A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to." 

I feel like people have a lot of opinions about Dave Eggers for being, well. Dave Eggers. Personally, I have no idea what all the fuss is about. He supports good authors, he wrote a movie with his wife that I like (although the world seems to disagree with me on “Away We Go”…), and his name is being bandied about as one of the most influential contemporary authors of our day.

Since I sort of study contemporary authors (emphasis on ‘sort of’), it has looked pretty bad that I haven’t read him at all until a month ago. Happily, I borrowed his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, from a coworker, and now the masses can stop mocking me behind my back.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir, kind of. It’s Eggers’ real story as told by him, and is mostly based on fact and experience. The story itself is (as the title indicates) a heartbreaking one. When Eggers is twenty-one, his parents die within a few months of each other. He and his siblings are left trying to reconstruct their lives in the wake of this loss, and Dave is given the burden of taking care of their youngest brother, Toph. By itself, this story is an interesting, sad one that shouldn’t be dismissed as fictional trite nonsense. Because, well. It’s real life.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

“Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.”

People have been telling me to read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett for about eight years now. And I, in response to their well-meaning advice, have been nodding pleasantly, smiling, and then continuing on about my business reading my epic Dragon Lance novels. (Because I have always been one of the cool kids.) 

Back when I was a young and tender thing without the wisdom and insight I have today, I used to hate reading. Well. That’s not true. I just wasn’t any good at it. I’m certainly not dyslexic, but anyone who has heard me attempt to read aloud knows that the mechanics of my reading abilities are somewhat compromised. It makes spelling fun!

Trials and Tribulations of Public Education - My Mostly Informed Opinions

My job is working with public school teachers here in New York City. I'm managing 95 educators as they attempt (with varied success) to implement service-learning lessons and service projects into their classrooms. This, alas, is more challenging to pull off than it may sound like. Happily, I don't want to talk about my job. Instead, I want to talk about public education. Because despite everything, I really do think that public education can work. Sorry, let me rephrase that. I think that we have an obligation to make certain that public education works.