Eliezer Wiesel was a deeply observant 13-year-old Jewish boy when Moishe the Beadle came to his town with descriptions of the horrors of the war, where Jewish men, women, and children were buried in graves they had themselves dug. No one in Eliezer’s town of Sighet in Hungary believed this was happening. It only a

Read Post

I have been wanting to read a general overview of world history, so without any other ideas I picked up Cracking the AP World History Exam 2012, a general review book for high school students produced by The Princeton Review. I read about 200 pages of world history summaries, timelines, and key terms. As was

Read Post

The Art of Changing the Brain by James E. Zull (2002, Stylus Publishing) is subtitled “Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of the Brain” and I picked it up because of my new role as teacher to my homeschool aged son. As his primary teacher, I want insight and assistance in understanding

Read Post

Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter (Candlewick, May 2012) is a collection of interviews conducted by Leonard S. Marcus with 21 different children’s illustrators over the past two decades. From Quentin Blake to Eric Carle, Helen Oxenbury, Peter Sis, William Steig, Mo Willems and many more, Mr Marcus covers a variety of backgrounds,

Read Post

Although I’m a beginner to homeschooling ideas and styles, I think it’s fair to say that A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levinson provides a great overview to the Charlotte Mason style of education, albeit from one home educator’s perspective. The author’s personal homeschooling style was certainly not for me, and the author’s opinions throughout

Read Post

Like historian Matthew Bowman, I am an active participant in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as the Mormon Church. Bowman’s recent overview of the history and people of the Church, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (published January 2012 by Random House), provides a different perspective

Read Post