Posted on 10/31/2002 8:48:55 PM PST by Burkeman1
I had to read Zinn's book last year for my 11th grade history class and I couldn't take it. Everyone else in the class lapped it up because they were in love with our commie of a teacher. He lived in East Germany for a while!
Portrait Of the Artist - Augh!!!! At least we didn't have to read Ulysses!!!
Johnny Got His Gun - our teacher did tell us about Dalton Trumbo before we started that one, so we had the whole Black List background.
Bless the Beasts and the Children - hero kid dies freeing buffalo that are going to be hunted.
Lord of the Flies - Sorry, just too gross for me.
In college - Chaucer - while I liked the author, I absolutely hated the instructor. He was Jewish and hated anyone who was Christain. He later got stabbed in the men's room at the college by the husband of the PR woman he was having an affair with. What goes around...
I went to a private High School, - most of the English teachers were pretty liberal , but they didn't try to force their views on us. And I remember doing a book report on Fear of Flying in 10th grade. Well, it was alot more interesting than Moby Dick. :-)
By contrast, the BEST book I have read this season is Uncivil War. Using the author's thesis of New Elites versus the Have-Not's, the 2004 election was predictable. It's a read much worth the paper it's printed on!
bookmark and back to the top. Great idea for discussion!
(some gary snyder (?) book, Island of Turtles (?) Mostly, the textbooks, though. )
That is what I did...but I was meaner. I went back and told them I wrote whatever they wanted to hear, and it was all bull$hit!!
The Great Gatsby. God, that book was horrific. The most amazingly dull and unreadable piece of tripe I ever had to refuse to finish reading. Even the Cliffnotes were unbearable.
Catcher in the Rye was probably the lousiest of the books I did actually manage to get through.
Animal Farm, 1984 were the best books I was assigned.
Qwinn
I can tell you why he stays on the bestseller list. But you will not like it.
His book is a textbook and therefore is purchased by government funded learning institutions. In other words your tax dollars go to this leftist fool so each year his book can teach a whole new crop of young Americans why they should hate America.
The mind boggles at such but alas it is true.
Animal Farm had the added advantage of low page count!
Even the liberal guys in my class agreed that each page dripped with man-hatred. None of the girls saw it, they liked the book.
There's only one male in that entire book who is portrayed in a positive light. He's a minority, he's a left-wing refugee, he doesn't speak English--actually, we don't really know this, because he almost never says anything, he just follows his wife around like a dog. That's Kingsolver's "perfect man." God forbid a man should have his own opinions and free will. Every single other man is some sort of demon figure responsible for hurting women. It was pure poison. That was the worst liberal book I had to read in high school.
Having to "subsidize" Zinn is like watching our government dollars flow to NPR and PBS. If they were so darn good, they could make money and survive on their own WITHOUT benefit of our tax dollars. Sesame Street used to be a gold mine for its licensees. I hope Bush's theoretically "leaner" budget has some deep surgical cuts for the National Endowment for the "Arts", NPR, PBS, and other leftist voices.
Wow, I'd forgotten this thread existed. Fun to take up a discussion again a year hence!
I'm sure the girls in your class liked Bean Trees because unfortunately, there still aren't that many books with spunky heroines out there. I was a lefty at the time I read it, so I'm sure that had something to do with it, but the prose is clean, and the female lead character is fun. Most books I had to read in high school were about boys. We all like to see ourselves reflected in literature.
that book immediately came to mind, i had it assigned to me in a class for future history teachers, so i'm guessing it's getting assigned a lot! Horrible book..
Anything post modern - Luce Irigeray (sp?) or Jacques Derrida were the worst.
That's a darn good list!
So I assume that 'math is tuff' did you a world of good, if you passed H&R-based Physics? ;-P
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