An extremely useful, well-organized guide to planning a successful family vacation with special needs children.
An illustrated family-vacation planning and resource guide for parents of children with physical, developmental and mental disabilities.
Any family vacation requires some thought, but when children have disabilities—such as blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, autism or ADHD—parents face additional challenges. In their debut work, Jones and Keiper, both special education teachers, present insights gleaned from their teaching experience and as co-founders of Starry Night Travel, a travel agency for parents with special needs children. Good planning is key, a process they’ve broken down into the five D’s: Dream, imagine the kind of trip desired; Determine, figure out what special provisions will be needed; Dry Run, practice potentially difficult situations; Departure, draft a timeline and checklist; and Destination, list last-minute details, tips and reminders. The authors continually stress safety, and vignettes, tips, exercises and worksheets round out the book. Some of this advice is common sense for any traveler: “[C]ruises up the Alaskan coast are most popular during summer months,” but most is directly, thoughtfully targeted to disabled children’s needs, such as how to help a child with ADHD withstand long waits or an autistic child deal with changes in routine. If a child can’t snorkel the usual way, “an inflatable raft with a window is the way to go.” Or, for blind children: “Create an accessible map of the travel plan…by gluing string on a map outlining the route.” A good tip for children on the autism spectrum is the Autism Theatre Initiative, which presents Broadway shows in autism-friendly environments; spectrum kids and their parents can also benefit greatly from the book’s discussion of using stories to alleviate anxiety. The authors offer strategies for various common scenarios, such as making a picture scrapbook ahead of time for anxious children meeting unfamiliar relatives or, if safety is a concern, making a “Pick the Safe Picture” book for children to identify rule-following behavior. Kids should know what to expect and what’s expected of them. Practical, doable and backed by evidence-based research, the guidelines and tips offered here make an excellent resource.
An extremely useful, well-organized guide to planning a successful family vacation with special needs children.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988838604
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Starbrite Kids' Travel, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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