March|April Good Reads
New Books of Interest to the Longhorn Universe
The Broken Compass:Parental Involvement with Children’s Education
By Keith Robinson and Angel Harris
Do children really perform better academically when parents are actively involved? Not really, says sociology assistant professor Keith Robinson in his latest book, The Broken Compass. Using 60 measures of parental involvement both at home and in the classroom, Robinson finds there’s no clear connection between hands-on moms and dads and better report cards. He also tackles—and debunks—other education myths, such as the so-called success of “tiger parents.” Drawing on extensive quantitative analysis, The Broken Compass challenges our most storied assumptions about educational success.
A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America
By Jacqueline Jones
Race doesn’t exist. That’s the bold claim history professor Jacqueline Jones makes in A Dreadful Deceit, which has already been featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. By tracing the lives of six African Americans throughout history, Jones makes the argument that Southern plantation owners didn’t invoke race to justify slavery until much later on. Race, she says, has simply become a crutch that helps us defend other types of discrimination, exploitation, and abuses of a power.
Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology
Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín
This first-of-its-kind, book-length study shines a light on the often overlooked Latino experience during World War II. Edited by journalism associate professor Rivas-Rodriguez, who also heads UT’s Voces Oral History Project, this book explores the effects of the Second World War on a variety of demographic groups—Cuban Americans, Spanish Americans, Mexican Americans, and more. Both on the front lines and on the home front, the authors say, World War II had a significant impact on the beliefs and identities of Latinos in the U.S.
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