A concise and very accessible guide to helping adults improve their reading.
A handbook outlining approaches to adult education.
Emeritus Professor of Clarion University of Pennsylvania Murphy opens her brief book of tactics for working with adult learners by briefly mentioning some of the stark statistics about literacy in the United States: 54% of adults have literacy below the sixth gradelevel, and one 2013 study revealed that 66% of fourth grade students couldn’t read proficiently. A full 21% of American adults are illiterate, and, as the author points out, these adults experience social pressures preliterate schoolchildren don’t: “Often,” she writes, “adults experience shame and inadequacy at not having learned to read earlier and lose self-confidence.” In short chapters filled with illustrated exercises focused on sparking adult learners’ motivation (“a key component for reading” for older students), Murphy advocates such approaches as journaling in timed bursts, working off newspaper prompts, and even doing Mad Libs to help with both comprehension and proficiency. Regarding writing, strategies like RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) are suggested to help adult learners understand their roles as writers. Other approaches are more basic, like instilling confidence by asking students to read the same passage out loud repeatedly to help them master the flow of the words. As evidenced by these and all of her other suggestions, Murphy has distilled a vast amount of experience into a handful of intensely useful pages. She switches out approaches (communal or solitary) and adds visual prompts with a carefully modulated variety that’s stimulating without being condescending. Educators at many different levels will find this collection of exercises and strategies invaluable for keeping their approaches efficient and varied enough to engage virtually any adult learner. The text’s references are extensive, and all explanations are clearly laid out.
A concise and very accessible guide to helping adults improve their reading.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798822937789
Page Count: 62
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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