A fine personal narrative, but readers will likely want more practical parenting tips.
Ratner look at issues regarding advertising and children in this memoir and parenting-advice book.
The author’s father, a Minneapolis marketing executive, brought home the family’s first television set when Ratner was in kindergarten. The young boy watched a variety of TV shows, including Dragnet and The Ernie Kovacs Show—and even sometimes watched test patterns. Ratner also consumed all sorts of other media, from magazines to radio, and even created his own block-wide radio broadcast as a kid. As an adult, he talked his way into a job selling radio advertising time and then voiced the ads and took on other on-air work. That led to his big break as the voice of Flint for the 1980s animated series G.I. Joe. But although Ratner was steeped in the world of media and messaging, he had a healthy distrust of it. He’d learned from his father how advertisers manipulate viewers, particularly children, so he went on to create an educational program for grade-schoolers about the effects of ads. The personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this book are lively and warm. He includes tidbits about how he raised his own daughters with far stricter limits on media exposure than he had, as well as longer passages about the marketing efforts behind juggernauts such as the Barbie and G.I. Joe franchises. The best parts of Ratner’s story, however, are rooted in the past. The true complexity of today’s parenting, when TV is the least of one’s digital worries, never comes through. As a result, the promise of the book’s subtitle, “The Truth Behind the Media’s Effect on Children and What to Do About It,” is never fulfilled. This is too bad, as Ratner’s stories of his childhood and his later adult skepticism didn’t need to be wrapped up in a “digital-age parenting” package—they could have stood very well on their own.
A fine personal narrative, but readers will likely want more practical parenting tips.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1939629050
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Familius
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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