Word: trappings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...argued proper Russian usage with Vladimir Nabokov. But he was right about Hemingway's sexual antagonism. It started with his mother. "I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide," he writes Publisher Charles Scribner in 1949. Women, he suggests frequently, will trap and destroy a man. They can also be too competitive. After his divorce from Combat Correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway writes Scribner: "Have a new housemaid named Martha and certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty was a lovely girl though. I wish she hadn't been quite...
...COLOR OF THE INK on the book jacket says it all. It shrieks; The Testing Trap: How it can make or break your career and your children's futures, and, in case the message isn't clear enough, the word "break" is printed...
Such-tactics unfortunately typify The Testing Trap--unfortunately, because Andrew J. Strenio, Jr., has something important to say, and is probably on the right side, if there is a right side, of the complex standardized-testing controversy...
...Testing Trap, however, does not discuss. It asserts. Everything about it is combative, from its chapter headings ("Branding Children--Closing College Doors--Narrowing Graduate Opportunites--Blocking Access to Licensed Professions") to its singsong polemical style. Strenio writes in a conversational second-person manner laced heavily with rhetorical devices. ("You've heard of setting the fox to guard the hens?") and breaks frequently into first-person to stress-a point or tell a sad little story about a friend ruined by low scores--sprinkling his pages with "I think" and "It seems to me" in the fashion that English teachers work...
...Testing Trap cannot be said to fail through lack of balance; it is what it is, a lively position paper offering a few substantive points and plenty of guidance for standardized testing's victims. Its weakness even as campaign literature is mostly the fault of length; repeating his thesis endlessly over 300 pages, Strenio unwittingly widens its gaps and saps much of its persuasive power. He could have written a great editorial