A multipart common-sense approach to parenting that addresses a wide variety of the issues parents face in their complex...
A new method for taking on “the ultimate time-management project.”
In her latest self-help book, Morgenstern (SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: A Four-Step Guide to Getting Unstuck, 2008, etc.), an internationally recognized organization consultant who has appeared on Oprah, Today, and other outlets, tackles parenting. To make comprehension easier, the author uses acronyms to break down the subject into eight manageable areas: provide, arrange, relate, and teach, followed by sleep, exercise, love, and fun. The first four areas are geared toward the child, whether it’s providing food and a home, sharing teachable moments, or arranging/scheduling a doctor’s appointment. The second four sections are for parents, so they can experience life independent of their roles as mom or dad—and have it long before the child leaves the nest. Morgenstern provides readers with several assessment tests to help parents discover the areas where they might be under- or overperforming. “No matter how practiced you are at the eight responsibilities in P.A.R.T. and S.E.L.F., what’s actually required of parents is the ability to continuously and seamlessly transition among all eight roles, and that’s tougher than it looks,” writes the author. “Like a master juggler who effortlessly tosses bowling pins…to a specific height at a specific arc and rhythm, so, too, must parents hone the essential time-management muscles that allow you to switch among eight roles while keeping every single one in motion.” As we all know, parenting is a daunting task, but Morgenstern’s bite-size, achievable goals and skill levels are simple to digest. Backed by scientific data and personal experience, the book is full of straightforward advice presented in an intriguing way. It will appeal especially to those who like to-do lists and find joy in checking off items as they are accomplished.
A multipart common-sense approach to parenting that addresses a wide variety of the issues parents face in their complex lives.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-743-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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