Horace Mann - Spring 2017 - 36

Bookshelf

book continues to provide a fascinating
character study, even after the election. It is
"useful, vigorously reported" and "... deftly
charts [Trump's] single-minded building of his
gaudy brand and his often masterful manipulation of the media," wrote The New York Times.
From Green to Mean, The GOP's
Downward Environmental Spiral
By Edward Flattau '54
Way Things Are Publications, March 8, 2016
In his fifth book, the
nation's longest running
national environmental
columnist and
Washingtonian Award
recipient, Edward
Flattau '54, shines the
spotlight on the GOP's
desertion from its
environmental origins.
Flatteau reveals a decades-long regression
away from sensible conservative environmentalism to a new platform as he charts this path
and unveils the party's paradoxes. While
relentless in his critical exploration of the
GOP's environmental journey Flattau presents
solutions that can turn the party around and
produce a new culture of cooperation that
need not betray conservative ideals. Wrote one
reviewer: "This book should be a 'must read'
for every member of Congress. It is an
outstanding, well written history of how the
Republicans went from supporting environmental issues to rejecting anything to do with
it (the environment), and why. The author
makes a challenging topic easy to understand."
New Moon, A Coming-of-Age Tale
By Richard Grossinger '62
North Atlantic Books, September 13, 2016
In 1960 Richard
Grossinger, Ph.D. '62,
then a junior at Horace
Mann School, began the
book that was to
become New Moon for
an assignment in a
creative-writing class.
Though he worked on
the manuscript in
college at Amherst, Dr. Grossinger put it aside
for 22 years as he pursued a different literary
and professional direction, publishing volumes
of experimental prose and works of nonfiction
on holistic medicine, cosmology, and embryology, largely through North Atlantic Books, the
publishing company he founded with his wife

Horace Mann Magazine Spring 2017

Lindy Hough. Grossinger published his memoir
as New Moon in 1996. However, after its
publication, Dr. Grossinger wrote that he
"recognized that while this version of New
Moon preserved the vision, landscape, and
period of the original, he hadn't fully excavated
the book that was there all along." The author
returned to the book once again, and, in
September 2016, published New Moon: A
Coming-of-Age Tale, capturing the enchantments and initiations of childhood, adolescence, and early adult life. Grossinger
describes this version as "a very different
book" from the New Moon of 10 years earlier, a
book "changed by 1,500 hours of work during
which I shortened the time frame, transferring
the last 100 pages to my other memoir books,
while sharpening the detail and tightening the
meter in the rest."
Hailed by Publishers Weekly as an "affecting, gracefully written memoir," the book follows Grossinger's path through grade school,
high school, and college, but with another
layer of depth than before. It recalls Freudian
psychoanalysis, and fascinatingly, the iconic
Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskills and the hotel's founding family, of which the author was
a member, changing his surname from Tower,
and working in the hotel kitchen. The book's
spin on '50s rock 'n' roll serves as a soundtrack
for teen romance before the narrative moves
on to spiritual and political initiation. A lifetime
in the making, George Plimpton described
New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale as "illumniating, tender, moving, evocative." Grossinger
provided friends and HM readers a link to an
Afterword, some of which appears in the book:
http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2015/11/
new-moon-afterword/.
The Math Myth, and Other STEM Delusions
By Andrew Hacker '47
The New Press, March 1, 2016
In 2012 Prof. Andrew
Hacker '47 made waves
with a New York Times
op-ed questioning the
requirement of
advanced mathematics
in our schools. His
piece instantly became
one of the newspaper's
most widely-circulated
articles. Prof. Hacker, the author of ten books
and a professor of both math and political
science at Queens College for over 47 years,
wondered in his essay why we inflict a full
menu of mathematics-algebra, geometry,

trigonometry, even calculus-on all young
Americans, regardless of their interests or
aptitudes. In The Math Myth Dr. Hacker
expands upon his scrutiny of many widely
held assumptions, including the notions that
mathematics broadens our minds, that
mastery of azimuths and asymptotes will be
needed for most jobs, that the entire
Common Core syllabus should be required of
every student. He worries that a frenzied
emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from
other pursuits. In fact, Dr. Hacker honors
mathematics as a calling and extols its glories
and its goals. Yet he shows how mandating it
for everyone prevents other talents from
being developed and acts as an irrational
barrier to graduation and careers. In this
book he proposes alternatives, including
teaching facility with figures, quantitative
reasoning, and understanding statistics. "A
lively argument against the assumption that if
the United States is to stay competitive in a
global economy, our students require
advanced training in mathematics," wrote
Kirkus Reviews. "The Math Myth is a worthwhile read, even if you are among the
educators who become apoplectic at the
suggestion that students shouldn't have to
grapple with polynomial functions," wrote
National Book Review.
Outpatients: The Astonishing New World
of Medical Tourism
By Sasha Issenberg '98
Columbia Global Reports, February 9, 2016
Sasha Issenberg '98 is
an acclaimed journalist
for numerous publications and author of The
Sushi Economy and The
Victory Lab, books that
were both early
identifiers of changes
in the way the world
works. In Outpatients
Issenberg turns his talents and attention to
today's medical tourism that sees, for one
case study example, people from all over the
world traveling to Hungary for dental care.
This rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar
medical tourism industry is exploding in
places as varied as India, Brazil, Korea and
Cost Rica, and is forcing countries to rewrite
laws to compete for patients. As patients
search for lower prices some countries have
found economic opportunity in turning health
care into a global trade. An American with
insurance, for example, can expect to pay

http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2015/11/new-moon-afterword/ http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2015/11/new-moon-afterword/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Horace Mann - Spring 2017