components of The New York Times works that provide insight into the the review or outline the review. life of Charles Dickens and self- Discuss these elements and the 1995 Margo Jefferson, publishing, and another perspective structure of the review. The New York Times on Abraham Lincoln whose 200th After discussion, assign the book birthday anniversary will be review. 1993 Michael Dirda, celebrated in 2009. The Washington Post “Close Reading: Book Reviews” is Compare and Contrast Book Reviews provided to use as an introduction Book reviews from other 1987 Richard Eder, to book review writing and the newspapers may be found online Los Angeles Times content found in reviews. The to compare and contrast how the opening and closing paragraphs of same book is evaluated, which 1981 Jonathan Yardley, one work are given to call attention quotations were selected and how The Washington Star to setting up the review and how the reviewer organized the material. the evaluation of the author and Book reviews may be found on 1977 William McPherson, his work can be re-enforced and these sites: The Washington Post expanded in the closing. ALA Booklist, Review of the Day The second page of “Close (www.booklistonline.com/) Reading: Book Reviews” could be The Los Angeles Times (www. done in class using the symbols latimes.com/features/books/), found in “Review a Book Review.” The Oregonian (blog.oregonlive. This could also be used as a quiz com/books/book_reviews/), or instrument to assess students’ San Francisco Chronicle (www. understanding of the components sfgate.com/books/) of a book review. The Boston Globe (www.boston. Give three to five students the com/ae/books/) same book review. Provide all USA Today (www.usatoday.com/ students with a copy of “Review books) a Book Review.” Students are to The Washington Post (www. complete steps 1-5 on their own. washingtonpost.com/books) Note: Teachers may have used the suggested markings in step 1 with This approach can also be used to “Close Reading: Book Reviews” in prepare students to write their own order to familiarize students with book reviews. the symbols. When the worksheet is completed, continued on page group students who have read

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page above approaches to familiarize The Reviewer students with the purpose, content If the class is reading the same and organization of book reviews, The book reviewer loves books. And ideas. book, group students to give give students “Guidelines for feedback to the first draft of the Writing a Book Review.” This Reviews require knowledge. Of the student-written book reviews. When handout should re-enforce what was expectations of a genre, of other all book reviews have received peer discussed in class and discovered works by the author and of other author’s review, the group can discuss the during the reading of book reviews. books on the same subject. How the different organizational structures, This sheet can also be used as a reviewer presents knowledge influences the the effectiveness of selected passages checklist for students as they write tone of the reviews. and final evaluation of the book. their book reviews. To be sure students are writing The writer does research. Reporting may Write a Book Review for audience, teachers may specify be required to support the arguments Instead of the usual book report or may ask them to specify the presented. or literary analysis, ask your publication in which the review will students to write a review of the appear. Require that students follow He reads books, especially the books books they are reading. the same format for reviews used in he is reviewing. After using one or more of the the specified publication. ■ The reviewer is a guide. She selects quotations from the book to relate the rhythm of the work and author’s style.

ANSWERS She paraphrases and summarizes ideas. “What Books Are People in the D.C. Metropolitan Area Buying?” He describes the plot, interprets a symbol 1. The key indicates the “week ended” date. Have students provide the or places it within the context of timeless beginning through end dates. themes. These passages support ideas, 2. Nielsen BookScan. glimpse scenes and characters, and intrigue 3. Number 1 has the highest sales in that period. a reader to read more. 4. Title (publisher, price), author and brief summary. 5. Price influences whether a reader will buy a book or go to the The reviewer uses concrete language. library. 6. Answers will vary by week used. The review writer uses figurative language 7. Answers will vary. and imagery. 8. Summaries typically are 8 to 10 words, but may be as short as 2 words. The reviewer reveals herself. Her 9. Each entry has a three-line limit. The teaser is the first to go. preferences, background, knowledge 10. Number of weeks on the list. and reasoning. 11. Answers will vary. 12. D.C. is a political town, people are literate with varied interests. The reviewer isn’t hesitant to make an evaluation.

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Giving Girls a Voice in History ‘American Girl’ Author Valerie Tripp Has Made Characters From the Past Come Alive for Young Readers

As the author of more than 50 “American Girl” books, Valerie Tripp knows a lot about bringing characters to life. But the Silver Spring writer was not quite prepared for seeing the adventures of her character Kit played out on the big screen of movie theaters. With Kit Kittredge: An American Girl out on DVD next week, KidsPost’s Tracy Grant caught up with Tripp to talk to her about the movie, her writing and her favorite American Girl.

susan biddle — the washington post Author Valerie Tripp

• Originally Published October 22, 2008 that appears to be a loss actually How did it feel to see your characters leads to a gain that you never would on screen? have had. “It’s a very strange experience. It’s very “The absolutely crucial message of unusual to hear words that you’ve heard the Kit books is that … the most im- in your head spoken and brought to life portant thing that you have … is your in motion, color and music on that giant family. Though the circumstances of screen.” your life may change, that most important thing — the love of your fam- Kit Kittredge lives through the Great ily and friends — won’t change. It may Depression. What lessons can kids to- strengthen.” cylla von tiedmann day — given the uncertain economic Abigail Breslin stars in times — learn from her? You write about girls who live during Kittredge: An American Girl, based on Tripp’s books about the Depression-era girl. “Kit’s story is very much my mother’s World War II (Molly), the American story. … Usually I just invent the char- Revolution (Felicity), New Mexico during What’s the hardest part of writing? acters, and their stories are shaped by the 1800s (Josefina), who is your favorite “When I go to schools to talk to kids I the main problem of the time. In the — or at least what’s your favorite time in bring a manuscript that I have that is case of Kit, I had been listening to my history? filled with big Xs through whole pages, mother’s stories for my whole child- “Whoever I’m writing about at the time! I things circled in red, Post-it notes stick- hood. Her father lost his job. To keep get to live in that time and soak up the mu- ing out. It’s hard when you’ve worked their house, my mother and her mother sic, the fabric, the fashion of that time. Since on something that hard and you hear became cooks and maids and took in I just finished a book about Ruthie, I’m very that [the publisher] isn’t going to use boarders. My mother had to move out much into the period of the 1930s now. it … but writing requires a lot of pa- of her room into the attic, which Kit did. When you write, it allows you to have a tience. You wouldn’t stop playing soccer But my mother found that the people personality that you wouldn’t have. For ex- because you get tired or thirsty. Some- who moved into her house … changed ample, Felicity is much braver than I would times the things that are hard for us give and enriched her life in ways she had be. You can create your best self and send the most back to us. But that moment is not foreseen. Sometimes something that self out into adventures.” still very hard.” ■

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program ‘Inkheart’ Comes To An Emotional End Cornelia Funke Hopes The Conclusion Of Her Trilogy Can Prepare Kids For Life’s Sorrows

• Originally Published October 8, 2008 “I have had 8- or 9- It might surprise you to learn that year-olds come up to Cornelia Funke doesn’t want all her me at book signings and young fans reading her newest book, tell me how much they Inkdeath. love the book,” Funke “I always meant it for says. “So I don’t want an older audience,” said to say that no children the German-born writer, that age can read it and who lives in California. understand it.” But she Inkdeath is the last book says she prefers to think in her Inkheart trilogy. of the book as a way for “I think children should older children to prepare start with Inkheart when for life’s inevitable they’re about 8, move on sorrows. to Inkspell when they’re 11 and What happens in wait until they’re 13 for Inkdeath,” Inkdeath, she says, “is she says. a shadow of what will The trilogy tells the story of a come in life. They can girl named Meggie and her father, practice on the pages.” Mo, who share the unusual talent of Funke, 49, knows about being able to read themselves into sadness. Her husband, stories. It’s as magical as it sounds, the father of her two but the outcomes aren’t always the children, died just before stuff of fairy tales. she finished the book. When Mo reads from a book called “What I wanted to Inkheart, some characters wind up show is my concept of in Meggie and Mo’s world and some, death. I was never in specifically Meggie’s mother, wind my life afraid of death,” up in the Ink World. she says. “What’s really SABINE HALBHEER Funke called the first book, which Author Cornelia Funke, above. hard is the loss of those wasn’t originally intended to be part we love. How can we of a series, “a love letter to all those readers as enchanted by live with the fact that we may lose the most precious things we books as I am.” When Inkheart became a huge success and know in life? We never really lose them. … They become layers Funke realized she had more that she wanted the characters of our heart.” to do and say, she wrote Inkspell, which had a cliffhanger The end of Inkdeath leaves open the possibility that Funke ending. will return to the Ink World one day, but what she’s really Readers delighted by Funke’s fantasy world, with its horrible excited about is another series of books she’s working on, villains and fire-dancing heroes, have been eagerly awaiting the featuring a character she calls Jacob Wreckless. The books final installment. start out in the real world but move quickly into the realm of So why is Funke warning young readers off? Well, the title fairy tales and gingerbread houses. gives a big hint. Death is a major theme in this book, and And for the youngest Funke fans not ready for Inkdeath, its plot and themes are more complicated than those of the there’s a long list of titles meant just for them. At the top of her earlier books. list, and ours, is Dragon Rider. ■ — Tracy Grant

My Book Review When you read a book, you meet characters, learn about other cultures and time periods, and go on adventures. If you liked the book, you want other students to read it. If you did not like the book, you will not recommend it.

Complete the following sentences to tell other students about the book you read. When you are finished, you will have written a book review.

1. The name of the book is ______. 2. The author of the book is ______. 3. A character you would like/not like in the book is ______. 4. I think this about him/her because ______. 5. The main idea of the book is ______.

6. The most interesting part of the book takes place when ______

______.

7. I liked/did not like the way the author wrote the book. A good quotation from the book to illustrate this is ______.

8. I think you would/would not like reading this book. I state this because______. Name ______Date ______

WASHINGTON AREA BESTSELLERS What Books Are People in the D.C. Metropolitan Area Buying? The Washington Post Book World each Sunday has a standing column called Washington Area Bestsellers. It charts the ten top books purchased in each of four categories: Paperback Fiction, Paperback Nonfiction/General, Hardcover Fiction and Hardcover Nonfiction/General.

Find and read this column in Book World. Answer the following questions.

1. The figures represent sales over what dates?

2. What company provides The Post with the sales data?

3. Titles are ranked from 1 to 10. What number is the top seller of the specified week?

4. What information is provided for each book?

5. Why is it important to list the price of the book?

6. Which of the publishers has the most titles on the charts?

7. Review all four charts. Does any author have more than one bestseller? If yes, name him/her/them and the book titles.

8. What is the average word count in the book note or “teaser”?

9. Why might a book not have a note or “teaser”?

10. What information does the right-hand column of numbers provide?

11. Which three books have been on the “Washington Area Bestsellers” charts more weeks than any others? a. b. c.

12. Why might so many people in the D.C. area have purchased these titles? VOLuME 8, ISSuE 4

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

What is the impact of getting a positive review? It might not sell more than ten more books or it can increase awareness to encourage 100 people to buy the book. Most of Oprah’s TV Book Club selections rapidly joined the bestseller lists.

Getting on a bestseller list may require being a known author (think Stephen King, John Grisham and David Baldacci), having a TV or movie tie-in or winning an election. Receiving word-of-mouth recommendations often reflects an original subject, an appealing adventure or animal, or a glimpse into an unknown world.

Whatever the reason, placement on a bestseller list encourages an author and pays the bills.

Label the components of a bestseller listing.

Review a Book Review

1. Do a close reading of the book review with markers in hand.

• Mark quotations with one color.

• In another color, highlight where the reviewer paraphrases or summarizes the author’s ideas. Label as “paraphrase” or “summary.”

• Underline where a comparison is made with another author’s work or another work by the same author

• Box direct statements of positive evaluation.

• Bracket statements of negative evaluation.

2. List words with which you are unfamiliar on a separate sheet. Define the words.

3. Using the information provided by the reviewer, summarize the book’s plot

4. Using the information provided by the reviewer, state the message, a theme or the place of this work in its genre.

5. Do you think you would like to read this book? Why or why not? Name ______Date ______

Close Reading: Book Reviews

2666 By Roberto Bolaño Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer Farrar Straus Girous. 898 pp. $30 Reviewed by Steven Moore

OPENING PARAGRAPH The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at the relatively young age of 50, but since then a steady stream of English translations has introduced American readers to the Gabriel García Márquez of our time: politically engaged, formally daring and wildly imaginative. The Savage Detectives, a huge novel published last year to wide acclaim, looked like his masterpiece, but now comes a monstrous novel twice as long and daring, and one that should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist.

CLOSING PARAGRAPH With 2666 Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic summation of their culture and the novelist’s place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals.

BLOOD RIVER A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart By Tim Butcher Grove. 363 pp. $25 Reviewed by Kira Salak

CLOSING PARAGRAPH What we don’t learn about, however, is Butcher’s own inner experience. “The reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage … but to an interior, a sentimental, or temperamental voyage,” wrote travel writer and novelist Norman Douglas. Blood River succeeds admirably as reportage, but not as essay. If the author comes to any personal revelations by the end of his grueling trip, we’re not privy to them; the result is disappointingly one-dimensional. Readers must decide what they want from a travel book, and whether this one’s thorough interweaving of history, geography and politics makes up for its lack of introspection.

ABOUT THE REVIEW WRITERS Steven Moore, the author of several books and essays on modern literature, is writing a history of the novel.

Kira Salak is the author of the novel The White Mary and the nonfiction travel book The Cruelest Journey: 600 Miles to Timbuktu. Name ______Date ______

Close Reading: Book Reviews | continued

In the following excerpt from a book review find and label the following:

_____ Context _____ Evaluation _____ Summary _____ Thesis of work

_____ Author’s background _____ Reviewer’s credentials _____ Quotation

BEYOND TOLERANCE Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America By Gustav Niebuhr Viking. 218 pp. $25.95

Reviewd by Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason magazine

The thesis of Gustav Niebuhr’s book could fit on an index card: In order to build a more peaceful world, hu- mans need to move beyond mere tolerance of one another’s differences and engage in direct, open-minded acts of interfaith dialogue and understanding. Extending that simple insight over 218 pages is challenge enough. But doing so without lapsing into either ecumenical banality or religious favoritism proves too daunting a task, even for a writer of Niebuhr’s talents. A former religion reporter for The New York Times and The Washington Post, now an associate professor of religion and media at Syracuse University, Niebuhr experienced something of a slow-motion revelation a few months after Sept. 11. Sent to cover what he and many others feared might become a wave of “backlash attacks” against Muslims and brown-skinned people, he slowly realized that something closer to the opposite was taking place. … As one of the country’s most experienced religious commentators and the grandson and great-nephew, re- spectively, of the legendary theologians H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr — Gustav Niebuhr came to this moment of spontaneous cross-faith communication with an impressive historical grounding and reporto- rial rigor. “It is a new activity in the world, and entirely new phenomenon in our history,” he writes. “It is a social good, a basis for hope, and a tendency that ought to be nurtured and cultivated.” Beyond Tolerance is at its best detailing acts of kindness and exploration between members of putatively competing religions. … [The reviewer lists examples from the book and then summarizes Neibuhr’s two examples of “two under-appreciated events in October 1965 that dramatically increased pluralism in the country that made religious freedom famous.] Niebuhr, who writes with an elegant, almost anguished austerity, clearly intends …. But he has no room in this discussion for another group of people who decry militant fundamentalism: atheists and agnostics. … The author’s biggest and most frustrating blind spot, though, is his propensity to blame, rather than credit, President Bush for his role in shaping the tone of the debate after Sept. 11. … … Niebuhr has made an important contribution by observing that America, through good-faith exchange

between liberty-loving believers, has come a long way indeed. n Name ______Date ______

Guidelines for Writing a Book Review

The purpose of a book review is to let the reader know if a book will be worth the price and the time to read it, based upon the reader’s knowledge and interests. It provides a quick overview of contemporary issues, a comparison with books on the same subject or genre and a sense of the writer’s style.

When writing the book review, consider the following:

1. Determine the audience for whom the book review is intended. Is this book for young readers, a general audience or someone in a very specific discipline or area of interest?

2. Provide most of the basic elements of the review:

• Name of the book and author • Cost of the book (hardcover or paperback) • Publisher • Brief summary of the work. Do not disclose the ending if this information will ruin reading the work. • Author’s education and/or family background • Author’s experience or expertise that would make him a reliable or believable author for this particular genre (an astronaut or former President, sixth generation Bostonian, 12th mystery written by this best selling author) • Comparison with the author’s other works or books of the same genre by other authors • Expectations of readers of this genre • Carefully selected quotations from the work that reveal the author’s style and level of language as well as support the reviewer’s claims

3. Clearly establish your evaluation of the book

4. Meet the purpose of a book review

5. Does the author use figurative language or allusions? For example, if reference is made to “the Gabriel García Márquez of our time” or “the original Transjordan was an afterthought in the redistribution of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories,” what are the historic roots of these allusions? What do the allusions add to the flavor of the review when quoted or used in the review? Do they support one of the concepts presented by the author?

6. Consider the author’s use of diction. What level of vocabulary is used? Is it appropriate for the intended audience? In addition to words that might appear in a SAT-prep list, what if the reviewer uses idiomatic terms?

Volume 8, Issue 4

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

FICTION Souls in Chains

A MERCY By Toni Morrison Knopf. 167 pp. $23.95 Reviewed by Ron Charles

• Originally Published Sunday, November 9, 2008 Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy, makes a spellbinding companion to Beloved, her 1987 tour de force that transformed our understanding of slavery and won the Pulitzer Prize. Her old themes rise up in A Mercy like a fever dream: the horrible sacrifice a mother makes to protect her child, the deadly vanity of benevolent slaveholders, the abandonment of a past too painful to remember. But this is a smaller, more delicate novel, a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison’s body of work. The lush poetry and amorphous structure of A Mercy reflect the story’s distant setting in the mist of America’s creation, when independence and the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution were still a century away. TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS The four abandoned women at the center of this novel — one white, one enigmatic words, “124 was spiteful.”) when a dog’s profile plays in the steam Native American and two black — are Morrison relies heavily on the allure of a kettle.” all enslaved in some way, struggling to of her imagery, perhaps even on Jacob Vaark, a small-scale trader who maintain their precarious life together the deference afforded by her Nobel was raised in an orphanage, inherited 120 on a failing farm in the late 17th century Prize. At this point in her career, she acres in upstate New York from an uncle when the New World’s traditions of doesn’t have to give up meanings any he’d never met. He considers slavery slavery are fresh and fluid. more easily than Faulkner or Joyce “the most wretched business” and insists Summarizing the plot does a certain did, and like their work, A Mercy that “flesh was not his commodity,” amount of violence to the novel’s self- conveys powerful emotional effects but he works out a moral equation conscious obscurity, its determination even when it leaves us struggling that allows him to make money as a to keep us off balance amid dazzling for sure footing. “Don’t be afraid,” a financier to slaveholders. As we’ve seen impressions. The opening chapter, in narrator begins. “You can think what before, Morrison writes with the kind particular, is a swirl of references to I tell you a confession, if you like, but of psychological nuance that turns her people and events we can’t comprehend. one full of curiosities familiar only (Beloved, remember, began with the in dreams and during those moments continued ON page 18

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page 17 her own chapters, Florens serves as the Rebekka. For Florens, it’s a chance emotional engine of the novel and the not just to escape but to reunite characters’ souls to clear glass: An early mystery at its core. with him. She propels herself through scene shows Vaark sneering “at wealth “They were orphans, each and all,” a frightening travail in the wilderness dependent on a captured workforce,” Morrison writes. The real triumph of with an ardent, irrepressible monologue, even while he profits from it. He A Mercy is its portrayal of the moral much of it directed to her absent lover. eventually makes a fortune, all the while ambiguity of these relationships. There Her voice is the most demanding but imagining that he’s kept himself above are no easy judgments here. Vaark rewarding in the novel, thick with raw “whips, chains and armed overseers.” may be compromised by his financial poetry and passion. “I never before It’s a brilliant portrayal of the expedient entanglements with slavery, but he’s a see leaves make this much blood and allowances people make to preserve their benevolent patriarch who gives safety brass,” she says. “Color so loud it hurts sense of purity and self-reliance. to a cast of women who would have the eye and for relief I must stare at the When he began farming, Vaark no security elsewhere in this place, heavens high above the tree line.” purchased a 14-year-old Native American surrounded by howling wilderness and She’s sometimes unhinged — sym- named Lina who lost her village to a settlements of religious zealots. pathetic one moment, animalistic the smallpox epidemic. She’s a determined What’s happened and what’s happening next. “These careful words, closed up survivor, traumatized first by the death of become clear only as several chapters and wide open, will talk to themselves,” her family, then by the Presbyterians who confirm the scrambled chronology of Florens says, and in the most mesmerizing “civilize” her. “Terrified of being alone these events: Jacob Vaark has died of sections of the novel, all we can do is in the world,” Morrison writes, “Lina smallpox and now his wife, Rebekka, is listen to her incantations, the voice of a acknowledged her status as heathen and close to death, too. The farm, their little young woman consumed with yearning. let herself be purified by these worthies. Eden in the lawless forest, is suddenly “I dream a dream that dreams back at She learned that bathing naked in the threatened with collapse, which can me,” she says. “Perhaps these words river was a sin; that plucking cherries only mean something far worse for its need the air that is out in the world. Need from a tree burdened with them was female residents. Morrison depicted the to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres theft; that to eat corn mush with one’s plight of an isolated women’s compound of primrose and mallow. … I am become fingers was perverse.” in Paradise in 1997, but in this more wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Morrison turns the issue of servitude impressionistic novel she captures the Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my over and over in fascinating ways. state of powerless women contending for love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last.” This was, after all, a time before the survival in a civilization that would not What a strange, affecting story, flowing spectrum of slavery had resolved into stabilize for decades. Without a master, through an astonishing range of emotions. black and white. Almost everyone is they are all at risk; without even a white And consider that all this takes place in for sale, and their relations with one mistress, they would have no chance. just 167 pages, shorter than her far less another are bound by customs and laws “Sir and Mistress believed they could complicated first novel, The Bluest Eye still evolving. Together, Vaark and Lina have honest free-thinking lives,” Lina (1970). Morrison, who has written so manage his farm as best they can with thinks with a sigh. “Their drift away from powerfully of catastrophe, cruelty and an odd kind of mutual respect, but it is others produced a selfish privacy and they horror, here adds to that song of tragedy “an unrewarding life” until Vaark buys had lost the refuge and the consolation of equally thrilling chords of desire and a wife from England, and again the a clan. … Pride alone made them think wonder, which in their own way are no results are surprising. “Rebekka’s sheer they needed only themselves, could shape less tragic. Whereas Beloved ends with good fortune in a husband stunned her,” life that way, like Adam and Eve, like the cathartic exhaustion of an exorcism, Morrison writes. “Already sixteen, she gods from nowhere beholden to nothing A Mercy concludes with an ambiguous knew her father would have shipped except their own creations.” Most of the kind of prayer, redolent with possibility her off to anyone who would book her novel takes place as Rebekka lies dying, and yearning but inspired by despair. passage and relieve him of feeding her … Lina cares for her, and Sorrow asserts This rich little masterpiece is a welding the stubborn one, the one with too many herself — all three women remembering of poetry and history and psychological questions and a rebellious mouth.” Vaark their lives before and with Vaark. But acuity that you must not miss. ■ also takes in a strange young woman the heart of the novel is young Florens. named Sorrow, and as partial payment She’s sent off to find a blacksmith, a Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book for a debt, he acquires a slave girl named free black man who once worked on World. He can be reached at charlesr@ Florens. The only character who narrates Vaark’s property and may be able to heal washpost.com.

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Windows to the Soulful In a New Book as in Life, Toni Morrison’s Probing Goes Well Below Surface

By Bob Thompson even disarming smile,” the novelist a moment. First, she wants to tell you Washington Post Staff Writer says of the incoming president, whose what she saw in the eyes of the world’s candidacy she endorsed in January, a greatest golfer. • Originally Published December 4, 2008 few weeks after he politely called to ask. “Death,” she says. There’s a burst of NEW YORK Then she holds up a hand, at mouth laughter, abruptly cut off. “He wants to Toni Morrison has a little trick for level, to show how she edits out that win. And he will destroy all.”How about judging character. She’s tried it on Tiger telegenic smile’s effects. the Mona Lisa, with whom Morrison got Woods, on the Mona Lisa and — why “I do this all the time. Just look at up close and personal in the Louvre? not? — on Barack Obama, too. his eyes.” “You know, he’s got a very pleasant, What did she see? She’ll get there in continued ON page 20

BY NIKKI KHAN—THE WASHINGTON POST The only living American Nobel laureate in literature, Toni Morrison has plans for two more novels, one set in the 50s, the other with a modern setting.

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“Everybody talks about her smile, that little mystery,” Morrison says. “And I went over there and I did like that” — she holds up her hand again — “and I literally jumped back.” She lowers her voice. “There’s nothing but evil there. Pure, distilled.” The only living American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is sitting at the kitchen table in her Manhattan apartment, a skylight silvering her braided gray hair. She’s mostly talking about her latest novel, A Mercy. But the name Obama keeps coming up. So what did she make of those smile- free presidential eyes? “Steely. I would say steely.” Which is a good thing, she thinks, given these “interesting times.” Interesting they are. But Morrison’s new book evokes an America at least as fascinating as today’s. Set in the late 17th century — before race-based enslavement became such a central American institution — it serves as a thought-provoking bookend to the era we are entering. “A Mercy. was sort of pre-racial to me,” Morrison explains. And though BY NIKKI KHAN—THE WASHINGTON POST she’s not ready to call the present day A Mercy, the most recent best-selling work by Morrison, is set in the late 17th century. post-racial, it does promise “something else, something different, a new slant on all that.” who’d signed up for years of bondage in to go on a journey. By herself. Usually, A Toni Morrison novel usually begins return for transportation and the basic guys go on journeys in narratives and as a question in the author’s mind. What necessities. What’s more, in the days the women stay home. was it with this book? before laws explicitly divided the races, “I wanted her to go somewhere, “How might it feel,” comes the prompt “indentured servants and black slaves endangering herself.” reply, “to be a pitch-black slave girl in a and free whites and free black people The girl is a 16-year-old slave named time when slavery was not associated worked on those plantations together.” Florens, living on a farm in Upstate with racism? How’s that?” What came next, after she had her New York. She’s needy because her The notion of a bound population central question? mother, or so Florens believes, has — whether called serfs, peasants “I get the narrative and the ending. I thrown her away. Her journey is a or something else — used to be have to know where I’m going. I don’t rescue mission — her mistress is sick commonplace, Morrison says. Yes, there always know how to get there.” and asks her to track down a man who were African slaves in North America And how did this particular narrative might help — but it’s personal, too, in 1690, but the continent also was start? filled with white indentured servants “Well, I have this needy girl. She’s going continued ON page 21

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page 20 — after a hospital letter informed her that “we have declined your Medicaid or Medicare or whatever because you are because Florens is desperately in love an illegal alien or incarcerated” — that with the man she seeks. it’s impossible to reach a human being “You alone own me,” she tells him. at a Medicare phone. She has not yet learned to look inside “Sixty minutes’ wait!” she says. “I herself for what Morrison has called finally had to go to a congressman, “the beloved — the part of the self because I thought it was identity theft. that is you, and loves you, and is And I got it straightened out, but not by always there for you.” doing what they tell you to do, which is How might it feel to be Florens? call and push buttons.” As Morrison fleshed out her answer, The good news is, there’s no retirement other characters emerged. age for writers. Morrison has two more First came Jacob Vaark, Florens’s novels in mind already, one set in the owner, who accepted her from a far 1950s, one in the present. worse master in payment for a debt. “I’m getting better,” she says. Morrison found Vaark’s name on a ship’s And that means? manifest and thought “that’s lovely.” “I get there faster. I don’t have to The character’s Dutch ancestry was a write badly.” necessary result. Chloe Ardelia Wofford (the name Next she conjured Jacob’s wife, Morrison’s parents gave her) wrote her Rebekka, whose prospects in England first words on the sidewalks of Lorain, were “servant, prostitute, wife” and who trees were, and the fish, the weather, the Ohio, in the mid-1930s. “My sister thought it a blessing when her father flies.” Emily Cockayne’s recent Hubbub: probably taught me. I was about 3,” she shipped her across the Atlantic to marry Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600- recalls. Her mother and father told a an unknown man. 1770 helped her understand why the lot of stories “and I lived in the library, Lina, a young Native American woman, Europeans came. down on the floor, because they had all gave Morrison pause. “Oh God, now I’ve Questions of race and servitude, the little children’s books down there.” got to know all about these tribes,” she the search for a true self, life-shaping At 12, she became a Catholic and says she thought. But she didn’t, she encounters with a new world: All that took the baptismal name Anthony, soon soon realized, because Lina’s people adds up to a novel that has drawn shortened to “Toni.” She went to college were all dead from disease. mostly raves. Washington Post critic at Howard, got a master’s in literature Late in the game, a mysterious, Ron Charles called it “a fusion of from Cornell. When her brief marriage mixed-race girl named Sorrow slipped mystery, history and longing that stands to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in, solving some structural problems alongside Beloved as a unique triumph ended, she was left with two young for Morrison. Then there were Willard in Morrison’s body of work.” sons and a name she had no intention of and Scully, white servants who began John Updike was less enthusiastic. putting on a book. with bit parts and ended with a chapter In the New Yorker, he complained “I was going to be Chloe — Chloe of their own. that it was hard to know what was Wofford,” she says. But in 1970, when “I was so pleased with them,” happening in the opening pages. she saw “Toni Morrison” on the galleys Morrison says, in part because she Perhaps “the pernicious influence of of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, and liked Scully’s sharp insights and in part William Faulkner“ was to blame? said, “I don’t want to use this name,” because the pair made clear the nature Morrison shrugs this off. she was told, “Sorry, it’s already in the of indentured servitude. “That was kind of funny. But I like Library of Congress.” Meanwhile, she needed to see her being reviewed by writers,” she says. She remains annoyed that she didn’t characters’ worlds, both new and old. At 77, she is old enough to have put her foot down. “I said, ‘Oh, four William Cronon’s 1983 study Changes acquired one of those plastic organizers in the Land showed her America before that reminds you what pill to take when. the Europeans arrived: “how tall the She is also old enough to have discovered continued on page 22

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continued FROM page 21 “And that was exactly the point.” my own book. In that voice,” says Morrison tried to imagine killing her Morrison, who never met the actor in people are going to read this book’ own child. She couldn’t get there. “But the flesh. “He said, ‘Do you remember — oh, man.” I thought the real person who might this part?’ “ She laughs. “He’d keep you It’s true that The Bluest Eye didn’t be able to judge her — that she would on forever. I was scared to hang up.” sell immediately. (Much later, an Oprah pay attention to — would be the dead Barack Obama wasn’t quite so scary. pick would help.) But nearly four decades daughter. And once I knew that, then I But when the candidate called to ask for after she published it, Morrison’s impact just had to make it work.” her endorsement, he talked about the is hard to overstate. She helped shape a Take Jazz, the novel Morrison same favorite book. wave of African American literature published a year before her 1993 Nobel. “Before I speak to you about anything that has yet to crest. She sees it as part of her continuing else,” she recalls Obama saying, “let me As an editor at Random House, where need to re-imagine history, to “tell it tell you about Song of Solomon. “ As she worked until she was confident her again properly, fill in those silences, it happens, she had been impressed by writing would support her, Morrison those things that people just, whooooh, his memoir, Dreams From My Father. published writers ranging from Chinua blew over.” What’s blown over in all It’s filled with scenes and dialogue and Achebe to Toni Cade Bambara. As a the talk of the Jazz Age, she says, is reflection, she says, not just the usual writer herself, she crashed the front the migration behind the music, the “and then and then.” So they talked ranks of the world’s novelists while syncopated liberation that came with about writing and she told him, “You bringing the specific experience of leaving the rural South for northern and I have a connection that way — but black America to life. cities. politically, I don’t know.” Take 1987’s Beloved, the Pulitzer “It’s transition from the blues, it’s She had admired Hillary Clinton for Prize-winning novel that vivifies the different, it’s anger, it’s seduction, it’s years. She had never made a presidential enormity of slavery in one woman’s below-the-belt stuff,” Morrison says. “It endorsement. story. Morrison spent years researching was not just the music, it was the style. Then she did. and thinking before she wrote a word. It was free.” Back home, you loved who “It really was about this thing that I “I didn’t know anything,” she says, was next door, but here “you could dared to call wisdom,” she says now. but at some point she realized that choose to love somebody.” Interesting times. Morrison can’t stop “all the narratives about slavery were Maybe it wouldn’t work out. “But the thinking about them. by men.” Then she read a newspaper point is, it was choice — black choice.” “I have to say, I wish Jimmy Baldwin article about Margaret Garner, who Or take Song of Solomon, Morrison’s were here,” she says quietly. “There’s had killed her own daughter to keep her breakthrough book. A sprawling, mythic so many people that I wish — I would from being returned to bondage. family saga whose plot resists summary, just like to hear them at this point, you “She did it and didn’t regret it,” it won the 1977 National Book Critics know?” Morrison says, ticking off things Circle Award and got compared to the And what does she think her old that struck her about Garner’s story. work of Gabriel García Márquez. It’s friend’s reaction to the Age of Obama “The man who interviewed her was also the rare Morrison novel centered might have been? astonished because she was so calm on a man. She gets quieter still, as though she and not drooling — I mean, she wasn’t Hmm. knows a bittersweet laugh is coming. insane. And her mother-in-law said, ‘I Might that be why Marlon Brando “I think he would be desperately, neither approved nor disapproved.’ She used to call to talk about it? desperately in love,” Toni Morrison just couldn’t make up her mind. “He would read passages to me, of says. ■

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

MICHAEL DIRDA A girlish diary that turned into a chilling record

• Originally Published Sunday, geois — in their outlook and culture. November 23, 2008 They certainly have almost nothing in common with the lower-class and The Journal of Hélène Berr is a sometimes now stateless émigré Jews relatively late addition to that most occasionally being detained by the sorrowful of genres, one that should Germans. One could hardly imagine never have come to exist: Holocaust that such people and the elegant literature. Its title subtly recalls the Berrs belonged to the same race — at most famous testimony to the horror of least not until the edict of May 29, life under Nazi domination, The Diary 1942, ordering all Jews to wear a of Anne Frank. As it happens, these yellow star.

NE BERR”

L two vital and deeply appealing diarists É At first Berr hesitates, considering described precisely the same period — it “degrading,” but ultimately she 1942 to 1944 — but with a significant changes her mind out of a brave sense difference: While the adolescent Frank of solidarity. Her pages about publicly hid in her secret rooms in Amsterdam, displaying this hateful insignia are Berr carried on with her life as a both piteous and shocking: university student in occupied Paris. “I was very courageous all day long. At least for a while. Ultimately, though, I held my head high, and I stared at both shared the same fate: death at other people so hard that it made them Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The two young avert their eyes. But it’s difficult … women were imprisoned there at the This afternoon it all started over again. same time. They might have met. I had to fetch Vivi Lafon from her As the journal begins in the spring of English exam at 2:00. I did not want to

THE JOURNAL OF H JOB/“ LLECTION CO S, H, PARI MORIAL DE LA SHOA

1942, Hélène Berr picks up a package M wear the star, but I ended up doing so, left with a Paris concierge. France’s most thinking my reluctance was cowardly. distinguished poet has kindly inscribed First of all there were two girls in one of his books to her: “On waking, so THE JOURNAL OF HÉLÈNE BERR avenue de La Bourdonnais who pointed soft is the light and so fine this living Translated from the French by David Bellos at me. Then at Ecole Militaire métro blue, Paul Valery.” The next day Berr Weinstein. 307 pp. $24.95 station … the ticket inspector said: records that she and her friends are ‘Last carriage.’ … I suddenly felt I was planning a picnic to her family’s country no longer myself, that everything had place at Aubergenville. In Paris itself in the study of Old English. A dozen changed, that I had become a foreigner, life consists of English classes, evenings pages of the journal go by before there as if I were in the grip of a nightmare. I of chamber music (Bach, Schumann, is any mention of the Germans. could see familiar faces all around me, Chopin), visits to bookshops, the After all, why discuss such unpleas- but I could feel their awkwardness and reading of Russian novels or romantic antness? Hélène Berr belongs to a bafflement.” It’s all horrible, she knows, poetry. Berr confesses that she might privileged family and class, her but then she thinks about Jean. The shy be in love with a young man named father being the eminent and valued couple take walks, listen to records Gérard — until she meets a fellow managing director of Etablissements together, visit each other’s families. student named Jean Morawiecki. Her Kuhlmann, an important chemical … and suddenly life is beautiful again. heart is suddenly torn. Full of emotional company. Though Jewish, the Berrs are confusion, the 20-year-old finds refuge thoroughly French — and haut-bour- continued ON page 24

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continued from page 2 of scholarship and learning, dreaming of happiness with the man she loves, Berr is any young woman in love with has virtually disappeared. The voice a young man who loves her. is somber now, philosophical, that of But one evening she arrives home a mature woman who recognizes that to discover that her father has been death in a concentration camp is her arrested. Raymond Berr spends three most likely future. Berr’s only aim, until months in Drancy, an internment camp arrested, is to bear witness: near Paris. Berr, her mother and sister “I have a duty to write because other visit, and they notice the working-class people must know. Every hour of every Jews all around them in the visitor’s day there is another painful realization room. “The four of us were so distant that other folk do not know, do not even from those poor folk that we could hardly imagine, the suffering of other men, the conceive that Papa was a prisoner too.” evil that some of them inflict. And I am But Papa is a prisoner too, and slowly still trying to make the painful effort Berr’s consciousness begins to alter. to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it Etablissements Kuhlmann eventually is maybe the only one I can fulfill.” To pays a ransom to have Raymond Berr ensure at least her journal’s survival, she released, and the family continues its life passes along sections to the household in Paris. Some of their friends escape to cook, asking her to save the pages for Vichy France, and yet the Berrs decide Jean. Berr still daydreams about him, to stay put, out of a sense of dignity, even imagines him reading the very steadfastly refusing to be cowardly, page she is writing. But so much has believing it important to stand together willpower left, I’m just putting down the been lost. “If only I could laugh! Jean with other Frenchmen. Berr herself salient facts so as to remember them.” liked laughing so much. Before, I used to touchingly confesses that it’s “because of Take their young friend Pironneau. laugh. Nowadays a sense of humor feels him [Jean] that I do not want to leave.” “Maman has gotten the details of his like sacrilege.” Everyone is in denial. Nobody can quite execution. It was on the day of the great Still, Berr periodically strives to believe that worse is yet to come. parade, he was taken off at 7:00 A.M., maintain a semblance of her old existence, Then it is announced that “Jews are with another man, in the prison van, with fighting off despair to imagine that she no longer entitled to cross the Champs- their coffins. There was nobody there to will somehow survive. She studies and Elysées. Theaters and restaurants are shoot them; they had to wait until 3:00 frequently quotes her beloved Keats, off-limits.” Neighbors begin to warn in the afternoon for a ‘volunteer’ to transcribes the reflections on World War the family about a series of roundups. come and shoot them, obliging one of I of the novelist Roger Martin du Gard, Hélène Berr starts to record what she them to witness the other’s death.” plays music, even reads Winnie-the- hears as well as sees: Somewhat to her own surprise, Berr Pooh and retells Kipling’s “Rikki Tikki “In Mlle Monsaingeon’s neighborhood, admits to a growing visceral hatred Tavi” to her young orphans. But she a whole family, the father, the mother, of the Krauts — and to anger at the also finds herself loathing the barbaric and five children, gassed themselves to frequent indifference of non-Jewish Germans, who “dared to claim that escape the roundup. Parisians. She begins to work part-time I was not French.” And the horrible “One woman threw herself out of a at a Jewish-run agency intended to help stories continue. Thirteen children from window. deportees and their families, soon taking an orphanage are seized to make up the “Apparently several policemen have homeless children under her wing, even required 1,000 deportees for a convoy been shot for warning people so they organizing a scout troop. Suddenly, Jean to the “East.” So many people have could escape. They were threatened announces that he is leaving to join been killed, Berr writes, that “we have with the concentration camp if they Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. almost stopped grieving for the dead.” failed to obey.” At this point Hélène Berr stops Her cousin, who is also her best friend, More and more, Berr regards her writing in her journal for some 10 disappears into a concentration camp. journal as an aide-memoire, almost months, starting again only in the fall “How many souls of infinite worth, a reporter’s notebook: “I’m not even of 1943. Sadly, the once high-spirited keeping this diary anymore, I’ve no young woman, full of plans for a life continued on page 2

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continued FROM page 24 and Antoinette Berr died later that year essay, a memoir by Berr’s niece Mariette in Auschwitz. Hélène Berr nonetheless Job, a brief history of “France and the repositories of gifts others should have managed to survive and in 1945 was Jews” (by Bellos), and a half-dozen treated with humility and respect, have transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where useful lists of books, acronyms, names been similarly crushed and broken by she grew sick from typhus and was and places. The Journal of Hélène Germanic brutality?” For a long time, then brutally beaten to death just five Berr has been an immense bestseller she cannot fathom why children and days before the camp was liberated by in Europe and deserves comparable pregnant women are being seized by the the British. success in this country. This, alas, is Germans, until she finally recognizes David Bellos, the translator and how it truly was when good people the truth and sets it down: “They have biographer of Georges Perec, as well as were heartlessly abused and their lives one aim, which is extermination.” a professor of French and comparative were ruthlessly taken from them. ■ On March 8, 1944, at 7:30 in the literature at Princeton, has created an morning, there was a knock at the door exemplary American edition of Berr’s Michael Dirda’s e-mail address is to the family’s apartment. Raymond journal. It includes maps, an introductory [email protected]

By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Foreign Service

• Originally Published July 28, 2008 SONGJIANG, China — Nodding his. ■

Staff writer Steven Mufson in Washington and researchers Wu Meng and Crissie Ding contributed to this report.

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

JONATHAN YARDLEY Dickens was facing financial ruin when he imagined Ebenezer Scrooge

• Originally Published, Sunday, in 1843, Martin Chuzzlewit, November 30, 2008 was doing no better. He needed In October 1843 Charles Dickens’s something to reverse his slide “once unequaled popularity was but seems to have had no idea at a nadir, his critical reputation what it might be. He was only in a shambles, his bank account 31 years old, but he had a large overdrawn,” Les Standiford writes. family to feed as well as other His first five books — Sketches by pressing financial obligations, Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver and he feared that he was sliding Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The toward oblivion. Old Curiosity Shop — had made However improbably, he found him “perhaps the world’s first true what he was looking for that celebrity of the popular arts” and October night in Manchester. “far and away his country’s best- After delivering his remarks, selling author, acclaimed as much for he walked the city’s streets, his themes — the misery of the poor thinking about his career. He and the presumption and posturing “began to take stock of himself of the rich — as for his spellbinding in a way that any accomplished powers as a storyteller.” Yet as and acclaimed writer would find he sat on a stage in Manchester, extremely difficult, much less the preparing to give a speech to raise most famous writer of his time.” funds for the local Athenaeum, “the As he subsequently told his industrial capital’s primary beacon close friend, advisor and future of arts and enlightenment,” he was biographer John Forster, perhaps deeply worried about “how rapidly he had begun to take his public — and how unaccountably — his for granted. He needed to return good fortune had fled.” to plain storytelling, “without Those first five brilliant successes browbeating or scolding, or had been followed by three mounting a soapbox,” as had disappointments. The first was been his tendency of late: Barnaby Rudge, an ill-advised “And so, as he walked the attempt at a historical novel, which streets that night, a new story sold respectably but considerably began to form. His nightly walks less well than its predecessors. The continued, even after his return second was American Notes, the from Manchester to London, his result of a trip he had made to the mind still whirling … until bit by United States, one that was meant bit his tale took shape, and, as to increase his American readership his friend Forster put it, with ‘a and gain publicity in England. But strange mastery it seized him.’ the book was poorly received by He wept over it, laughed, and British reviewers and readers, and continued ON page 27 the novel he was publishing in serial BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU — THE WASHINGTON POST

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page 26 Dickens himself “had always been weeklong cessation of business affairs greatly enamored of the holiday,” but to through the New Year, no orgy of gift- then wept again, as bits and pieces the public at large it was a minor blip on giving, no ubiquitous public display swam up before him, including the the calendar: of nativity scenes (or court fights vision of two children named Ignorance “There were no Christmas cards in regarding them), no holiday lighting and Want, those ‘wretched, abject, 1843 England, no Christmas trees at extravaganzas, and no plethora of frightful, hideous, miserable’ creatures royal residences or White Houses, no who would, with Tiny Tim and Bob Christmas turkeys, no department- Cratchit and Scrooge and Marley and all store Santa or his million clones, no continued ON page 28 the rest, stamp themselves on Dickens’s imagination, and that of the world, forever.” Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a fever; it took him only six weeks to complete the 30,000-word manuscript. “I was so closely occupied with my little Carol (the idea of which had just occurred to me),” he told a friend, “that I never left home before the owls went out; and led quite a solitary life.” It was the shortest book he had written — the others were issued in multiple serials and then published as three- volume books known as “triple deckers” — and the biggest financial gamble of his life. His publisher, Chapman and Hall, expressed little enthusiasm for the book, so Dickens decided to have the firm bring it out “for publication on his own account.” All the risk would be his own: “He would be responsible for the costs of the book’s production, which would be deducted from its sales. He would also oversee the book’s design, hire its illustrator, and consult on its advertising. In essence, his publishers — which would receive a fixed commission tied to sales — had become merely his printer. In contemporary terms, then, A Christmas Carol was to be an exercise in vanity publishing.” The book has for so long been a central part of the Christmas season, and even more central to popular images of the Victorian British Christmas, that it is useful to be reminded by Standiford of one important thing: In 1843 Christmas was not even remotely similar to what AP PHOTO it became and what we know now. Charlesoutpouring Dickens, of in ‘Yuletidean undated greetings,’photo, wrote no“A Christmasmidnight Carol” services in only six weeks. celebrating the

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page 2 Financial reward from A Christmas one from the ostensibly reputable Harper Carol came more slowly to Dickens than and Brothers, which infuriated Dickens, birth of a savior. In fact, despite all of he had hoped — Chapman and Hall, in a passionate advocate of international Dickens’s enthusiasms, the holiday was the grand tradition of publishing, seems copyright. A bogus edition appeared a relatively minor affair that ranked to have cooked the books against him in England as well, but there he won far below Easter, causing little more — but popular success was immediate his legal case against the offending stir than Memorial Day or St. George’s and immensely gratifying, taking the opportunist. There also were dozens of Day does today. In the eyes of the book into its third printing before the unauthorized stage adaptations, but by relatively enlightened Anglican Church, and large he was less concerned about moreover, the entire enterprise of them. The practice was widespread, celebrating Christmas smacked vaguely and the dramatizations provided free of paganism, and were there Puritans publicity for the book. In the 20th still around, acknowledging the holiday century “at least twenty-eight film might have landed one in the stocks.” adaptations” have been made, “the very Totally — and correctly — best” having been released in 1951, contradicting the title of The Man starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. And Who Invented Christmas, which the beat goes on: probably is the invention of someone in “According to a count made in the his publisher’s marketing department, late 1980s, at least 225 live stagings, Standiford says that “no individual can films, radio dramas, and television claim credit for the creation of Christmas, plays based on Dickens’s ‘little Carol’ of course — except, perhaps, the figure had been produced after 1950, and that that the day is named for.” No, Dickens number does not take into account the did not “invent” Christmas. But he untold number of amateur and regional “played a major role in transforming a productions staged every year. Not celebration dating back to pre-Christian only has A Christmas Carol become times, revitalizing forgotten customs the most ‘adapted’ of all the author’s and introducing new ones that now works, but it would be hard to name define the holiday,” including the turkey any other work of fiction that has as the centerpiece of the day’s feast. thereby become so ubiquitous a part of He gave us “a secular counterpoint end of 1843. Writing about himself in Western popular culture.” to the story of the Nativity,” and the third person, Dickens told a friend: Standiford’s account of A Christmas “complemented the glorification of the “By every post, all manner of strangers Carol relies almost entirely on secondary nativity of Christ with a specific set of write all manner of letters to him about sources and probably will be dismissed practices derived from Christ’s example: their homes and hearths, and how this by Dickensians as adding nothing new charity and compassion in the form same Carol is read aloud there and kept to our understanding of the writer, but of educational opportunity, humane on a very little shelf by itself. Indeed it is a nice addition to the literature of working conditions, and a decent life it is the greatest success as I am told, Christmas. A small addition, to be sure, for all. Just as vital as the celebration that this ruffian and rascal has ever but then so was A Christmas Carol. ■ of the birth of a holy savior into a achieved.” human family was the glorification and In the United States pirated editions of Jonathan Yardley’s e-mail address is defense of the family unit itself.” the book were quickly issued, including [email protected]

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

JONATHAN YARDLEY The literary preparation of a great president LINCOLN The Biography of a Writer By Fred Kaplan Harper. 406 Pp. $27.95

• Originally Published November 2, 2008 The literature about Abraham Lincoln is so vast as to defy comprehension, yet historians and other scholars — not to mention novelists, poets, artists, sculptors, even composers — continue to find new and revealing things to say about this greatest of all Americans. Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is the latest case in point, a book that is certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. To be sure, many others before Kaplan have dealt in various ways with Lincoln’s love of literature and writing, but no one has explored the subject so deeply or found so much meaning in it. Kaplan’s central subjects are Lincoln’s “compelling interest in language as the instrumental vehicle for civilization and culture” and his specific interest in written language, about which he once said: “ Writing— the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye — is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception ALAN E. COBER/IMAGES.COM/CORBIS of it — great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, The language of that passage may seem from every other president, with the and the unborn, at all distances of time a trifle quaint to today’s reader, but the exception of Jefferson, in that we can and of space; and great, not only in its essential truth of it is clear and beyond be certain that he wrote every word direct benefits, but greatest help, to all argument. And at a time when careful to which his name is attached,” and other inventions. … Its utility may be writing has fallen into disrepute — a he “was also the last president whose conceived, by the reflection, that to it time of lower-case e-mail, text messages character and standards in the use of we owe everything which distinguishes and advertising idiocy — its importance language avoided the distortions and us from savages. Take it from us, and may well be greater than ever, especially other dishonest uses of language that the Bible, all history, all science, all when one contemplates the debased have done so much to undermine the government, all commerce, and nearly state of political discourse. As Kaplan all social intercourse go with it.” points out, “Lincoln is distinguished continued ON page 30

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

know to our sorrow, has become a well- established presidential prerogative, and Adlai Stevenson’s pledge to “talk sense to the American people” is a figment of a forgotten past. So let us contemplate the example of Abraham Lincoln, who before the age of 10 — and in circumstances scarcely conducive to learning, much less deep learning — had developed the habit of reading. As a boy on a farm in Kentucky in the early 1800s he seemed to face a “lifelong fate” of manual labor, as his father had, but in 1816 he came under the influence of a schoolmaster who set him on a different path. His “first formal lessons in literacy came from Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue, popularly known as Dilworth’s Speller, a widely reprinted textbook first published in London in 1740.” The book “taught Protestant theology and moral behavior” as well as grammar, and “some of the language and its lessons entered deeply into him” as “guideposts in his formative years.” Then, in 1818, not long after the Lincolns moved to Indiana, Lincoln’s mother died. A year later his father married Sally Bush Johnston, a passionate reader who brought “a small but marvelous library” with her. Young Abe’s world changed forever “when she

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS took from her luggage the Arabian “Nicolay Copy,” the earliest known of the five drafts of what may be the most famous Nights, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, American speech, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Noah Webster’s Speller, Lindley Murray’s The English Reader, and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution.” credibility of national leaders.” Some words. Yes, times do change and with Though he could not have been aware presidents have been well served by them the ways by which we communicate of it at the time, Lincoln’s constant, their speechwriters, but “the challenge with each other, but the need for clear, obsessive reading was teaching of a president himself struggling to honest and comprehensible speech and him how to write. The rhythms and find the conjunction between the right writing has never been greater, as the cadences of the prose and poetry that words and honest expression, a use political season now ending has made all he read — Shakespeare (his lifelong of language that respects intellect, too apparent. How we will be served in “secular Bible”), Robert Burns, Lord truth, and sincerity, has largely been this regard by the person who is elected Byron, Edward Gibbon, Samuel abandoned.” president on Tuesday remains to be seen, Johnson, Alexander Pope — insinuated It is always instructive to study but the rhetoric of recent presidents — themselves into his capacious, ever Lincoln, but now is a particularly in particular the two most recent ones good time to consider his devotion to — does not bode well. Mendacity, as we continued ON page 31

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page 0 — provided literary guidelines.” He “Our progress in degeneracy appears wrote little poetry thereafter, but “the to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, curious mind and became the bedrock command of literary models and of we began by declaring that ‘all men are upon which his own majestic prose language that enabled him to write these created equal.’ We now practically read eventually was constructed. His reading credible poems in 1846,” Kaplan says, it ‘all men are created equal, except also made him, again all unwittingly, was “inseparable from his command of Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get a son of the Enlightenment, one who language as a prose writer.” control, it will read ‘all men are created “had little mind for transcendence, let Kaplan — emeritus professor of English equals, except Negroes, and foreigners, alone permanence,” but was connected at Queens College and author of well and catholics.’ When it comes to this “to the rooted quotidian”; to him, regarded biographies of Mark Twain, I should prefer emigrating to some “reason, logic, and experience seemed Henry James and Charles Dickens, country where they make no pretence of the best guides.” The Enlightenment’s among others — meticulously analyzes loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, “prevailing synthesis, which Lincoln how Lincoln’s steadily maturing prose where despotism can be taken pure, and absorbed, emphasized a combination style, “projecting a persona of dignified without the base alloy of hypocracy.” of Christian ethics, classical style, and but amiable authenticity,” enabled him Five years later he was elected natural law.” Shakespeare’s “What a to come to grips with slavery and, as president. We know the rest of the piece of work is man! How noble in his own views evolved, to express his story, and Kaplan devotes far less space reason. …” became his touchstone: “No deepening opposition to it. In 1854, not to it than to Lincoln’s education as matter how powerful the appeal of long after Franklin Pierce signed the a writer, for by then — just in time bombast, moodiness, and melancholy, Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted — that education was complete. In Lincoln found in his Enlightenment slavery’s westward expansion, Lincoln one of the finest passages in this fine, models and in Shakespeare the tartly exposed what Kaplan calls invaluable book, Kaplan sets him on the affirmation of his tested but sustained the “flawed and dangerous” logic of road to Washington: faith in man’s reasoning faculty as slavery’s adherents. Then, the next “If intellectual readiness is everything, his highest and in reason’s power to year, he exploded: he was ready, as he well knew when he advance good works.” said goodbye to his Springfield world, He believed that he had the capacity having prepared himself over a lifetime to do important things but often feared to become a well-read master of the that the opportunity would never come human narrative. If that narrative was his way. His young adulthood, his long to have its tragic dimension in Lincoln’s apprenticeship in law and politics, his failure, despite his talents, to prevent romantic disappointments and strange the South’s secession, shorten the yet crucial marriage to Mary Todd — inevitable war, or alleviate Northern all gave him cause to wonder whether racism, it was to be an object lesson in at worst failure or at best modest the limitations of language rather than a accomplishment was to be his fate. failure in preparation. At the same time, Through it all, though, he kept reading, the unfortunate givens of the narrative and by 1846, when he was practicing provided the context for his two greatest law in Springfield, he decided to “try his achievements, the Gettysburg Address hand as a writer of literature, attempting and the second inaugural address, in to use language as a vehicle of self- which he did what great writers do: exploration and pleasurable expression create useful texts from which readers in a way distinctly different from the can derive inspiration, literary pleasure, writing that he had done as a political and universalizing direction.” man addressing public issues.” In three Amen. ■ poems of his that have survived “the two alternative modes of his personality Jonathan Yardley’s e-mail address is — the melancholy and the humorous [email protected]

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Michael Dirda The 10 Commandments of Book Giving • Originally Published December 7, 2008 Last week, I began to think seriously about presents. ‘Tis the season, after all. When little, I used to lie on the faded blue davenport in my family’s living room and daydream about what I’d like to unwrap on Christmas morning. A gleaming silver six-gun in a tooled black leather holster. A gigantic Erector Set, with battery-operated motors. The plastic model kit for a three-masted frigate or a double-fuselaged P-38 Lightning. Cool stuff, in other words. I could never quite fathom why Santa even bothered with socks and underwear and heavy winter clothes, usually in wool.

Look beyond the obvious bestsellers. War II, he’d be thrilled to possess a about impenetrable. But owning the book People who are interested in the copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships from the led me to read around in it, and before 1latest hot novels and topical works late 1930s, or the 1943 edition of The long I was memorizing long passages and of nonfiction already own them. Plus, Bluejacket’s Manual, or — if you really looking for Eliot’s Selected Essays. The to give a bestseller shows a lack of want to splurge — the multi-volume set gift changed my life. imagination. And you don’t want that. of Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of Support the midlist. Many good United States Naval Operations in A classic is always welcome, novelists, most poets and nearly all World War II. especially in a pretty edition. If 9scholars sell only a few thousand 2your intended giftee owns a much Be complementary. Note that’s copies of their books, if they’re lucky. underlined Penguin Pride and Prejudice with an “e” not an “i.” If your wife Blockbuster titles and brand-name authors or never travels without a beat-up 6obsessively reads and rereads the will always be with us, but the books that paperback of On the Road, you won’t dark psychological thrillers of Ruth matter in the long run, the books that will go wrong with a beautiful folio edition Rendell — and I’d be a little worried truly speak to our very innermost being, of the Jane Austen or the recent 50th- if this is the case — then she’s likely can easily be overlooked. Browse through anniversary hardback of Jack Kerouac’s to enjoy the so-called “hard” novels the fiction shelves. Pause at the poetry classic. (romans durs) of Georges Simenon or section. Buy a few of these books, and the unsettling suspense fiction of Patricia you’ll be a patron of the arts. If you know that your friend reads Highsmith. and rereads Keats’s poetry, then Read book reviews, 3give something related to Keats. It Seek out books with a special established literary blogs and might be W. Jackson Bate’s monumental association. Just last month I was 10best-of-the-year round-ups in biography, Hyder Rollins’s edition of the 7browsing through the bargain magazines. Here, you can readily learn letters, the recent study by Stanley Plumly tables outside Second Story Books near about all kinds of wonderful books, on (Posthumous Keats) or even a scholarly Dupont Circle and for a few bucks picked every subject from public policy and edition of the poetry. up The Short Stories of H.G. Wells, in current affairs to Taoist philosophy. worn but respectable condition. I already Librarians and booksellers are great Remember the books you love owned this edition, but on this particular resources, too. yourself. If you’re crazy about the copy’s title page there was a dated Over the years I’ve gone through all novels of Georgette Heyer, the 4 inscription signed “H.G. Wells.” (As all kinds of Christmas presents, and nearly stories of Laurie Colwin or such books as good collectors know: Carefully read any all of them quickly broke or have been Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm and writing on endpapers and title pages.) long forgotten. Not so the gift books, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred What admirer of The Time Machine whether Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan Years of Solitude, it makes sense to share wouldn’t be thrilled with such a present? and the Golden Lion, a paperback copy your passion with others. After all, the of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Pléiade giving and receiving of presents is a kind Expand the horizons of your friends edition of Stendhal’s Oeuvres Intimes. of soul-exchange. and family. In college my girlfriend Given to me by relatives, teachers and Do not scorn second-hand books. If 8gave me a copy of T.S. Eliot‘s friends, they helped to make the season your husband or son is fascinated by collected poems. Till then, I had thought bright — and they also helped to make 5the naval operations during World of Eliot as dauntingly academic and just me who I am. n 32 December 8, 2008 © 2008 THE WASHINGTON POST COMPANY Volume 8, Issue 4

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

Academic Content Standards

This lesson addresses academic content standards of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Maryland Virginia Washington, D.C.

Reading: Read critically to evaluate English: The student will read and English: Describe the facts and informational text (Indicator 6) analyze a variety of narrative and evidence used to support an a. Analyze the extent to which the poetic forms. argument. (Argument and Persuasive text or texts fulfill the reading b. Describe inferred main ideas or Text, 7.IT-A.6) purpose themes, using evidence from the c. Analyze the text and its text as support. English: Compare (and contrast) information for reliability; e. Compare and contrast authors’ works with similar themes in two Assessment limits: styles. (Reading, 8.5) different literary genres, using their Connections between the credentials structural features as the basis for of the author and the information English: The student will read and the comparison. (Genre, 9.LT-G.2) in the text analyze a variety of literature. e. Analyze additional information a. Identify format, text structure and English: Write interpretations that would clarify or strengthen main idea. of literary texts that the author’s argument or b. Identify the characteristics that • Extend beyond summary and viewpoint; Assessment limits: distinguish literary forms. literary analysis; Information that would enhance or d. Explain the relationships between • Address the author’s techniques; clarify the reader’s understanding and among elements of literature: • Draw inferences about its effects; of the main ideas of the text or a characters, plot, setting, tone, point and portion of the text of view, and theme. • Support inferences through f. Analyze the effectiveness of e. Explain the relationship between references to the text or other persuasive techniques to sway the the author’s style and literary effect. works. (Expository Writing, reader to a particular point of view g. Explain the influence of historical 10.W-E.4) (Standard 2.0 Comprehension of context on the form, style and point Informational Text) of view of a written work. (Reading English: Write interpretations Analysis, 9.3) of literary or expository reading that Reading: Analyze and interpret • Demonstrate a grasp of the theme important ideas and messages in English: The student will critique or purpose of the work; literary texts. professional and peer writing. • Analyze the language and unique c. Summarize or paraphrase a. Analyze the writing of others. aspects of text; e. Explain the implications of the b. Describe how the author • Support key ideas through accurate text that may have implications accomplishes the intended purpose and detailed references to the text for the reader of the writing. or to other works; (Standard 3.0 Comprehension c. Suggest how the writing might be • Demonstrate awareness of the of Literary Text) improved (Writing, 10.8) effects of the author’s stylistic and rhetorical devices; and • Include information on the validity and reliability of all relevant perspectives. (Expository Writing, 11.W-E.2)

Standards of Learning currently in effect The Maryland Voluntary State Curriculum for Virginia Public Schools can be found Learning Standards for DCPS are found Content Standards can be found online at online at www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/ online at www.k12.dc.us/dcps/Standards/ http://mdk12.org/assessments/vsc/index.html. Superintendent/Sols/home.shtml. standardsHome.htm.