Sensible, warm, and funny, with or without the benefit of pushy parents.
The author of more than two dozen works of good humor (You Can’t Be Serious, 1990, etc.) gets tough as well funny as he disses the nitwits who push their offspring toward superstardom from birth—and even before.
A solid family man, Schoenstein launches an effective assault on those who play Mozart to the fetus, those who drill a kid in her nappies in the arcana of geopolitics or iambic pentameter, and all the “Fun for Ones” and “Creepy Crawler” crowd. Creepy, indeed! In his exhaustive research, Schoenstein travels from “Learning Zone” to “Better Baby Institute Activity Zone,” from “Prenatal U” to “Postnatal Upgrade” and reports that it’s all a scam. He relates the grotesque goings-on at a kiddy beauty pageant. The scramble to produce designer infants and the passion to turn toddlers into bimbo contest queens, eminent policy wonks, corporate CEOs, precocious tax evaders, or whatever Mommy and/or Daddy deem most estimable is, he worries, bound to take a toll on the besieged tots. The quest for the fastest track to render offspring superior to the best of any generation won’t accomplish anything anyway, according to the author’s wise friends. Early reading has “no bearing on whether a child will end up in the Institute for Advanced Studies or the Witness Protection Program,” he says. You can’t make Baby read before Baby is ready to read, so there’s no need to haul out Dick and Jane for an embryonic audience. Nor will Beethoven quartets played for the occupant of a womb bring forth a musical genius. Forget the maniacal mind games and let Junior’s psyche develop in the time-tested ways, says old philosopher Schoenstein. Abandon “push parenting,” as he calls it. Let the kids alone and don’t try to fix what’s not broken. Respect the “best blessedness around”—the sweet grace of childhood.
Sensible, warm, and funny, with or without the benefit of pushy parents.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7382-0560-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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