Reviewer: Foster Corbin
Attorney and former English Instructor
Atlanta, GA

I finished this fascinating book later the same day I had read in my local daily newspaper that in 2001 a former assistant basketball coach at the University of Georgia had given a final exam for the only grade in a "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" course that consisted of 20 multiple choice questions. Two of the 18 questions included how many goals are on a basketball court and how many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game. So learning about teachers like Ms. Kirschenbaum provides a much needed antidote for the latest news item about education in Georgia. She begins this beautiful book with the following statement: "I will never forget the day that changed my life forever. [With the exception of the wondrous first letter "I" which I cannot describe, I believe those words are in burnt sienna] I was teaching The Canterbury Tales when one of my students raised her hand and asked, 'Ms. Kirschenbaum, how come our books are not in color, like they used to be?'" The author, for ten years a teacher of English at the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, located just a mile or so from Ground Zero, set about to find an answer to that question. The result is this beautiful book of many colors, designed, written and printed in a "feminine" very reader-friendly font that Ms. Kirschenbaum herself designed.

Ms. Kirschenbaum has certainly done her homework. There are 363 pages of text and another 50 or so footnotes. The book is filled with quotations from artists, writers and scientists about the significance of color and all its ramifications. The writer discusses the books before Gutenberg, though not accessible to common people, that were always in color. She also refers to the ancient Greeks, Chinese and Eqyptians who invariably wrote in color. She gives anecdotal evidence from her own teaching experience that an overwhelming number of her students would prefer reading, for instance, Homer, Poe et al in "living color." I think the writer's two strongest points are (1) we are fast losing a whole generation of nonreading students to television, video games, and movies, all in color and (2) because of digital printing, books in color can now be produced economically.

Ms. Kirschenbaum discusses many writers, some who used color effectively in their prose, and others whose works cry out for it: the artist and writer William Morris, and William Blake, whom she describes as the "only instance after Gutenberg of a great poet and a great painter married into one magnificent soul." On Emily Dickinson: "Her manuscripts are bubbling with body language [in red letters] -- long dashes, short dashes, angled dashes, crosses, pluses, minuses, waves, curves, line breaks. . . " Finally the writer makes a good case-- Faulkner himself wanted it-- for THE SOUND AND THE FURY to be printed in color.Ms. Kirschenbaum's theory of designer writing has been well received except by some "academics." (The quotations are mine.) "Some people in the academy have refused to take me seriously because I teach high school and not college; because I have only a master's degree and not a doctorate; because I am not an Ivy Leaguer; and God knows what else." One professor even called her "Madame Nobody." She's in good company since Miss Dickinson would say, "I'm nobody/who are you?" And Robert Frost didn't have a Ph.D as I recall.

In addition to the brilliant illustrations and colored images here, the text, almost all of it in color, is clear and well written. And Ms. Kirschenbaum is a great punster, both verbal and visual. She sold me on this book when, in first thumbing through it, I found a delightful visual pun at the beginning of the footnotes.

What comes through in every page of this book, which I cannot adequately describe, is that Ms. Kirschenbaum is the most dedicated of teachers and decent of people. "Whenever I visit a museum, I seem, unavoidably, to be reminded of my mortality and of the precious chance [red letters] I have been given, as a young American woman, to make a difference in the lives of others." Chaucer would have said of her, "gladly did she learn and gladly did she teach."

You must see this book for yourself. I am at a loss as to how to best describe it.

< back to reviews