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GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO

Name: GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO
Author: Jay Spence
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1177-6

REFLECTIONS ON YOUR EARLIEST BEGINNINGS TO YOUR LATE TEENAGE YEARS

by Jay Spence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2017

A brisk, useful, and extremely accessible handbook about growing up.

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A debut illustrated guide explores the most formative years of modern human life.

Despite its somewhat somber cover image, this book delivers a warm and inviting narrative for young readers and teenagers. (An obstetrician and gynecologist, Spence hopes the manual will also prove useful to parents, caregivers, and teachers.) Each section tackles a new stage of human development, laying out the facts and the science involved in comprehensible language that’s almost always optimistic and upbeat. Each chapter opens with a brief comment directed at young people, an observation that is meant to put the forthcoming matter in perspective, as in the chapter on genetics: “The genetic information that makes up the directions for your growth is similar to a plan to build a Lego toy or to blueprints for building a house.” Or the remark about birth itself: “What a change! You have been growing for nine months in complete darkness, bathed in the amniotic fluid in your mother’s uterus, supplied constantly with nourishment in a warm and protected environment and with only muffled sounds to please your ears.” Accompanied by delightful illustrations by Baker, these chapters take readers from the womb to birth to infancy, through the toddler experience, and into the physical and emotional tangle of the teenage years. With a helpful blend of fact and guidance, the narrative drops its readers off on the doorstep of adulthood. The text is occasionally guilty of oversimplification, as when the audience is told: “Humans, at the top of the animal kingdom, are unique in that their young cannot survive without their mothers or the wider family’s care.” And although the section on same-sex attraction is sensitively nonjudgmental (“It is not for us to judge, but to allow others to be true to themselves”), AIDS is mentioned only a few sentences after homosexuality is first introduced. But in general, the manual Spence creates in these pages is an invaluably clear and straightforward collection of answers to the most basic questions his young readers will have about the stages of their lives.

A brisk, useful, and extremely accessible handbook about growing up.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5255-1177-6

Page Count: 186

Publisher: FriesenPress

Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.