 Red Room Writer Profile
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Daniel Wolff's Blog
November 9, 2009
- A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It's like the book continues to be written - in public - person by person. There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted ...
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September 29, 2009
- "We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools. Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments? It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over ...
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August 31, 2009
- CommentaryThe President's Laugh LineBy Daniel Wolff In President Barack Obama’s first major speech on education, in March of this year, he presented five “pillars of our education reform agenda.” Only one of them got a laugh.As well as better standards and assessments and more charter schools, he proposed merit pay for teachers. Plenty of controversies there, not so many punch ...
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July 30, 2009
- The Education of Rachel CarsonWestern Pennsylvania's natural glories enthralled Rachel Carson -- while the ravages of industry shocked her young mind. Beatrix Potter and the 'St. Nicholas League' helped provide refuge.Sunday, May 03, 2009By Daniel Wolff[A new book called "How Lincoln Learned to Read" is subtitled "Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them." The ...
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July 29, 2009
- Q & A With Daniel Wolff Posted by Leonard Gill on Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:43 PM The author is Daniel Wolff. He wrote You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, and he’s collaborated with Memphian Ernest Withers in Withers’ collections of photographs, Negro League Baseball and The Memphis Blues Again. And he’s currently producing a documentary on New Orleans, called Right To Return, ...
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July 24, 2009
- 1. While I have not yet read them, this book seems like a departure from the books you've written before; how did this idea occur to you, and how did you develop the idea into How Lincoln Learned to Read? It was a less an idea than feeling. You know that sensation when your kid - of, for that matter, when you - went off for the first day of kindergarten? Both the ...
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July 18, 2009
- Printers Row Literary Festival runs three or four blocks in downtown Chicago: tents for booksellers, microphones for readers, a milling crowd flipping through sci fi, poetry, radical lit, and old postcards. Kind of an extended outdoor library. With everything for sale. Nice to see so many folks out even in slightly chilly, damp ...
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July 14, 2009
- Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads, and try to see the source high in the mist. It’s wet on wet: drizzle and mist watering ferns, ...
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July 8, 2009
- My prologue to the readings in the Northwest is a weekend stay up on the Olympic Peninsula. A walk down the beach facing the Juan de Fuca Strait reveals sea otter, bald eagles, loons, seals, grebes. Drawn by this wilderness, the folks I meet are in the middle of a re-education. They’re convinced the car-driven, oil-dependent, energy-wasteful culture is suicidal, and ...
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July 7, 2009
- The drive across New Hampshire into Vermont is almost all through low woods of pine and white birch. These are the Green Mountains, and it seems like the wind and cold and thin soil must keep the growth down. Around a corner, there’s a rushing white river or a black pool of winter with a marshy, yellow fringe. The granite, blasted open for the highway, shows pink or ...
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July 6, 2009
- When you’re doing readings for a book about learning and education, it tends to color how you see what’s around you. Up in Hanover, New Hampshire – on the bottom floor of a Dartmouth College library – the walls sing with the murals of Jose Clemente Orozco’s “An Epic of American Civilization.” They’re biting, less structured and less ...
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June 24, 2009
- To drive up through New England – past the Merrimac River, past Lawrence and Lowell – is to think about Thoreau and all the factory girls whose names were once known to friends and family and are now considered nameless. This isn’t the green New England of summer or the blazing of fall. It’s early spring, and there’s only the first reddish blush on the tips of the maples. ...
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