"The miracle of the preserved word, in whatever medium-print, audio text, video recording, digital exchange-means that it may transfer into new times and new places." -From the Introduction
Margaret Mackey draws together memory, textual criticism, social analysis, and reading theory in an extraordinary act of self-study. In One Child Reading, she makes a singular contribution to our understanding of reading and literacy development. Seeking a deeper sense of what happens when we read, Mackey revisited the texts she read, viewed, listened to, and wrote as she became literate in the 1950s and 1960s in St. John's, Newfoundland. This tremendous sweep of reading included school texts, knitting patterns, musical scores, and games, as well as hundreds of books. The result is not a memoir, but rather a deftly theorized exploration of how a reader is constructed. One Child Reading is an essential book for librarians, classroom teachers, those involved in literacy development in both scholarly and practical ways, and all serious readers. Foreword by Roberta Seelinger Trites. A significant and unique contribution to our understanding of reading, readers, and literacy development. 140 B&W images, foreword, bibliography, index "The habit of reading is most frequently acquired in childhood: it is as children that we first acquire our love of losing ourselves in other worlds and other lives, and our imaginative capacity to respond emotionally to the abstract symbols that make up a text-based narrative. .. [In Margaret Mackey's] new volume, she turns inward to recall her own formative experiences as a child reader growing up in Newfoundland during the 1950s and '60s." "One Child Reading [is] the remarkable Margaret Mackey's exhaustive but far from exhausting study of the development of literacy." [Full blog post at http://bit.ly/2aecVwx] "I know that One Child Reading is meant to be more than just a walk down memory lane, and it is much more than that, most certainly. And yet, while I know that scholarship and literacy will be richer for the extensive and careful research represented here, I still want to thank Ms. Mackey for taking me on that walk. It was a pure pleasure. I will recommend this book highly, and not just for library collections, but for any child of the fifties who loves books and reading." Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER "One Child Reading, in which a professor becomes a geographer of her own literacy, is hyper-local, yet there's something about the way Margaret Mackey describes the forces that affected her early reading as a white, middle-class girl in 1950s and 60s St. John's that will speak to readers across identity lines.... [T]his book marks an expert in her field bringing a career's worth of knowledge to material she knows best. A thorough and lucid examination of the self, aided by prolific illustrations and great page design. "Inquiring into children's reading experiences is notoriously difficult.... [The] most promising work in the field so far has imported methods and analytical categories from the social and cognitive sciences into the hermeneutic approaches of the humanities. Mackey's crowning achievement also manages to do just this and superbly so.... One Child Reading is beautifully written: its lucid, accessible style invites readers into the world of Mackey's emergent childhood literacy, amply offering the sensual, graphic details that the author sees as key to any reading experience.... This book is an ode to reading: please read it." "...Margaret Mackey's uniquely detailed, insightful and wide-ranging study of the development of her own literacy in childhood is a major contribution to knowledge, all the better for the fact that it subsumes a lifelong of reading, thinking and reflecting. Her Autobibliography helps us to understand the full meaning of 'learning to read', and the lasting impact that early experiences of stories, non-fiction texts and even ephemeral writings can have on
