Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School Review

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Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School ReviewI found Small Victories to be a text of incredible value for the even-handed way that it lays out the profound problems facing the New York City Public School system-- from the exhaustingly ponderous beaurocracy and latent racism of the Board of Education to the extreme poverty and violence that surrounds the students all of the time. Freedman cuts back and forth between sections of personal narrative and the political and social history of the Lower East Side so that you really gain an understanding of the way that many of these problem has been created and maintained by the education system over such a long period of time that overcoming them may be quite difficult. The story of Jessica Siegal, the teacher profiled in the book, is one of amazing courage and dedication that sinks into a depressing story of insurmountable obstacles such as uninterested politicians, bitter, lazy educators, and rampant poverty. The small victories that she achieves are incredible and important but are so far from remedying the very real problems of the school system, which short changes so many thousands of students in so many ways, that it is hard not to be left with a sinking feeling that the large failures of the system that surrounds Siegal just might swallow up the pride and drive off the teachers like her who perservere. Though this may be incredibly depressing it is a story that needs to be told and I applaud Freedman for tackling such a difficult topic with such a keen eye and unrelenting dedication to the truth.Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School Overview

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Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours Review

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Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours ReviewOne of the legacies of W W II was acceleration of the disintegration of colonialism in Africa and Asia. Colonialism, of course, did not end overnight, and it took longer to collapse in some countries than in others. The book AIRLIFT TO AMERICA looks, generally, at the end of colonialism in eastern Africa and, specifically, at an interesting and little known "crusade" or initiative whose main purpose was to prepare a country emerging from British rule to independence by providing higher education for its future leaders. The country was Kenya.
The crusade referred to in the previous paragraph was the so-called African "Airlift" to the USA. Beginning in 1959 and continuing for the next several years, and supported by people from both Africa (Tom Mboya) and the US (Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, Bill Scheinman), approximately eight hundred east African students flew to the US to continue their education at a wide variety of colleges and universities all over the country, from community colleges to Ivy League schools.
Most of these students earned undergraduate and/or graduate degrees and returned to their African homes to take up positions in government, education, agriculture, and business, as their country prepared and attained self-rule (granted to Kenya in 1963). Some chose to stay in the US.
The airlift venture inevitably became connected to and involved in both the international cold war (the Soviets were also recruiting African students to come to schools in Moscow) and domestic US politics (the presidential election of 1960). These connections are discussed by the author in some detail. He also supplies profiles of numerous airliftees, i.e. the individual students, and their experiences.
One of these students happened to be named Barrack Hussein Obama, who left his native Kenya (and wife there) to study at the University of Hawaii (Hawaii's climate, he'd apparently heard, might be more to his liking than Maryland's or northern California's) and later earn a master's degree in Economics at Harvard and work toward a doctorate in that subject. As with most of the airliftees, Obama returned to his country where he worked in business and government. But while in Hawaii, he was married for a short period of time to a university student by the name of Ann Dunham, and this union produced a future president of the US.
Although Barrack Obama Sr. and John F. Kennedy are featured in the book's subtitle, there really is not much on either of them here. Readers would probably like to have seen a bit more. I'd also like to have read more specifics on the discrimination the students had to put up with in the US because of the color of their skin. Too, the book seems somewhat hastily put together in that there are a lot of gaps and "jumping arounds". (Perhaps a historian might take up this topic?) Still, in spite of minor imperfections, the book opened up a topic that I knew nothing about, for which I thank Tom Shachtman. And, in the end, how can one not fail to be moved or inspired by a cause as noble as this, in most repects at least, appears to have been.
Recommended.
Tim Koerner December 2009Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours Overview

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