To Sunday school or not to Sunday school?
To the intriguing question of how parents without religious affiliation raise their children, the answers vary, as do the parents studied here. Manning (Religious Studies/Sacred Heart Univ.; God Gave Us The Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism, 1999, etc.) opens with data about the rapidly growing number of people in the United States, especially those under 30, who list “none” when asked to indicate their religious affiliation. The author divides the “Nones” into four categories—unchurched believer, spiritual seeker, philosophical secularist, and the indifferent—which she takes pains to differentiate. She discusses the plusses and minuses of five strategies by which parents attempt to transmit a worldview to their children: going back to church, finding an alternative community, doing it oneself, letting others do it, and finally, doing nothing. In addition to using existing surveys and demographic data, Manning conducted interviews with Nones across the country, seeking to discover how they differ from churched Americans, asking what choices they made about including religion in their children’s lives, what strategies they adopted, how community and family pressures shaped their choices, and how having children affected their own worldviews. A self-identified None, she clearly established a rapport with her subjects that enabled her to extract thoughtful, revealing answers. She summarizes some responses and quotes extensively from others, making the book longer than absolutely necessary but more pleasurable than a more academic text. Having presented the results of her study and analyzed its significance, the author then muses on the meaning of choice in religion, the significance of this trend toward personal choice, and its impact on the culture at large. As to whether it is better to raise children with or without religion, her conclusion is that more study is needed to answer that question.
Refreshingly nonpolemical—will be of special interest to secular parents struggling with some of the issues presented.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4798-7425-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Categories: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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