Inspired By the Discussion Over at CCBC, I’ve Come to a Realization about NF Reviews  The discussion over at the CCBC listserv was supposed to be about professional reviews — which ones do people read, which are  useful, how, why, how do reviewers review, etc. Before that thread ever began the discussion lurched to one [...]

T.S. Eliot Frames This Discussion Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (from The Rock, quoted  in Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are…Adventures in Probability  tinyurl.com/yg5j6s9) My last post related to exactly what Eliot [...]

= Text I’m reading a fascinating book professor Mary Carruthers called The Book of Memory tinyurl.com/yk8d2au This is a study of what memory meant in the middle ages, and the techniques people used  to store, retrieve, and combine information they held in their brains. The most famous example of this is the "memory palace of Matteo Ricci" [...]

Some Books On My Shelf Did you all catch the article in the Times about new views of the Battle of Agincourt? tinyurl.com/ykg235l If you, or your school, teaches Henry V part one this is a great article to circ, because the whole "Band of Brothers" image of the vastly outnumbered plucky English against the arrogant, [...]

The HF Seminar Clarified Something For Me — And I Hope For You — About K-12 Nonfiction As we discussed historical fiction, I suddenly came to understand the fundamental problem with nonfiction, especially for upper middle grade and high school aged readers. Lets divide up our audience and look at what each segment wants out [...]

Both I selected the passages from March because I see in them examples of what I treasure as well as what I dislike in HF. Oddly enough the same book, even the same paragraph epitomized both ends of the HF spectrum — to my eyes. Like Mary, I found that whole first excerpt up through the [...]