(Crossposted from The Itinerant Librarian)
Lawrence R. Samuel, Literacy in America: a cultural history of the past century. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2024. ISBN: 9781538189542.
The book makes some good points, but it is a seriously slow read, and it is pretty much a dry textbook. Sure, it considers how literacy is a contested ground for race, gender, and class, and those are important topics. However, the important ideas get buried in the constant citing of scholarly articles, trade publications, and other academic sources. To be honest, the book reads like a student research paper where the student, instead of being selective in what sources to cite to support their claims, just cited everything they found to fill up the page quota. Whatever voice the author has gets lots in citation after citation of this scholar in a journal article or that teacher in an education magazine.
This is what the author intended with the book:
"Supported by hundreds of research studies conducted throughout the years as reported in scholarly journals and popular magazines, the book intends to make a contribution to the histories of education, language, and literature, sociology, and the United States as a whole" (vii).
Oh,
he lays those research studies and periodical articles pretty thick. As
for the contribution statement, that is an ambitious declaration.
I was honestly hoping this would be more interesting, but it was not. One detail I will mention is that history often repeats itself. Some of the concerns today on whether kids can read or not are pretty much the same as concerns back in the day. Every time a new technology comes along, be it radio, television, or the internet educators freak out about kids abandoning reading. For the most part, the kids are still reading, even if it is not the "classics," but that is another conversation.
For example, back in the 1920s aand 1930s, pearls were clutched because kids were not reading classics or wholesome books:
"Students tendency to choose less than hearty literary fare was just one problem associated with literacy in the 1920s and 1930s" (1).
Gee,
the generation coming out of the Great War (World War I) and its
horrors wants to read light, fluffy, escapist fare. The humanity! I
would say not unlike today with readers seeking light, fluffy, escapist
fare to forget the Hard Times for a while.
Overall I would say this book was just OK. For libraries, this is highly optional. If I had been able to read a review copy beforehand, I would not have ordered it for our library. This may be one for larger academic libraries with comprehensive collections in education and maybe some large library school libraries. Small academic libraries can pretty much skip this.
2 out of 5 stars.
