An educational tool presented without a rigorous argument for its effectiveness and that may feel dutiful to children.
Litvin introduces a game—including a workbook of exercises—designed to promote mental acuity in children.
According to author Litvin (Introduction to Brain Stimulation by Psychoconduction, 2011, etc.), a psychologist, parts of the human brain are “sleeping” or “inactive.” As a result, the brain as a whole underperforms, falling short of its potential efficiency. Litvin devised a game—a “new approach to non-invasive brain stimulation” intended to awaken those slumbering sectors of the brain—that emphasizes an integration of different kinds of stimuli into one continuous learning sequence, including “visual, audio, tactile, kinesthetic and olfactory types.” Litvin argues that the recruitment of all the senses (rather than only one) into action should improve “attention, concentration and the memory of the entire brain.” The exercises unfold in great detail, including visual illustrations. In general, each exercise presents a visual display of boxes that either contain a symbol or are empty. Each visual display corresponds to a number and a letter and has an “audio representation,” which is a series of knocks. The kinesthetic element, which corresponds to the numbers and letters, is expressed through the clamping and unclamping of each hand. A participating youngster—Litvin claims the game is appropriate for children as young as 5 years old—translates a code from one perceptual sense to another. The book is almost entirely a workbook of exercises—there is one page of explanation, which provides no scientific analysis of the functioning of the brain or any empirical evidence that this learning tool is superior to any other except the author’s anecdotal experience. For example, it’s not obvious the exercises are neurologically more productive than reading a book with a child. But they are lucidly explained and easy to follow. However, many parents will be skeptical that this particular brand of game, especially for kids used to all the options on the internet, is “fun.” The exercises feel like exactly that: drills conceived to foster greater competence, not merriment.
An educational tool presented without a rigorous argument for its effectiveness and that may feel dutiful to children.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4669-0045-5
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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