Reviews from Bookshelf non-fiction

This book has been one of the most influential to my teaching, and it helped me to integrate my personal reading and writing life and my work in the classroom. Because of Bomer's book, I began each year by exchanging letters with my students about our experiences reading and writing. These were an amazing foundation for our work together. He also offers many manageable strategies for managing writing workshops and other classroom experiences targeted to turn students into readers and writers for life.

This is a great title for improving your writing at the sentence level and upping your craft.

This book helps us see that there are multiple ways of communicating and experiencing love when interacting with others. It opened my eyes to the fact that I was showing love the way I wanted it to be shown to me rather than the way the other person would most fully experience that love. While you could get the concept of this book from a summary, it's worth taking the time to zip through this quick read to actually absorb the implications of the differences in our preferred love languages. So go on, love lots. But love with purpose, too: to make the people you care about feel how much you love them.

I encountered the ideas now collected in this book as a Teach For America corps member in 2004. These concepts shaped--and continue to shape--my teaching practice. If I could pick one book to give to a new teacher eager to effect change in the classroom, this would be it. It helped me to set aside excuses and work strategically every day to solve problems creating barriers to my students' learning.

Caution: the philosophy proposed here may change the way you think about teaching forever.

Why do I like cake? David Kessler's·The End of Overeating:·Taking Control of the American Appetite has satisfying answers on why some foods never satisfy, driving us to overeat. He·explores·how eating has become an area of our lives where we don't really understand what we're doing or why. Nor, oftentimes, do we understand why certain foods exercise the pull they do over us.

What I liked best about this book was how it changed the way I view an encounter with tempting foods.·No, I am not now Ms. Self-Control, but I do find that it's easier to resist commercial items. I can understand that they've been engineered, not to satisfy my craving, but to encourage it. I really don't like the idea of being manipulated in this way.

Another thing I appreciated was the readability and moments of personal reflection that Kessler offers. Unlike many "dieting" books (and that's not what this is), Kessler's book doesn't feel preachy. We get the sense that he, too, is on the same journey.

I loved this book. I read it when Liam was about four months old, and there were many moments I could relate to. Best thing about the book: Lamott says the things that I'm ashamed to. This book made me laugh and cry.

This free e-book demystifies query-writing. Lukeman is very much in the tough love camp, but if you follow his advice, your query letter will be the better for it.

This book gave me many strategies for basing my writing in the development of rich characters. A go-to resource for the first draft of a novel.

So you've written, rewritten, and rewritten. You've workshopped your manuscript at a conference. You've joined a writer's group and gotten feedback. You've let your manuscript cool off and rewritten it again. Now you think you're ready to sell it. This book is a crash course on getting an agent and more. Don't start querying until you've read i

I listened to this on audiobook well over a year ago, and many of Medina's points are still present with me. You can get the skinny on the rules here, but you'll thank yourself if you go ahead and read (or listen to) the whole book. It's consummately readable and memorable, and Medina practices what he preaches when it comes to making the concepts "stick." I just requested Brain Rules for Baby, so we'll see if Medina offers something new when he weighs in on parenting questions.

I read this while researching juvenile hall and gang activity, and I loved it. Salzman's portraits of the teens he works with are beautiful, and you feel how his relationship with them developed over time. My favorite part was when he gives a Vietnamese inmate a Vietnamese-English dictionary (something the boy didn't even know existed). He exploded into writing after many years of struggling to express himself.

Jane Tompkins, a high-profile English professor at Duke with a reputation for pushing the envelope in teaching methods, bares her soul and reveals the scars--many self-inflicted--incurred during her academic career (as student and professor). Hers is basically the story of a success/performance-driven student who achieves at each step of the academic process only to realize, 10 years into tenure, that in her striving in a realm where proving one's
authority is part of almost every exercise, she'd lost her ability to be herself and to let others do the same. So it's a story of her development in school, her professional striving, but more importantly of her movement in teaching away from "making sure students knew what I knew and what I thought" to recognizing that part of education must be learning "how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun," that this must be as much the "material" as any body of literature or theory.

What I found most moving about this book was how eloquently she describes the compulsion to always be _doing_ something that is both a source of success and a barrier to an even deeper need: to know how to do nothing. (And still like oneself.) Her experiences in the classroom--and within herself outside of the classroom--resonated with me especially as a teacher, but this often painful account of her journey toward self-acceptance and its ramification on her teaching is beautifully written and would be of interest to others, too, I suspect.

Forget Strunk and White. This is the absolute best grammar guide for elegant, readable prose. It's consummately readable itself since John Trimble practices what he preaches.