New science or a leap of faith? Either way, nurturing spirituality in your children may save them a world of pain.
A reassuring and instructive lesson in spiritual parenting that strives, but only partially succeeds, to cement the link between science and spirituality.
In this paradigm-shifting book on parenting, Miller (Psychology and Education/Columbia Univ., Teachers College) claims that spirituality exists innately in all human beings from infancy onward and that spiritual education is an important part of a child’s development. Emphatically, and repeatedly, describing research that correlates different levels of spiritual awakening with different developmental stages across cultures, Miller contends that spirituality is a universal experience. She carefully defines spirituality outside the confines of any particular religion, as “an inner sense of relationship to a higher power that is loving and guiding.” Many of the studies the author cites provide surprising and useful information. For example, the knowledge that spirituality correlates to lower rates of substance abuse, depression, and risky sexual behavior in adolescents can encourage parents to make important changes in their children’s spiritual lives. Some of the studies could be more open to interpretation, such as twin studies showing that an adolescent “surge” in spirituality is 52 percent attributable to purely genetic factors—though Miller does not advance alternative explanations. Ironically, the author’s focus on the science behind her theory takes something away from the engaging and deeply felt case studies and personal stories she shares in later sections. Unfortunately, she saves two particularly poignant examples—adolescents dealing with depression and sexual addiction—for the penultimate chapter. If the plights of Marin and Kurt had been introduced earlier, Miller could have established more emotional connection with her readers, who would then be more engaged with the science she presents.
New science or a leap of faith? Either way, nurturing spirituality in your children may save them a world of pain.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03292-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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