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    Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate
    Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate
    Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate
    Ebook300 pages5 hours

    Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate

    By Mark Oppenheimer

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Have you ever met a child who talked like an adult? Who knew big words and how to use them? Was he a charmer or an insufferable smart aleck—or maybe both? Mark Oppenheimer was just such a boy, his talent for language a curse as much as a blessing. But when he got to junior high, Oppenheimer discovered an outlet for his loquaciousness: the debate team. Frank and comical, Wisenheimer chronicles the travails of a hyperarticulate child who finds salvation in the heady world of competitive oratory.

    In stirring prose, Oppenheimer describes what it was like to have a gift with no useful application. Unlike math or music prodigies, he had no way to showcase his unique skill, except to speak like a miniature adult—a trick some found impressive but others found irritating. Frustrated and isolated, Oppenheimer used his powers for ill—he became a wisenheimer, pushing his peers and teachers away. Then, in junior high, he discovered the world he was meant for: the debate club. His skill with language was finally being channeled, refined, and honed into something beautiful.

    As Oppenheimer blossomed as a person, he also became a world-champion high school and college debater. His journey from loneliness to fulfillment affords a fascinating inside look at the extraordinary subculture of world-class high school debate and at the power of language to change one’s life.

    Oppenheimer writes movingly about the art of rhetoric, of his passion for it, and of the inspiration he derived from debating and watching others do it. This smart, funny memoir not only reveals a strange, compelling subculture, it also offers a broader discussion of the splendor and power of language and of the social and developmental hazards of being a gifted child. Finally, it looks with hope at our present age, in which oratory is once again an important force in American culture.

    Revealing, touching, and entertaining, Wisenheimer offers a brilliant portrait of the rarefied world of high school and college debate—and of what it’s like to grow up talkative in America.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateApr 13, 2010
    ISBN9781439146989
    Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate
    Author

    Mark Oppenheimer

    Mark Oppenheimer is a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and The Forward. His journalism has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, Details, and Travel + Leisure, and his essays have appeared in The Believer, The American Scholar, and Yale Review. He is the author of two books, a founding editor of The New Haven Review, and an occasional commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and Day to Day. In the school year 2008-2009, Oppenheimer was a lecturer in the English and Political Science departments of Yale University and a visiting professor of creative writing at Wellesley College. He has also taught at Wesleyan and Stanford. He holds a doctorate in religious studies from Yale and is currently the coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative. With his wife, daughters, dog, and two cats, he lives in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut.

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    • 3/5
      Memoir by a high school and occasional college debater. After starting with prank telephone calls and other hijinks that would’ve gotten a poorer, darker kid sent to juvenile detention if not jail (he wrote a letter pretending to be another kid, accusing her father of abusing her), Oppenheimer got scared and ultimately ended up in debate, which gave him the opportunity to play with the words and rhetoric he so loved. I was hoping for a memoir of my kind of debate (policy), but Oppenheimer did parliamentary and thus looked down on policy debaters as we did on his kind. His descriptions of skating by on the most tenuous of knowledge of current events didn’t mesh with my recollections of spending hours each day on research. But chacun a son gout, I guess.
    • 3/5
      Mark Oppenheimer learned to talk at a very young age, no doubt because he was raised in a family that valued language. However, Mark carried it to such an extreme, that when he was two, his mother would call his father and beg him to come home. "I can't take it any more--he just won't stop talking!" When he was 12 years old and just enrolled at a new private school, he finally found an outlet for his verbosity--and his love of oratory. His new school had a debate team! As a nervous 7th grader, he bravely tried out for his school's debate team, and won a spot. From then his career as a high school debater skyrocketed! At the end of ninth grade, Mark was invited to represent his school at an international championship held in England.Intertwined with his stories of debate are tales of friends and girlfriends, enemies and heartbreak. Mark's successes on the debate circuit continued through high school, and helped him to be accepted to Yale, the college of his dreams (in large part because of its fine debate team). He almost did not believe it when he did not make the team his freshman year! Didn't they know who he was?

    Book preview

    Wisenheimer - Mark Oppenheimer

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