An innovative at-home program for juvenile offenders.
For about 15 years, debut author and therapist Shea Hellervik ran a treatment program for juvenile offenders, experience upon which she bases this workbook. The program, based on cognitive-behavioral principles, challenges the thinking errors made by juvenile offenders: If they can change their thoughts and change their behaviors, they can begin living pro-social lifestyles. Some offenders, she says, may not even realize that they think before they act and can therefore choose to act in a different way. Shea Hellervik cautions, however, that the change process may be both lengthy—a minimum of six months to start—and strenuous. Parents should form a Change Process Team with other interested adults so that they have support in helping their offenders make desired changes. The book, which offers a criminal behavior history assessment, chemical health and education assessment, essay assignments and other exercises, would be vastly improved if it provided some evidence that parents, with their own emotional investments, can deliver treatment interventions with effectiveness comparable to that of a disinterested professional. Furthermore, the presumed effectiveness of the original treatment program is based on a single study that was not subjected to peer review through publication; even this study found significant effects only with offenders who were committed for a period of 180 days—a disappointingly small group. It’s difficult to see how parents will be able to successfully implement the program with so little supporting information. On the other hand, Shea Hellervik does an excellent job of identifying the obstacles parents may face and (as the title suggests) alleviating the damaging blame that can paralyze efforts at change. Concepts are explained thoroughly and comprehensibly, and the book’s progression is logical, with each chapter building on the previous. While the nonjudgmental, affirming stance is likely to be refreshing to beleaguered parents, these same parents are tasked with making profoundly difficult decisions with very limited guidance. Overall, the workbook may have more potential as a supplement to other, more intensive programming rather than as a stand-alone treatment. Either way, it would be strengthened by the inclusion of additional research.
Promising but ultimately unconvincing guidance for addressing a challenging familial and social issue.
Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493509683
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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