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Rating: 
Summary: Thorough, but left me hanging
Review: This book covers Maria Montessori's life very thoroughly. It covers her life well, but it would have been nice to include something of an afterword on what happened to the Montessori movement after her death, it's re-emergence in the US, a little of what Mario Montessori did with AMI, etc. Rita Kramer gave me a good understanding of how Montessori was able to rub some people the wrong way, which had an effect on the success of the movement here in the US. I don't really begrudge her trying to keep tight control over the movement, and I can see it from her point of view, after all, as Kramer points out, the movement had her name attached to it, for good and ill. If it had been presented as a neutral method, or if she had taken an academic post, and therefore didn't have to be so invested in the didactic apparatus, her ideas may have spread farther. I was also interested in what happened to the method in the US after WWI, since Kramer points out that, for example, the Rhode Island school system adopted Montessori for its public schools in something like 1910. When did they go back? Kramer did do a good job of explaining why the method caught on in some countries and not others. The real tragedy was in Vienna, which had a thriving Montessori community in the 20's and early 30's, but which was wiped out in WWII. This book gave me an appreciation for Maria Montessori I didn't have before, and reinforced my opinion that, politics aside, with the grown-ups talking and arguing about committees, names and priorities, what's important is where the rubber meets the road, that is, in the classroom. In the classroom, when you're down with the kids watching what they do, you can see the fundamental truth in Montessori's approach.
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