Book Blog Tour - Review
Crazy is Normal
It is a pleasure to participate in the Book Blog Tour for Lloyd Lofthouse's "Crazy is Normal."
I love the title, I must admit.
Lloyd has provided us with a special peek into his life, for one year, as a teacher. Somehow, he managed to keep a very detailed journal for that year, and has now shared it with us in this memoir.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Publisher: Three Clover Press (June 14, 2014) ISBN: 978-0986032851
Category: Biographies and Memoirs, Educators
Tour Date: October, 2014
Available in: Print & ebook, 386 Pages
Multi-award winning author, Lloyd Lofthouse kept a daily journal for one-full school year and that journal became the primary source of this teacher’s memoir.
“Readers who envision eager students lapping up learning led by a Tiger Teacher will be disappointed. Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.
Throughout this memoir, though, Lofthouse seems able to keep the hope alive that there’s a future for each student that doesn’t include jail—thanks in large part to his sixth period journalism class and its incredible editor, Amanda.” – Bruce Reeves
About Lloyd Lofthouse:
Little did Lloyd Lofthouse know in 1999, when he married Anchee Min, that he was beginning a journey of discovery. His first trip to The Middle Kingdom was on the honeymoon with his bride, who introduced him to China and Robert Hart (1835-1911), the main characters in Lloyd’s first two novels, My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. The next decade was a journey of discovery. Lloyd now lives near San Francisco with his wife–with a second home in Shanghai, China.
Lloyd earned a BA in journalism in 1973 after fighting in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine. While working days as an English teacher, he enjoyed a second job as a maitre d’ in a multimillion-dollar nightclub. His short story, A Night at the ‘Well of Purity’ was named as a finalist for the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. Lloyd has won 15 awards for My Splendid Concubine and 5 awards for Running With the Enemy.
Website: http://lloydlofthouse.org/
Author’s Den: http://www.authorsden.com/lloydlofthouse
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lflwriter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lloyd-Lofthouse/168775989838050
Google+: https://plus.google.com/116728680363586998839/posts
‘Crazy Is Normal’ will be on sale for only $0.99 from October 1-November 15, 2014 on Kindle!
My Review:
As a writer myself, I was totally impressed that Lloyd Lofthouse could have kept such a complete and detailed journal as to be able to recreate this fabulous memoir of such length and complexity many years after the fact. His portrayal of life in the class room is stunning, realistic, and even a little scary. You really get the feeling you are that little "fly on the wall" - put sitting on his shoulder witnessing exactly what he experienced, day by day, in that classroom.
Some readers my find this memoir tedious reading. But, if you really want to get into the situation and understand his experience in depth, you will be enthralled by his pace and descriptions of students, administrators, and the school environment.
Lofthouse came away from this experience with very strong feelings about how education in this environment should be handled versus how it is handled in most situations. View of the video clip to understand his feelings better.
Video clip- interview: http://youtu.be/f-C4X6f0B5g
To see what others have to say about this book, here is the schedule for the entire tour:
Crazy Is Normal Web Tour Schedule:
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Teddy Rose
Book Reviews Plus Oct. 1 Review & Giveaway
Inspire to Read Oct. 2 Guest Post & Excerpt
Cassandra
M's Place Oct. 6 Review & Giveaway
Pinky's Favorite Reads Interview & Excerpt
Being
Tillys Mummy Oct 9 Guest Post
& Excerpt
Manic
Mama of 2 Nov. 6 Review
& Excerpt
Deal Sharing Aunt Nov 7
Review, Interview, & Excerpt
From Isi
Nov
11 Review
Happy Reading!
Dr. Bill ;-)
Thank you for reading and reviewing my memoir. One of my concerns was exactly what you mentioned in your review, that "Some readers may find this memoir tedious reading." I would really appreciate it if you would post your review on Amazon.
ReplyDeleteI debated this issue with myself while writing the rough draft, and decided that the tedium—the struggle, the hardship of teaching at-risk kids and the relentless, exhausting demands and pressure on teachers from politicians in Washington D.C. and state capitals, the corporate owned media, district and site administrators and parents had to be revealed as it was experienced on a day-to-day basis.
The daily journal was much longer than the memoir, so I cut out a lot of material in a compromise to cut back on the relentless routine while still revealing the challenges that teachers face on a daily basis.
I want as many open minded readers as possible to step inside the world of the public school classroom and discover that no standardized test regime, from President Obama’s Race to the Top agenda with its Bill Gates supported Machiavellian so-called Common Core State Standards created to rank and fire teachers for not achieving the impossible demands of President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, while closing public schools and then turning them over to the often honeyed and hyped, false promises of corrupt for-profit, private-sector, corporate Charter schools, will match or even achieve more than the public schools are already doing.
That doesn’t mean the public schools can’t improve, but they don’t need to be reformed into some grotesque ideology that is either Tea Party, neo-conservative, libertarian, corporate or neo-liberal driven. If we don’t stop the fake, corporate, financially supported public-education reformers, America might wake up one day and discover they’ve lost their democratically run public schools to corporate CEO’s and oligarchs like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates or the Walton family, and that the public schools in fact were actually outperforming the rest of the world once we move beyond the cherry-picked facts and lies that the fake carpetbagger reformers are using to push their draconian agendas.
I wonder if Americans really want—for instance—someone like the Walton family that has spent $700 million in a PR blitz campaign just in the last few years with an agenda to destroy the democratic public schools, who inherited their great wealth from their father, who built the labor-union hating Walmart chain that pays many of its employees poverty wages without health benefits, teaching their children.
In fact, maybe your Blog readers might want to see what I mean from this “New York Times” piece on the Waltons, and the Waltons are not the only billionaires involved in spending hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy America’s public schools. It has also been reported by “The Washington Pos” that Bill Gates has spent more than $2 billion in his war on a vital element of democracy’s foundation, the public schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/us/a-walmart-fortune-spreading-charter-schools.html?_r=0
Great response! I'll get it on Amazon! ;-)
DeleteThank you.
DeleteThanks for taking part in the tour. I'm glad you enjoyed 'Crazy Is Normal' so much!
ReplyDeleteIt was a pleasure! ;-)
Delete