The expectation of stable children must be founded on a family rooted in security, safety and rational communication, according to this husband-and-wife team.
Psychotherapists MacMannis and Manchester MacMannis aim their self-help book at parents, opening with a plea that parents not expect their child to find stability or functionality in his or her life without first being given a sound home environment with each of those elements. It’s in this exchange that the authors place the onus upon the reader (the parent) to explore the family structure in terms of the system created by the authors. Following a self-evaluation to be completed by the reader, the authors walk through a series of “keys” (“Talking and Listening,” “Adapting to Change,” “Seeing the Positive,” etc.)—each a pillar in the overall foundation of healthy emotional familial relations. Peppered throughout the text are anecdotes and wisdom gained from the authors’ experiences as family therapists, and each anecdote is made relatable to the subject at hand. The authors weave popular quotations and psychological facts throughout, which teeter between complementary and distracting. Overall, the text provides a sound guide for a healthy emotional approach to any familial relationship one may encounter, be it parental or romantic. However, with such a strong introductory framing of the tools presented here as being effective in healing a family that finds itself at a breaking point, practical application is not gone into with much detail; techniques for putting the ideals set up here to use when years of poor habits don’t allow for immediate integration are glossed over in what seems to be a quick wrapping up at the end of a great deal of information, knowledge and practicum. But still there is much to be learned from this thoughtful text. A fine guide through the emotions, challenges and proper approaches to family life for anyone on the brink of entering or already within a family unit.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-193640125
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Two Harbors
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.
From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life.
Drawing on a lifetime of music-making as an amateur, professional, performer, producer, band member and solo artist, Byrne (Bicycle Diaries, 2009) tackles the question implicit in his title from multiple angles: How does music work on the ear, brain and body? How do words relate to music in a song? How does live performance relate to recorded performance? What effect has technology had on music, and music on technology? Fans of the Talking Heads should find plenty to love about this book. Steering clear of the conflicts leading to the band’s breakup, Byrne walks through the history, album by album, to illustrate how his views about performance and recording changed with the onset of fame and (small) fortune. He devotes a chapter to the circumstances that made the gritty CBGB nightclub an ideal scene for adventurous artists like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Tom Verlaine and Television. Always an intensely thoughtful experimenter, here he lets us in on the thinking behind the experiments. But this book is not just, or even primarily, a rock memoir. It’s also an exploration of the radical transformation—or surprising durability—of music from the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction through the era of iTunes and MP3s. Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world.
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936365-53-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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