October 2017

Biloxi Junior High will again teach ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ in class, after national outcry

Biloxi has sent a letter home to students. It plans to restore “To Kill A Mockingbird” to the eighth-grade classroom and begin teaching it again in class, starting Monday.

Students do, however, have to ask to participate, by returning a permission slip signed by a parent to their school and their English Language Arts teacher by Friday.

From Biloxi Junior High will again teach ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ in class, after national outcry | The Sun Herald

On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places

It’s funny to think I just stumbled on this book by chance. I must have been escaping from something much more heavy—I love the turgid pace of an academic book, if it’s a topic I really care about, about once a year. I think I probably escaped to Jean Stafford from something like that, and I didn’t expect much of her. I thought, Oh, this is just good old-fashioned fiction, I’ll try that for a change. So often you’re just reacting to the last book you read, and you want something that’s a little bit of an antidote to that. I’ve found that if I live a more programmatic life where I’m reading the books that I’m supposed to read—if I’m accomplishing all my little chores of reading what everybody else is reading—I stop having time to read in a way that’s rich and multiple.

From Happy Accidents

From Hamilton To Grant: Ron Chernow Paints A ‘Farsighted’ President in New Biography

From Hamilton To Grant: Ron Chernow Paints A ‘Farsighted’ President in New Biography

Chernow, author of Hamilton, has a new book, just out this week, which also aims to revise our understanding of a figure he sees as overlooked and misunderstood: The 18th president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In it, Chernow aims to rehabilitate the way Americans think about the man who not only led the Union Army into victory during the Civil War but also led the country during the tumultuous era that followed.

Full piece at NPR