A thorough and well-intentioned safety guide for parents.
In this third book in his self-help series, Quesenberry draws on his years of professional training and personal experiences to help parents keep their teens safe.
The author is a retired air marshal who spent his working life training new recruits in situational awareness. In these pages, he shares his acquired wisdom and strategies with parents, so they can teach their teens to “identify and process environmental cues to accurately predict the actions of others” and keep safe accordingly. By revealing some of the tactics and behaviors of child predators, Quesenberry hopes to educate readers about the dangers that teens face online and out in the world. He explains “pre-incident indicators” that predators may use to manipulate a potential victim, and encourages kids to pay attention not just to their environment, but also to their intuition. Some sections lean more toward more traditional parenting advice, which isn’t Quesenberry’s area of professional expertise, although he does cite experts and includes a bibliography of sources. He’s clear about which strategies he’s used with his own teens, including teaching self-defense techniques and driving rules. Each chapter has a section of “practical exercises,” which are designed to help parents teach their teens skills to deal with dangerous situations. Many readers will likely take issue with the physical aggressiveness of a “sneak attack” game—agreed to by parents and kids in advance—in which a parent overpowers an inattentive teen, pins them to the ground, and tickles them to teach them a lesson in situational awareness. But although this sort of role-playing seems extreme, the author also stresses the reality of attacks in which kids could find themselves unable to react defensively. Each chapter concludes with a summation of key points, which may serve as a useful refresher for those consulting the book again after an initial reading.
A thorough and well-intentioned safety guide for parents.Pub Date: April 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1594398926
Page Count: 184
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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