A highly readable treatise on human development—so good it can be recommended to any new or about-to-be ma (and pa). Beginning with conception, controversial science writer Morgan (The Aquatic Ape, 1982, etc.) provides absolutely fascinating material on the days, weeks, and months of development, including fetal rehearsals for breathing that appear to coincide with rapid eye movements. Covering birth, she comments that the tendency toward nighttime arrivals may be a hangover from our pre-hominid past, when the dark was probably safer. Morgan neatly dispatches old myths (smiles are early and real, not symptoms of gas) and calls babies ``he,'' so as not to confuse pronouns with mom. The anatomical compromises between pelvic width, bipedalism, and baby head size, she argues, mean that human newborns are exceptionally helpless and do everything they can to ``control'' their caregivers—making eye contact, crying, imitating, smiling, laughing. The brain almost triples in size the first year, and Morgan reprises the theories of what happened in evolution to favor this development, pooh-poohing the idea that the strains of savannah life put a premium on large brains (other savannah-living primates do just fine with smaller ones). Yes, she still plumps for an aquatic stage of evolution, but here it is watered down to some sort of marshland existence that might have favored certain anatomical and behavioral changes. Chapters on parenting, socialization, and the nursery years remind us how much culture molds society, producing today's state of isolated and ghetto-ized infancy, the need to learn how to care for a child, and the decline of the family. The real tragedy, Morgan avers, is the unwanted child, who runs the risk of continued frustration and abuse and the eventual failure of too little, too late rehabilitation for adolescents. We can learn a lot from and about babies and children, and Morgan is a first-rate guide.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-509895-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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