The self-proclaimed Christian parenting book, To Train Up a Child, has come under fire in the wake of the three child deaths. Critics started an online petition asking Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to stop selling the book; over 9,000 people have signed it.
To Train Up a Child
Tuesday New Release Day: Morrison; Schultz; Roe; Wellington; Cohen; Parrett; Miller; Gibbon
New this week: God Help the Child by Toni Morrison; The Blondes by Emily Schultz; The Miracle Girl by Andrew Roe; Positive by David Wellington; This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen; When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett; Seven Devils by M.G. Miller; and Paris Red by Maureen Gibbon. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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The Great 2014 Indie Press Cheat Sheet
Interested in reading some of the indie and small press books coming out in 2014, but don’t know where to start? Michael Seidlinger put together a great Cheat Sheet of titles to get excited about this year. Think of it as a complement to our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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HomeWORK More Like HomeFUN
“Heidi Maier, the new superintendent of the 42,000-student Marion County public school district in Florida, said in an interview that she made the decision based on solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students.” In place of traditional homework, 20,000 elementary school students will spend 20 minutes reading a book of their choice each night, reports The Washington Post. Pair with T.K. Dalton on books, kids, and gender.
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The Right to Be Average
“The call isn’t for a literature to, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has described, stop people from hitting us. […] But for a multiplicity of presence. A mingling, if not an acceptance, of a duality of presence. The right to be average. For the black guys in our literary fiction, if nowhere else, to be given the benefit of the doubt.” Over at the Ploughshares blog, Bryan Washington makes a case for inclusion in literary fiction.
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Reading Dickens in Lagos
George Packer at Lapham’s Quarterly writes of meeting a young Burmese reader of Charles Dickens: “‘All of those characters are me,’ [he] explained. ‘Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can…I am more equipped to understand Dickens than modern novels. I don’t know what is air conditioning, what is subway, what is fingerprint exam.’” (via Book Bench)
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