loved it and passed it on!

Someone gave me this book to read and I read the cover and didn’t expect much from it. After all, a fat Yankee pretend farmer writing about dogs? But Jon Katz is not only an excellent writer, but a spot on observer about what life is really like on a farm. I’m now reading a bunch more of his books and that says a whole lot about how wrong I was!

I enjoyed the book. It is pretty much everything that the review below me (Corinne) said. The writing was so good that during a several week long heat wave with temps over 90 every day, one day I’d been reading about being in ND in January and opened the door and expected it to be cold! But at the end I thought mostly, ummm, why? Loved the characters though, and loved the miraculous father.

in general. These books are, I think, a fair representation of what he espouses (and in that, I so totally do not get that people find him extremist or racist or all those other things), but they are written in a rather elementary style that I didn’t find particularly enjoyable.

she has a good ear and good characters, and in this one she doesn’t indulge in overdramatics too much. Enjoyable.

good ideas . . . for a blog post not an overly long book. He keeps going over and over again how what he’s talking about is evolutionary, telling us what we are supposed to think about what he can’t seem to get around to actually describing to us, the reader.

I didn’t make it past the first few chapters honestly. I mean, I know the story can be told in a riveting fashion so, why not do that? This sort of writing is why I never did like history to begin with, and why people turn to Zinn’s People’s History which is, frankly, communist. The honest to goodness best history “books” we’ve ever had are the Cartoon Guides (to US history, world history, genetics, pretty much everything).

most of the things in this book were things unschoolers were thinking about 20 years ago. I wish he’d asked more explicitely in the last chapter whether early language acquisition was really a good thing or not because I think that the way language limits thinking that delaying language acquisition with the internalization of all it rules might actually open up ability to think widely and unexpectedly. (He pretty much seemed to assume that early language acquisition was a good thing, period—and this after chapters showing that early high IQ scores were not predictive). Anyway. It was still interesting and informative background noise.

I do have a few issues with the writing, mostly in that it takes her a couple chapters to get going and then, throughout the book and even still, I have to constantly review each character and his/her story, like it isn’t drawn strongly enough or something.

But I like the story and I like the characters and I think it is particularly strong in that the girls act like girls really do act instead of like cardboard cutouts or something.

And I particularly liked this look into mothers and daughters. And tears were falling through the last five chapters at least.

It is a good, decent flick. Good story, good characters, nothing too much too much, and oh so beautiful even if I did just see it on a regular tv.

Here’s what got me about Avatar: not that it was hyped but that people fell so in love with it that they wanted to commit suicide because they couldn’t live there. Hey gang, I live there. It is not a problem. What it takes is guts, balls, and courage.

You might notice in the film that a lot of the good guys die. You might notice that not many humans are invited to stay. I mean, most humans are not the evil leader incarnate but the boring, everyday Nazi prison guards “just doing their jobs” and thinking they don’t have a choice. To live there, the people (both Navi and human) had to be willing to die to live: They had to be brave beyond measure, love beyond reckoning, be both willing to let live and to kill; They had to replace self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution all the while maintaining independence and autonomy. (pretty classic self-actualization)

So, I enjoyed it but I think the people who thought it was over the top are deluded mostly about themselves.