Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition by James W. Loewen Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition
Book Review: A quote from book that says it all
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent read. Perhaps a short quote from the book will best reveal it's thesis: "Indeed history is the only field in which the more courses students take, (in High School) the stupider they become." As a parent with two childred in grade school I have taken a whole new approach to my discussions of history with them. This should be required reading for grade school history teachers.Book Review: A passion for history
Summary: 4 Stars
Why was history class so bo-o-o-ring, as Loewen describes it? I had forgotten that I even learned anything in my high school history class until I picked up this book and found a spirited critique of several popular school textbooks, including the back-breaking one I once lugged around. Loewen brings to light the fallacies and vague assumptions that we carry around in our brains thanks to history class; and, in his own entertainingly brisk way, fills in some of the gaps in our education. Too bad this wasn't around when I was in school!Book Review: I thought I was very well-informed until I read this book.
Summary: 5 Stars
I am a very well-read student of history, a subject at which I excelled throughout high school and college, and have pursued actively ever since. Not since I read Dee Brown's classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (not for school, by the way), have I been so excited, aroused, and motivated to read a book. Lies My Teacher Told Me is an eye-opening, "can't-put-it-down" book that humanizes and clarifies American history for the reader. I pride myself on knowing the real story beneath the crap, but Mr. Loewen has awakened me to my own shortcomings and basic beliefs about American heroes and fables. WHOEVER CARES ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR NATION MUST READ THIS BOOK. This book has made sense out of some pretty confusing lies. It has changed my life. I am buying half a dozen copies to send to my nephews and neices.Book Review: This is an invaluable corrective against our amnesia.
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm home schooling my daughter (12) and find I will use this book and its resources. Beyond the corrective it offeres, I especially like how the author is sensitive to the language and rhetoric of textbooks, even when they are striving to do justice to the complexities of history. The author understands that history needs to be experienced not as propaganda or (in the worst sense) as myth, but as the play of many forces and ideas that had consequences rather than just happened. We should be thankful for this book and those who treat themselves to it will understand how wrong-headed it would be to say that its author is merely pushing some crude political agenda. True, the work is political, but in the deepest sense of giving us a view of ourselves as a community stumbling and sometimes falling towards the future. Finally, the author's remarks on using alternative genres and more real primary sources so students can hear history, not merely read about it, are most refreshing and need to be acted upon by educators, especially in light of the cinematization of history which is often of dubious value.Book Review: I loved the book
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought it was a well thought out, informative book. I was amazed at all of the things I thought I knew about and ended up being lies. I have showed this book to teachers at my school and they all agree that most students don't become aware of these lies untill college. The history tecaher I have allowed me and aa friend to do a presentation to other classes exposing some of the lies this book talked about and all of the other students were just as stunned as I was at first, to find that they had been lied to from a book that millions of students all over the world read and learn info from every day. I am finally realizing why I hated history clss so bad when I was younger, every one of the people we talked about had a picture over them and they all appeared exactly the same, they all did good things for every one and took no more than what was given. But in realitly they all took every thing they wanted and more and they took advantage of any one they could.