A straightforward, useful, and compassionate coaching manual for parenting.
A debut guide focuses on contemporary parenting.
In this comprehensive manual, the author makes clear that her book is about “the emotional health of your children and not about rules regarding bedtimes, napping or what to feed your child.” This friendly, no-nonsense tone reverberates throughout the work, which centers on the basics and insights that Fulla has acquired over many years of raising her own children as a single mother. As she acknowledges from the outset, the world of 21st-century parenting has a wide array of challenges no previous generation faced, including the ubiquity of the internet and all-pervasive video games and social media sites. The outside world intrudes far more and far earlier than it ever did, but one of the author’s earliest and most sustained lessons for her readers is to look inward rather than outward. They should ask themselves questions about their own upbringing and unearth the lessons about parenting it might inadvertently have taught them. This motif of questioning assumptions recurs frequently; Fulla’s effective strategy is to encourage her readers to examine the fundamentals of the very concept of parenting. Always the stress is on patience and understanding, on remembering that although the modern adult world is full of distractions and contradictions, children don’t yet live in that realm and can only be treated fairly—and raised healthily—by parents who constantly remind themselves of that. In this helpful and empathetic guide, parents are entreated to remember the tremendous responsibility of their position as the gatekeepers of so much of what their children learn about society (“If we want our children to do as we say,” the author writes as one example, “perhaps we should look at the words we give them”). Fulla lucidly reminds her readers to respect the individuality of their children—listen to what they’re saying; don’t tell them how to feel. Although much of this advice borders on the self-evident, it’s all presented with an approachable bluntness and self-deprecating wisdom that should make the book invaluable for many parents, especially first-timers.
A straightforward, useful, and compassionate coaching manual for parenting.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1117-2
Page Count: 127
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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