Easy-to-assimilate lessons on creating a healthy and respectful relationship with your child.
How to avoid making the same mistakes as your parents.
When many of us become parents, we vow to raise our children differently than we were raised. Far too often, however, we fall back on automatic responses to our children that actually correlate to how we were raised, whether it’s a positive or negative response. David-Weill (The Suitors, 2013, etc.) takes a close look at how our unconscious actions, what we might call parental instincts, are actually reproductions of our own parents’ behavior and how we must consciously regulate and evaluate our reactions if we truly seek to take a different approach to parenting. Throughout the text, the author includes numerous examples to illustrate the wide range of ways we follow what we learned as children, whether it’s choosing a bedtime, deciding what foods to serve, or disciplining rambunctious children in the back seat of a car. She also addresses more intriguing topics, such as why we can resent having to raise our children, the amount of time we should devote to our children so they ultimately gain independence, and how squabbling over minor issues can be a way to hide from larger, more urgent issues—depression, drug use, etc. At the end of the book, a comprehensive “Practical Guide” provides parents with advice on the do’s and don’ts they can follow so they don’t become their parents as well as a series of questions that evaluate the type of parent they really are. Much of what David-Weill discusses is straightforward and common sense, but having it compiled into a logically progressive text that identifies the key ways we mimic our parents and then provides helpful ways to work around these issues makes this book a worthy read for parents of children of all ages.
Easy-to-assimilate lessons on creating a healthy and respectful relationship with your child.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-056-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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