Books Read Since Autumn 2022 >>>>> An Indication of the Knowledge that Underpins My Work as Teacher, Activist, and K-12 Revolutionary

I have been on a lifelong quest for knowledge that gains acceleration with each passing day.

Having such a deep and broad knowledge base allows me to provide information to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative whenever the need arises in any subject for grades spanning preK-12 and university at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

The following represents the reading that I have done from autumn 2022 onward.  Such reading occupies just a part of my daily activity, which typically begins at 6:00 AM and concludes at 12:00 midnight.  On most days, including weekdays and Sundays from afternoon into the evening, I teach three or four academic sessions, after spending mornings in reading, research and writing.

All of this knowledge and teaching provides extraordinary weight and ballast for my work on the second edition of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect and for my advocacy for knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Perpend  >>>>>

Books Read Since Autumn 2022

  

Books on Taiwan or Pertinent to the Brutality of the People’s Republic of China Under Xi Jinping

Shelley Rigger, The Tiger Leading the Dragon:  How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise (London:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

>>>>>   Makes a convincing case that Taiwan’s investment in the People’s Republic of China during the early 2000s was a prime determinant of the latter nation’s rapid economic rise.

Shelley Rigger, Why Taiwan Matters:  Small Island, Global Powerhouse (London:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)

>>>>>   Provides an excellent, up-to-date summary of Taiwan’s past and present;  but typically uncourageous in stating the frank case of and for independence.

Vern Sneider, A Pail of Oysters (Manchester, United Kingdom:  Camphor Press, 1953)

A novel that, like George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, found a publisher only with great difficulty and got tremendous push-back in the era of the China Lobby and McCarthyism;  focuses on an engaging cast of characters who ran afoul of the Guomindang in the early 1950s and on an American journalist who gradually grasped the intensity of the brutality.

George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Manchester, United Kingdom:  Camphor Press, 1965/1997)

>>>>>   A seething but fact-laden account of the brutality of the Guomindang during and after the February 28^th Incident--  and the culpability of the United States in backing Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.

Peng Ming-min, A Taste of Freedom:  Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader (Manchester, United Kingdom:  Camphor Press, 1971/1998)

>>>>>   Another book that found difficulty in finding publication and a fascinating assertion of the case for Taiwan’s independence by a Taiwanese Presbyterian from extreme southern Taiwan who came to the United States upon release from prison and then returned to run as the first Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate in a free presidential election, against Lee Teng-hui in 1996.

Sean R. Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs:  China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority (Princeton and Oxford:  Princeton University Press, 2020)

>>>>>   This is a magnificent, fact-heavy book that provides much historical background on the Uyghurs, details shifts in policy over time, and ultimately exposes the genocidal policies of the Xi Jinping regime.

Michael Van Walt Van Praag and Miek Boltjes, Tibet Brief 20/20:  Rights, Legal Status, History, State Responsibility, Sovereignty (New York:  Outskirts Press, 2020)

>>>>>   Unrelenting as with the Roberts book on the Uyghurs, this is also an invaluable tutorial of international law as pertains to the nation state.

Books Pertinent to My Waging of the K-12 Revolution

John Kukla, Patrick Henry:  Lion of Liberty (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 2017)

>>>>>     This one might otherwise be placed in the category of my quest for historical and multisubject knowledge, but I was specifically impelled to read this volume when the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education voted to approve a committee that will submit names to replace the appellation for Patrick Henry High School in North Minneapolis;  reinforced my view of Henry that is similar to that I hold of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, brilliant architects of republican democracy who knew that slavery was wrong but took a pragmatic view of their personal economic wherewithal and never released their human bondspersons.

Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap:  The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System---  and How to Fix It (New York:  Avery/Penguin Random House, 2019)

>>>>>   An application of the ideas of E. D. Hirsch specifically to reading skill acquisition, in the context of advocacy for the “Science of Reading” that is now all the buzz;  read this twice before going with my new bestest buddies at the Minneapolis Public Schools to attend a conference based on a  knowledge-intense, fundamentals-plus-subject area, information-heavy approach:  the author of the work of note spoke, as did Science of Reading podcaster Susan Lambert, at the conference.

Muhammad Khalifa, Culturally Responsive School Leadership (Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Harvard Education Press, 2018) 

>>>>>   A terrible, education-professor-jargon-infested work that does the noble theme no favors for its intellectual vacuity.  The assertions made in this book have slim evidential backing, many of them made on the basis of observations at an academically insubstantial alternative school that no longer exists.

Books Pertinent to My Quest for Historical and Multi-Subject Knowledge

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, eds., The 1619 Project

(New York:  One World/The New York Times Company, 2021)

>>>>>   Flawed as a work of history but a needed addition to the history of the African American experience in the United States;  this is the work that has caused such a stir nationally, especially among proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and those for whom CRT is a matter of fear and loathing. 

Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People (New York:  37Ink/Atria/Simon and Schuster, 2018)

>>>>>   Thompson-Spires authors a short story included in the Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al, work noted above;  and offers here a riveting set of short stories that in many cases is an explication of the difficulty that middle class African Americans have in finding a place in an American society that is neither middle class white nor urban core Black.  I have begun an energetic email correspondence with Thompson-Spires, who is a professor at Cornell University.

Christopher Daniell, A Traveller’s History of England (New York:  Interlink Books, 1991)

>>>>>   Plucked this one, long viewed as a planned read, off my personal library shelf;  added a bit to my knowledge of the history of England (emphasized but also necessarily with reference to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland).

Books That Have Been Made Into Movies I’ve Seen

Honore de Balzac, A. J. Krailsheimer, transl., Pere Goriot (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1991, reissued 1999 and 2009 as Oxford World’s Classics Paperback)

>>>>>   Read this one after Barbara and I saw the cinematic Lost Illusions; will also be reading the latter work and Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet.  The latter work and Pere Goriot are volumes listed from Balzac’s prolific novelistic output that appear in a book that I have that reviews the key literary masterpieces of mostly Western authors.   Pere Goriot is an intriguing look at the pretentions of aristocratic Parisian society while examining the poignant circumstances of the 69 year-old namesake character, a former vermicelli (yes, that particular pasta) merchant whose self-made fortune is squandered on supporting two society-ascending aspirant daughters who by novel’s end have treated they daddy in manner much in the fashion of Goneril and Regan in King Lear. 

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Books Read Very Recently

Reading the first two of the following books are part of my ongoing effort to gain a comprehensive understanding of Native American history specifically and a broad grasp of the entirety of American and United States history  >>>>>

Daniel J. Silverman, This Land Is Your Land:  The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Trouble History of Thanksgiving (New York:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

This is a very scholarly rendering of the facts pertinent to the meal shared by certain members of the Wampanoag people and protestant colonists from Great Britain in autumn 1621.  

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous History of the United States Land Is Your Land:  The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Trouble History of Thanksgiving (Boston:  Beacon Press,  Publishing, 2014)

Dunbar provides a fact-laden alternative to conventional renderings of American and United States history.  

John Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (London:  The Penguin Press, 1992)               

Goudsblom traces the impact of fire on humanity, from discovery of how to produce fire through the human uses of and experiences with fire over the centuries.                                                                                                                        

Books Read This Week

I have given particular attention to East and Southeast Asian of late, refreshing and updating my knowledge of the histories of the region  >>>>>

Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China [Third Edition] (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Ebrey has been a major force in Sinology since YSM and I were in graduate school at the University of Iowa in the late 1970s;  she eventually made her career at the University of Washington as a specialist is gender and cultural issues while also writing admirable generalist tomes.  Her first edition of the indicated work was written thirty years ago.

Xiaobing Li, The History of Taiwan [Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations Series] (Santa Barbara, CA:  Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO, 2019)

The Li book is quite a discovery, good enough as another concise update on Taiwanese history but even more as a work among sixty-four (64) such books in a Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations Series about which I had not known until my poking around landed the Xiaobing Li catch.  I already have on order the comparable works on Korea and Somalia and project that these books, at approximately 250 pages each, will be invaluably efficient resources for my aspirations for comprehensive knowledge of world history and as additional sources for writing the ethnic histories as resources for teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Eugene Y. Park, Korea:  A History (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2022) 

I have already been in communication with Park, praising his exhaustive detail (he thanked me and asked me to write a review on Amazon [I haven‘t yet]);  he is among many in academia, working in all manner of fields, with whom I am keeping in touch.