A study intended for a general audience as well as academics; although the lay reader may find the theoretical jargon...
Children “do” race and racism, runs the premise of this ethnographic report from two scholars—and watching how they “do” them can teach us something about teaching, learning, and racial concepts and ideals as well.
Van Ausdale (Sociology/Syracuse) and Feagin (Sociology/Univ. of Florida, Gainesville) conducted an 11-month study of children between the ages of three and six in multi-ethnic day-care centers. Van Ausdale observed what children say about race and skin color—their own and others—as well as how they respond to adult instruction about those concepts. Her observations are presented in a text co-authored with Feagin and backed by an extensive reevaluation of both standard and controversial theories of child development. The authors argue that our fundamental mistake is the imposition of adult ways of thinking and learning upon children; they gathered a large amount of empirical data on how the young define their own skin color, that of others, and what they feel adults are trying to teach them about it. Even very small children act and interact with themselves, with other children, and with adults in a fiercely independent and highly developed manner; by the time a four-year-old encounters someone of a different skin color, he incorporates his own observations into a system of thought that includes sophisticated and fluid thinking about specifics and generalities. An adult teaching a child “about race,” they suggest, may be teaching a child more about adult-child relationships, with the moral object of the lesson falling by the wayside. We might be able to rethink race, the authors conclude, if we rethink the distinctions between children and ourselves.
A study intended for a general audience as well as academics; although the lay reader may find the theoretical jargon burdensome, the scenes of youngsters interacting are vivid and provocative.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8476-8861-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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