A warm and heartfelt account of establishing the treasured childcare institution HelloBaby.
Frisch and Simonelli detail the history of an innovative childcare initiative.
In this volume, Simonelli, a journalist, and child welfare activist Frisch tell the story of how she founded HelloBaby, a free-play space for babies, toddlers and their parents and caregivers, based in the rough environs of Chicago’s South Side. At HelloBaby, children are given plenty of open-ended play and activity time, and their caregivers, in addition to being able to relax for a bit, are given first-hand demonstrations of how their children blossom when taken out of their usual “play desert” (“a community where accessible play spaces are hard to find”) and allowed to flourish. To spread the word about her prospective project and perhaps secure some official funding or sanction, Frisch originally tried to interest then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and gubernatorial candidate J. B. Pritzker, but her overtures failed to elicit any response. So, Frisch pivoted to a “bottom-up” approach, contacting local community groups and churches, and, in 2017, HelloBaby opened its doors. Frisch was responding to the self-evident fact that, “unfortunately, the social systems we’ve built around families don’t always support the natural processes designed to help babies grow up strong, happy, and loved.” She notes many reasons for this—“entrenched racism, de facto segregation, the deterioration of the nuclear family, and generational histories of trauma”—and provides readers with a series of case studies of the parents and children who’ve been helped by HelloBaby since it began.
Those case studies make up a significant portion of the book and give it a very human face. They’re well chosen by Frisch and well shaped by Simonelli into personalized parables that effectively illustrate the many kinds of help young children and their adult caretakers often need—and the kinds of help HelloBaby tries to provide. There are profiles of babies like Tucker, born in rural Illinois to heroin-addicted parents, who decided, when Tucker was an infant, that they couldn’t care for him anymore, and Louise, who was born in a run-down inner-city hospital to a mother facing criminal charges and suffering from mental health issues. Alongside these personal stories, the authors engagingly tell the story of creating HelloBaby, covering everything from personnel and philosophy to the intricacies of how the actual space would be designed. “The whole space was created with an understanding of how it would be experienced from a baby’s perspective,” they write. “Over and over again, the question was asked: What would be at eye-level for an infant or toddler?” Positive moments that can uplift an entire day were “gently kneaded into the design.” Throughout, Frisch urges her readers to adopt the HelloBaby ideology: “My call to you is to pick the thing you know how to do, that you love to do, and share it,” she writes. “Even a little good can ripple out in ways you will likely never see.” A warm and heartfelt account of establishing the treasured childcare institution HelloBaby.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781953943255
Page Count: -
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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