Category: Book Reviews

Today I introduce a book in a review about five books, but especially about one of them, Teacher. The author is Sylvia Ashton-Warner, an English woman who went to New Zealand to teach five-year old children for two years and, instead, stayed there for the rest of her life. The main story of the five books is of romance but perhaps the stronger story is of her work with the Maori children. 

It is difficult to say who benefits most from that work—Ms. Ashton-Warner, the children, or the reader of the books. Ms. Ashton-Warner is a gifted writer; there’s no doubt about that. She was a gifted teacher, too, a teacher who instinctively understood that these children lived in a time and space, a world, entirely different from that she’d left behind. The rigid, proscribed and goal-driven methods of teaching would not, could not work within the Maori context. She must begin where these children were, and work from there. Not only that, she must do so for each child, not for the class as a whole. Each life, even by age five, was unique in experience and interpretation of reality.

Ms. Ashton-Warner listened to each child. She created a set of cards for each child. She asked the child for a word, then another. She added those words to that child’s set of cards. As time went on, they added more words; so grew each stack of cards. That set of words became that child’s Key Vocabulary. The Key Vocabulary was easily read; it rapidly became the basis of early writing. From that set of building blocks, work in other subject areas developed.

There’s not time and space here to do justice to Ms. Ashton-Warner’s insight and method. I encourage you to find and read a copy of Teacher. You will soon understand that this woman instinctively understood what most of us who love and work with people with autism learn as a way to teach them that quite often works, and works well. As one such parent, I can say only that I know this well. Before I read her book, I had done most of the things she did, and they worked for my son and me. I haven’t her talent as an author, but I can, and do, recommend a good story, a good read, and a good result when I see them!

“Tastes like milk,” said my mother-in-law of John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia, and I realized that she was, as I am, a synesthete, able to experience sensations in unexpected ways, like hearing colors or seeing smells. It is a relatively rare, and very pleasurable, talent.

Grendel, by John Gardner, doesn’t taste at all like milk. It is far more potent in its poetry, like a hunter’s kettle roiling atop broken tree limbs, filled with the remnants of several days in the woods: body parts, meat and bones, dried blood, wild berries, mushrooms, and pungent spicy leaves. 

It is also orchestral music, rising and falling in multiple movements, occasionally punctuated with puns and sudden childlike outbursts. Grendel tells his own story in fragments, an ongoing threnody insinuated beneath and between the details of the familiar Beowolf legend. He emerges from and retreats to the cave where his mother still lives in a stuporous haze, visits a pontificating dragon whose ultimate words of wisdom, after almost twenty pages, are “seek out gold and sit on it,” and observes and makes raids upon the local Danes until a stranger comes across the sea with a challenge for him alone. 

I first picked up a copy of Grendel in a bookstore a number of years ago, but did not buy it at that time. I put it on my list of “Books to Read Soon.” A couple of months ago, I finally got a copy; I read it straight through. I was so enthralled I sent an e-mail to six friends, recommending it as a delightful read. Two of them quickly replied saying that they, too, had recently read and very much enjoyed the book! Go thou and do likewise. You won’t be sorry!