Book Review: Minds More Awake by Anne White
Minds More Awake: The Vision of Charlotte Mason by Anne E. White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow!
I really loved this. I’ve had it for years and kept putting it off – a decision I now regret.
It was great for a cursory read, but I’m going to start it again because I know there are depths to be plumbed.
Anne has written a lovely, thought provoking introduction to Charlotte Mason’s ideas using PNEU materials, her own experience, and her own wide reading to bind ideas and practices together to give moms a view of what can be, of how to awaken minds – ours and our children(‘s).
She starts with what is generally considered the end of Mason’s principles – the Way of the Will and the Way of Reason, then she goes back and introduces us to the wide room of treasures she introduces as Aladdin’s Cave and slowly unfolds some of the treasures therein clearly showing how they fit in a CM paradigm.
The end goes back to the beginning and shows how those treasures have given the born person an awakened mind and a magnanimous character. She gives us CM from a different perspective than the traditional and it really works to help me see a fuller, more robust version. By modeling ideas as instruction, she not only preaches but practices as well.
This book is firmly, gently beautiful. White knows and presents what she knows in that authoritative through experience way, but not aggressively. Matter of fact, but lovely and lovingly.
Like I said … I’m going to read it again right now. I commend it to you, too.