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In a review for Ms. (December 1973), the poet Yvonne contrasted the musical Raisin with Lorraine Hansberry's original play, in which theThree Younger women formed the most complex, thoroughly honest portrait of the archetypal black woman to have appeared on the American stage…. The spine of Hansberry's original plot was provocative and clear-cut. It was the conflict between life and the profit motive, a conflict in which a black man, Walter Lee Younger (Mama's son, Ruth's husband, Beneatha's brother), having chosen money as his god, becomes his family's moral antagonist. In the new musical, the dramatic focus is switched from the women to the man. The total production—script, music, lyrics, direction, choreography, sets—is created by everybody but the black woman. The women's most intense speeches are cut, their stage movements made awkward and their personalities made shallow or reversed. Many of their lines and dramatic gestures, particularly those showing warmth and depth, are given to Walter to make him a less vindictive and more likeable character.

After speech, reading is the most important of the basic skills, involving as it does recognition of a visual pattern, and the ability to pronounce it. Reading readiness has been the subject of much investigation and varies considerably from country to country, but in Great Britain it is now fairly generally accepted that the age at which a child is ready to read depends upon intelligence, home influence and teaching methods. The latter have varied very much in the last decade and much investigation is still going on to determine the best methods. To combine maximum comprehension with rapid or effective reading, more early practice in ‘silent’ as opposed to oral reading is probably necessary.