An engaging, much-needed new approach to teaching children about the human sexual experience.
Straightforward advice on how to talk to teens about sex.
High school sexuality educator Vernacchio opens the door to his classroom and invites readers in for a closer look at the often awkward subject of teaching sex education to teens. Teens today receive many levels of information on the complex world of love, relationships and physical closeness via the Internet, all forms of media and their peers. However, that information is often incomplete or stresses abstinence only and doesn't help foster a well-rounded, healthy approach to sexuality. With frankness and earnestness, Vernacchio breaks down barriers and gives parents, educators and teens comprehensive, practical advice on all aspects of sex. He discusses the concept of using baseball as a metaphor for sexual activity, noting how this creates a skewed image—in part due to the gender assumptions it makes: "It sets up the idea that sex is a game and that there are opposing teams…it's competitive. We’re not playing on the same team; we’re playing against each other—so someone wins, and someone loses." Instead, he tells his students to envision a new model for sexual activity based on the act of sharing a pizza, which encourages discussion, negotiation and is mutually satisfying to both parties involved. Vernacchio includes thorough analysis of gender identity, sexual orientation, body images, and the use of technology to communicate sexual ideas and desires. Included in each chapter are real questions posed by real students, with Vernacchio's direct and honest responses, which offer more advice and encourage further discussion on the topic. By the time Vernacchio's students finish his sexuality and society class, they are "confident, open, and more secure in themselves, and they know their values." Readers will feel the same way after finishing this book.
An engaging, much-needed new approach to teaching children about the human sexual experience.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-226951-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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