The Week in Rap 1/28/11

The Week in Rap - Jan 28 from Flocabulary on Vimeo.

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

Here's a great presentation on search tips from Mark Moran and Shannon Firth that I came across on a Richard Byrne's Free Technology 4 Teachers blog post.
Teaching the Ten Steps to Better Web Research

View more presentations from SweetSearch.

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

During our snow day, I enjoyed reading Jordan's book Mudbound set in rural Mississippi right after WWII.  Although hard to read at times with the racist lynch mob scenes, I found it really compelling.


Here's a summary:

Publishers Weekly Review

Jordan's beautiful debut (winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for literature of social responsibility) carries echoes of As I Lay Dying, complete with shifts in narrative voice, a body needing burial, flood and more. In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis schoolteacher, becomes a reluctant farmer's wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing, readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all, life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans, Henry's brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons' son, Ronsel, arrive, both battling nightmares from horrors they've seen, and both unable to bow to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe. Jordan convincingly inhabits each of her narrators, though some descriptive passages can be overly florid, and the denouement is a bit maudlin. But these are minor blemishes on a superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

The Week in Rap 1/21/11

The Week in Rap - Jan 21 from Flocabulary on Vimeo.

The Week in Rap 1/14/11

Freedom by Johnathan Franzen

Here's one that has been on my reading list since it first came out.  It must be incredible to make the cover of Time Magazine this fall. Can't wait to start reading!

Here's the summary:

Patty, a Westchester County high-school basketball star, should have been a golden girl. Instead, her ambitious parents betray her, doing her grievous psychic harm. Hardworking Minnesotan Walter wants to be Patty’s hero, and she tries to be a stellar wife and a supermom to Joey and Jessica, their alarmingly self-possessed children, but all goes poisonously wrong. Patty longs for Richard, Walter’s savagely sexy musician friend. Walter’s environmental convictions turn perverse once he gets involved in a diabolical scheme that ties protection of the imperiled cerulean warbler to mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia. Richard is traumatized by both obscurity and fame. Joey runs amok in his erotic attachment to the intense girl-next-door and in a corrupt entrepreneurial venture connected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The intricacies of sexual desire, marriage, and ethnic and family inheritance as well as competition and envy, beauty and greed, nature and art versus profit and status, truth and lies—all are perceptively, generously, and boldly dramatized in Franzen’s first novel since the National Book Award–winning The Corrections (2001). Passionately imagined, psychologically exacting, and shrewdly satirical, Franzen’s spiraling epic exposes the toxic ironies embedded in American middle-class life and reveals just how destructive our muddled notions of entitlement and freedom are and how obliviously we squander life and love.

Booklist starred (July 2010 (Vol. 106, No. 21))

Happy New Year!

The First Week in Rap of 2011! from Week in Rap on Vimeo.