Some time ago, the publishers of John A. Sarkett’s book Extraordinary Comebacks, asked me if I would like an advance copy of the book. I haven’t had a chance to read it, embroiled as I was in the end-of-the-year chaos. The book contains 201 vignettes — “stories of courage, triumph, and success” — from a variety of fields. Whatever your background, at least one of these stories will speak to you and encourage you to keep going.

The vignettes are arranged according to background — for example, Walt Whitman’s story is included in the Literature section. This construction makes it easy to focus on particular areas of interest. The book can be read cover-to-cover, but the vignettes are also short, requiring perhaps five minutes of your time each, which makes the book easy to pick up during a few free moments, but just as easily put down for later; the reader can skip around according to interest.

I would think that this book might be a good addition to the teacher’s classroom library. Our students struggle with difficulties, and I believe the vignettes might inspire our students to keep going.

[tags]John A. Sarkett, Extraordinary Comebacks, book review[/tags]

I am cross-posting a review I wrote of Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife here because I think other English teacher geeks out there might enjoy this book.

From one brief mention of Ahab’s wife in Moby-Dick, in the manner that God fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, Sena Jeter Naslund has fashioned Ahab’s Wife:

[W]hen I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!… I see my wife and child in thine eye (Moby-Dick, Chapter 132 “The Symphony”).

And what sort of a woman would be a match for Captain Ahab?  Naslund’s Una Spenser is Ahab’s feminine counterpart — where Captain Ahab is consumed by vengeance, Una learns forgiveness for all; Ahab is destroyed by his hate for the white whale, while Una survives and prospers because of her love.  This, then, is a woman to marry Ahab.

You do not need to read Melville’s Moby-Dick in order to appreciate Ahab’s Wife, but I would strongly recommend that you do so, for your appreciation will be much deeper.  Una begins her story in medias res, as memorably as Melville begins Moby-Dick: “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.”  Una is pregnant and decides to travel to Kentucky to have her child.  She recounts the two most horrible moments of her life, then takes us into her past when she was twelve and first moved to the Lighthouse home she shared with her Aunt Agatha, Uncle Torchy, and cousin Frannie.

At the age of sixteen, Una runs away to sea as a “cabin boy,” and encounters horrors as her ship is destroyed by a whale and she is forced to survive on an open boat in the water.  She endures a disastrous marriage and is forced to use her sewing needle to support herself.  She feels immediate attraction to the elemental Ahab, and the two are happily married until Ahab encounters Moby-Dick in the Sea of Japan.

Una crosses paths with many luminaries of her age: astronomer Maria Mitchell, writer and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Naslund’s many literary allusions, from The Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to The Faerie Queene, and many more will delight book lovers.

Naslund has a gift for language, and she breathes life into Una — I wished as I read that I could have really known her! — and makes her setting so real, I felt I was there.  I have read some enjoyable books, but this might be one of only a handful that transcend other literary fiction to such a degree that I feel sure it will have a place in the canon of Literature with a capital L one day.  And Una Spenser is a remarkable character and proper soulmate for Ahab.

Read other reviews:

• Feminista! Vol. 3, No. 8: Ahab’s Wife
  
• CNN.com: “Author says ‘Ahab’s Wife’ is an ‘epic story of an American woman'”

[tags]Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, Una Spenser, Captain Ahab[/tags]

The Education Wonk has published the Carnival of Education #106. Thanks to EdWonk for including me. Go check it out!

[tags]Carnival of Education[/tags]

This afternoon, I finished reading Frank McCourt’s third memoir Teacher Man. When asked by new friends why he waited until he was 66 before publishing Angela’s Ashes, he explains,

I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools… When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.

I couldn’t have said it better. Teaching is exhausting, physically and psychologically.

I wasn’t able to finish Angela’s Ashes. At the point when I realized the twins would die, I had to put the book down: it was too depressing. I haven’t read ‘Tis, either. I picked up this book thinking it would be right up my alley, and I walked away feeling that I was right.

It was interesting to see McCourt second-guess himself, to feel he wasn’t a good teacher at times. It was a joy to celebrate with him after a particularly good lesson. I have had moments in my teaching life in which I, too, felt like an utter failure, punctuated by moments when I know I’ve really hit it — I have really taught a great lesson. It’s an amazing feeling. I feel like I could fly afterward, and it is that feeling that McCourt so eloquently captures in his book.

I can’t recall where I read this now, but one comment from a reviewer stands out to me after reading this book. “McCourt hates his students.” I have to wonder if that reviewer read the same book I did. It was clear to me that McCourt loved teaching, especially after he began teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School. That he cared deeply about his students is evident on each page. Did he complain about some of them? Sure. Show me a teacher who has never done that — you can’t. That teacher never existed. And each teacher is sure the kids in his/her generation were more respectful, more engaged, more… whatever. McCourt tells it like it is — in his thirty years of teaching, the kids didn’t change. Indeed, his late 1950’s students were just like students I’ve had. However, I also noted that even if he complained gently, he often wrote in the next few pages of reaching a new understanding or peace with the student he was having trouble with. I did not sense any resentment in the end. I think he was very happy with his career in the end, despite wondering at times if he had done the right thing in becoming a teacher.

I came away from the book wishing I had been a student in his class. His classes sounded so interesting, so different. He actually reminded me so much of a colleague at my current school, a fellow English teacher, that I bought a copy of Teacher Man and had it sent to my colleague at school. I hope he enjoys it as much as I did.

My article, “Toward “Moral Perfection”: Integrating Judiac Concepts and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” is now available to subscribers of English Journal online.  If you are not a subscriber, you may purchase the article here.  If you subscribe to the print edition, you should be receiving your copy in the next week or so.

I think moments like this are why we teach.  Make sure you let those who inspired you in your life — teachers, parents, grandparents, whoever they are — actually know how they impacted you.  There is no greater gift that you can give a teacher.  Having been the recipient of this only on a small scale, I can tell it must be an incredible feeling, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to experience it one day.