-
SAT reading scores drop to lowest point in decades
By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: September 15
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
“Once you hit a certain mark, you want to maintain that,” said Frieda Lacey, deputy superintendent for Montgomery schools. “Don’t think the decline didn’t bother us. It really did.”
Nationally, the reading score for the Class of 2011, including public- and private-school students, was 497, down three points from the previous year and 33 points from 1972, the earliest year for which comparisons are possible. The average math score was 514, down one point from last year but up five from 1972.
... -
What Do Egypt’s Writers Do Now?
The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghali’s “Beer in the Snooker Club,” a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like “The Catcher in the Rye” in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghali’s characters — young, precocious, cosmopolitan — are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régime’s sordid pretensions and the new regime’s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; “We have the worst of both systems,” one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editor’s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.
Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered. While the state remained the primary patron of Egyptian literature, absorbing and co-opting anyone it possibly could, many authors escaped prickly Egyptian censors by publishing their books in more lenient Lebanon. Meanwhile, plush literary foundations and glittering prizes popped up in the much wealthier gulf countries. Still, there were pockets of activity. In the late 1990s, a former journalist named Mohamed Hashem founded Merit, a publisher credited with nurturing a new Egyptian avant-garde. Merit published Alaa al-Aswany, the dentist turned literary star whose “Yacoubian Building” captured the jaded grandeur of downtown Cairo. It also put out Ahmed Alaidy, whose stories of youthful mall culture used a vernacular Arabic — complete with text messages — that challenged the high orthodoxy of classical Arabic, and Khaled al-Berry, who skillfully narrated his experiences as a teenage jihadist in “Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise.”
... -
The Dinner Guest Who Never Left
Ali Smith loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word “but” such a star turn that you wonder why you’d ever taken it for granted.
Smith’s love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith’s characters says, “The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”) Smith’s wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations — characters, places, ideas.
Smith’s new novel, “There but for the,” is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, “There,” “But,” “For” and “The,” though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which “There” Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers’ minds to echo with the phrase “Grace of God Go I” — and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith’s sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you’re after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she’s someone to relish.
... -
Book Recommendations for September 2011
...
Azar Nafisi’s Memoirs. – A book I’m looking forward to reading. Read more of this book review in the Washington Post. Also read an excerpt from Chapter 1.
Nafisi’s sensory descriptions of Tehran life — the “enticing cacophony” of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be “so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices” — are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning Things I’ve Been Silent About is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi’s pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.
Book: The Forever War (Iraq)
listen to this book review. On this page you will also find an interview with the author and you can read an excerpt.
To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of “war correspondence,” is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins’ reporting is as rigorous in this book’s informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.
THE FLORENTINE
I read Machiavelli’s The Prince in graduate school and found it quite fascinating. Here’s a great article written by Claudia Roth Pierpont from today’s New Yorker on the man behind one of the most famous books ever written.
The Prince,” Machiavelli’s how-to guide for sovereigns, turned out to be “a scandal that Western political thought and practice has been gazing at in horror and in fascination since its first publication,” to quote from Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction to Peter Constantine’s new translation. Circulated in manuscript for years, the book was not published until 1532—nearly five years after Machiavelli’s death—and received its first significant critique within the decade, from an English cardinal who pronounced the author “an enemy of the human race.”
-
Must Read 2 Oct 2011
What’s Next for the Arab Spring? Author Marwan Muasher
Moammar Qaddafi’s exit from Libya is a reminder that the Arab awakening will not just fizzle out, despite what some observers are saying. Recently, commentators pointed to the public cheers heard in Egypt as the army pushed protesters out of Tahrir Square as a signal that the uprisings were petering out and the hope of the Arab Spring would soon be lost. The doomsayers were wrong.
Indeed, the uprisings are entering a difficult but inevitable phase where the two sides — the protesters and the leaders — are at a loss on how to proceed. Read More
The Ghosts of Israel’s Past Author John Barry
“There were two hunters,” Yitzhak Rabin began. It was 1975, and Rabin was prime minister of Israel. He was trying to explain to a visiting reporter Israel’s policy toward “the Palestinian question.” And, as usual, he was telling a story to make his point. “The hunters were stalking deer in thick brush. Suddenly, a deer appeared in front of them. They fired and the deer dropped. They took the deer by its antlers and began to drag it back toward their car. But the deer’s antlers caught in the brush. Finally one of the hunters suggested: ‘If we drag it the other way, the antlers won’t catch like that.’ So they took the hind legs of the animal and began to drag it the other way. After a while, the first hunter said: ‘There, didn’t I say it would be easier this way?’ ‘Yes,’ the other replied, ‘but aren’t we getting a long way from the car?’ ” Read More
My Unfinished 9/11 Business – Author BILL KELLER
Ten years after the attacks, we memorialize the loss and we mark the heroism, but there is no organized remembrance of the other feelings that day aroused: the bewilderment, the vulnerability, the impotence. It may be difficult to recall with our attention now turned inward upon a faltering economy, but the suddenly apparent menace of the world awakened a bellicose surge of mission and made hawks of many — including me — who had a lifelong wariness of the warrior reflex. Read More
If Obama Is a One-Term President – Author JULIAN E. ZELIZER
“I’D rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.
With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history. Read More
Love and War – Author JANINE DI GIOVANNI
MOGADISHU, winter, 2002. The sun was beginning to drop as I climbed the roof of my guesthouse and began the finicky task of setting up my satellite telephone. From the roof, I could hear the call to prayer from a nearby muezzin. It was the time of evening between twilight and night — what the French call “entre le chien et le loup.” I took out my flashlight and began to phone the other world. Read More
... -
Prose Lays Nightmare of ‘Forever War’
To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of “war correspondence,” is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins’ reporting is as rigorous in this book’s informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.
The Forever War, though, deserves to be considered alongside long-praised and similarly structured modern literary classics such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street — books that achieved their raw force and nightmarish beauty by mixing elements of fiction and creative nonfiction. That The Forever War is, front to back, a true story, is a testament to Filkins’ literary talent and extraordinary accomplishment.
Don’t look here for an explanation of “How the war was lost” or even of “How the war reporter’s innocence was lost.” Filkins, as he notes in his epilogue, writes from the impossibly limiting perspective of one who’s Been There. For those who haven’t Been There, then, The Forever War‘s narrator can sometimes come across as inhumanly cold and unlikable. That’s because Filkins is incapable of placing himself into a fake, pre-war personality in order to persuade his readers that he’s not the Iceman but is, in fact, as outraged with things as they are.
The Forever War – By Dexter Filkins
...
Hardcover, 384 pages Alfred A. Knopf List Price: $25 -
Students Explore America In ‘Chicago’
Jerome Scholomoff – Author, dentist and former Egyptian presidential candidate Alaa Al Aswany.
Former Egyptian presidential candidate Alaa Al Aswany is a journalist and the Arab world’s best-selling fiction writer. He makes his living as a dentist in Cairo, which affords him an intimate look at the everyday lives of Egyptians — who often inspire his works.
His latest book, Chicago: A Novel, follows several recent Egyptian emigres as they study at the University of Illinois and their professors, who emigrated to the U.S. decades earlier. Al Aswany says he drew from his own experiences as a student at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. And he tells Weekend Edition host Liane Hansen that the experience had a big impact. “I learned something very important in my life in America … what I call the know-how of success. How do you become a successful person?” Al Aswany says he took this knowledge back to Egypt and applied it to his writing.
Many do not know that chicago is not an English word but rather Algonquian, one of several languages that Native Americans spoke. In that language chicago meant “strong smell.” The reason for that designation was that the place occupied by the city today was originally vast fields where the Native Americans grew onions, the strong smell of which gave the place its name. Read More
... -
Welcome to the Counter-Jihad
Robin Wright contends that the Arab world’s young people are at the vanguard of a sweeping and seductive cultural revolution.
... -
The Waning Appeal of Radical Sheik
A decade after 9/11, a sociologist says the mystery isn’t why so many Muslims turn to terrorism, but why so few.
...