On the ninth day of giveaway...

...the winner of the eighth day is...

Kriston!

Boy, can I say right now that it's a really good thing I've got the random.org site working for me on this giveaway. It would be impossible for me to choose on my own, especially when people say such wonderful things in their postings. I have to go somewhere that the dice are guaranteed not to be loaded, and make a solemn vow to only roll them once per drawing. (That's a fun site, by the way. Bring your kids over and teach them how to gamble. I mean, teach them about probability.)

Anyway: Congratulations! And thank you!

I expect to get screamed at for this next one. Not because of the book itself, but for the reason I'm giving it away.

The book is a new, hardcover copy of Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto.

This is a review copy I received. I wasn't able to review the book, so the least I can do is offer it a good home.

I expected to admire Gatto and enjoy his work. Now that the pressure's off me to either review or admire him, I may be able to finish reading this book (my library carries it, I already checked), and I may even have some interest in doing so. However, when I tried to in preparation for writing about it, I was so infuriated by something on almost every page that I simply couldn't bring myself to either finish reading or attempt to put my anger down on paper.

Gatto is, in his own words, anti-Darwin. To my mind, he’s anti-science and, like Miniver Cheevy, longs for good old days that never were.

I'm sorry to use such unfriendly words to preface a giveaway. I'm a lousy liar. A lot of people admire Gatto's work. I know he's been an inspiration to some who hadn't even thought of homeschooling until they read his early writing. But there it is. As Austen put it so beautifully in Emma, "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." Just because a book doesn't work for me doesn't mean that it shouldn't make someone else happy.

So: come and get it! And if you still like me, spread the word about SHM for an extra chance to win this book!