Daniel Wolff's Blog
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Mar.10.2013
The fight for home is still being fought in New Orleans, more than seven years after Katrina. And it’s in full-swing in the New York metropolitan area, months after Sandy.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced he wanted...
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Sep.06.2012
The Fight for Home tries to put post-Katrina New Orleans in the larger context of what’s been going on nationally. Perhaps no joke was more biting than the city’s flooded-out residents discovering that, thanks to the...
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Aug.06.2012
One of the reactions I’m already getting to “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back” is “What can I do?”
That’s pretty quick since the official pub date is today.
But it’s a good question with...
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Jul.23.2012
In “I’m Carolyn Parker,” the documentary film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Jonathan and myself among others, the Semmes school is a hulking presence. Standing in ruins on a block in Holy Cross, it’s pointed out as a landmark, its roof put on by Carolyn’s last true love with the...
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Jul.17.2012
The temptation to keep updating my new book, “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back,” is overwhelming. But since it’s due to come out August 6th from Bloomsbury, I’ll have to be content to send addendums your way.
...
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Jul.17.2012
The temptation to keep updating my new book, “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back,” is overwhelming. But since it’s due to come out August 6th from Bloomsbury, I’ll have to be content to send addendums your way.
...
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Nov.09.2009
A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It's like the book continues to be written - in public - person by person.
There was...
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Sep.29.2009
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties...
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Aug.31.2009
Commentary
The President's Laugh LineBy Daniel Wolff
In President Barack Obama’s first major speech on education, in March of this year, he presented five “pillars of our education reform agenda.” Only one of them got a laugh.
As well as better standards and assessments and more charter...
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Jul.30.2009
The Education of Rachel Carson
Western Pennsylvania's natural glories enthralled Rachel Carson -- while the ravages of industry shocked her young mind. Beatrix Potter and the 'St. Nicholas League' helped provide refuge.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
By Daniel Wolff
[A new book called "How Lincoln...
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Jul.29.2009
Q & A With Daniel Wolff Posted by Leonard Gill on Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:43 PM
The author is Daniel Wolff. He wrote You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, and he’s collaborated with Memphian Ernest Withers in Withers’ collections of photographs, Negro League Baseball and The Memphis Blues...
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Jul.24.2009
1. While I have not yet read them, this book seems like a departure from the books you've written before; how did this idea occur to you, and how did you develop the idea into How Lincoln Learned to Read?
It was a less an idea than feeling. You know that sensation when your kid - of,...
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Jul.18.2009
Printers Row Literary Festival runs three or four blocks in downtown Chicago: tents for booksellers, microphones for readers, a milling crowd flipping through sci fi, poetry, radical lit, and old postcards.
Kind of an extended outdoor library. With everything for sale...
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Jul.14.2009
Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads,...
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Jul.08.2009
My prologue to the readings in the Northwest is a weekend stay up on the Olympic Peninsula. A walk down the beach facing the Juan de Fuca Strait reveals sea otter, bald eagles, loons, seals, grebes. Drawn by this wilderness, the folks I meet are in the middle of a re-education. They’re...
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I pray many will read this so they understand the rank manuevers the politicians used to make a land grab that ripped the people and the culture from our heartland.”
—Dr. John
About Daniel
Of Daniel Wolff’s new book, “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back,” Kirkus writes, it “communicates the smells of decay, the depth of desperation, and the powerful frustrations of people who feel abandoned in their own land. [Wolff]...