Boston schoolkids were told to read Obama's "Dreams of My Father" for the summer and some folks
have not been happy:
President Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” is creating a nightmare for 1,099 Hingham High students cramming to wrap up their “required” summer read - a book, it turns out, they didn’t have to read in the first place.
With school opening Tuesday, the Herald has learned teens whose offended parents complained were allowed by Principal Paula Girouard McCann and Helaine Silva, head of the Hingham Public Schools English Department, to pick any other memoir - an option they never publicized.
“I had no idea,” sophomore Graham King, 15, who was only on page 120 of the 460-page autobiography yesterday, told the Herald with an astonished look. “My parents would like me to be done with it.”
Senior Jes Maloney, 17, just cracked Obama’s book last week.
“My mom thought it was kind of weird,” Maloney said of the tome all of Hingham was encouraged to curl up with as its “community read” for summer.
Lynne Powell-Pinto, chairwoman of the Hingham Republican Town Committee, has a son entering 11th grade.
Powell-Pinto said she brought the book home during the first week of summer vacation even though she thought it “a poor choice.”
Obama, she noted, “is a current political figure. He’s an important historical figure, no quibbles about that. But the goal of the community read is to bring people together. I just think they could have made a less divisive choice.”
Jules Crittendon has some suggestions for future reading lists:
“Well, if that’s what they want to teach the kids, Dick Cheney has a book coming out in spring 2011. He’s an important historical figure, too. Bush’s memoir is due out around the same time. These are books about people who, unlike Obama’s father, actually shouldered their responsibilities, and unlike Obama, governed. And didn’t mind taking a little heat for it. They struggled against what seemed like overwhelming odds to a lot of surrender enthusiasts, and fortunately for us, succeeded.”
You gotta be careful. If they read Cheney or Bush they might actually learn something from people who didn't write their memoirs until they actually did something.
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2 comments:
Ugh, perish the thought of reading the memoirs of any of that lot. How horrid.
Obamas dad, Darth Cheney, GWB, none of them have anything meaningful to say about the loss of Liberty in this country. If kids want to read something meaningful, give the some Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson to read.
Jack Cashill believes that "Dreams of My Father" was actually written by hardly-know-the-guy Bill Ayers.
He makes a very interesting comparison of Dreams with Ayers's book "Fugitive Days."
Cashill's claim can be read in detail here
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html
I got a used copy of Fugitive Days recently so I could make a comparison of my own. Have planned to borrow a library copy of Dreams -- no way, I'm giving Obama a dime. Anyway, I've postponed my plan for a while.
The library's copies of "Dream" were all checked out (I live in Dem land), and I got "Audacity of Hope" instead just to get a flavor of "Obama's" writing (Cashill uses "Audacity" as further evidence that "Dreams" was written by a different author.)
Well, I got so utterly disgusted reading parts of the Audacity of Hope, which is page after page of the most slithery charlatanism -- that I had to quit. Was just more phoney balogny than I was prepared to read.
I plan to compare Dreams and Fugitive Days once I recover my composure. And to make it less loathsome, I'm actually going to begin by diagramming sentences and looking at linguistic structure, ignoring as much as possible (at least at the beginning) the two books's contents.
As part of testing Cashill's thesis, I also want to compare the writing style of both books with a variety of other memoirs.
Anyway, literary types might want to visit Cashill's post. If true, it means that Ayers's role is much bigger than ever suspected.
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