MILES AHEAD. A Cascades collection of travel writing. Edited by Wendy Cooling.
AS IT HAPPENS. A Cascades collection of reportage. Edited by Rosy Border.
WILD WORLD. A Cascades book about the natural world. Edited by Anne Gatti.
WAR STORIES. A Cascades collection of fiction and non-fiction. Edited by Christopher Martin. Collins pound;6.25 each. TES Direct pound;5.25 each.
These sturdy and attractive hardback collections provide an inexpensive resource of excellent classic and new writing, which would be particularly useful for Years 10 and 11, covering non-fiction in various genres as well as fiction.
The quality of the activities that accompany the texts is, however, uneven. In Wild World, for example, information retrieval questions, speaking and listening suggestions and springboard activities are unhelpfully listed together under one heading.
In Wendy Cooling’s travel collection, activities are more helpfully organised under Close Reading, Writing and Speaking and Listening, although some of those headings have been left out.
If these books are really to be “ideal for GCSE preparation” as the publishers claim, there must also be some focused language analysis tasks.
Only War Stories includes some simple questions which direct students towards language study. Generally, these activities are unstructured and will be of limited value to teachers who want anything more than straightforward comprehension questions.
Another serious shortcoming of this series lies in the referencing and dating of the extracts. for many, neither date nor source is given. This matters, as for example, in John Timpson’s brilliant but undated piece on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Is it from a report broadcast at the time, or was it recollected in the tranquillity of his autobiography? This kind of information is vital to teachers if they are to present these worthwhile texts effectively.
Miles Ahead is the most successful of these four books. Its extracts are dated and referenced, and the choice is not overly reliant on long-established writers, but includes such refreshing Nineties travellers as William Dalrymple in Delhi in 1994 and Rory MacLean in Burma in 1998.
War Stories includes some brief poems for comparison (the only book to do this), and suggests books, videos and websites for further study.
It would, however, have been good to see a wider selection of “war”. We’re in the 21st century now, but the post-1914 section consists almost entirely of passages relating to the two World Wars, mainly from the British perspective.
An opportunity seems to have been missed here. The Vietnam war, the only other war included that took place after 1914, gets just one extract, and there is nothing from more recent arenas of war, such as the Balkans, which are within students’ own memories.
RACHEL REDFORD
Word meisters: George Bernard Shaw and Will Self (inset) help create a pop-style buzz about literature lOrder titles with TES prices from TES Direct on 020 8324 5119 99p pamp;p per order
