An unflinching, earnest, and vulnerable parenting account.
A child psychologist recounts the difficulties of raising a son with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in this memoir.
Early in Quie’s (co-author: You Might Be Raising an A**hole If…, 2018) book, she discusses the rocky months surrounding her son William’s birth, describing a nurse’s accidentally breaking her water, her infant son’s inability to properly nurse, and the onset of postpartum depression. Even as a toddler, the author recalls, William showed abnormal behavior, including nonstop energy and a refusal to eat anything that didn’t look absolutely flawless, as though it was “molded in a wax museum.” When William was 4, the author and her husband adopted a 14-month-old girl from China; the baby had severe attachment issues, which further drained the author’s emotional energy. After William began attending school, Quie saw that he required professional help that she couldn’t give. She describes her frustration with William’s inability to focus enough to tie his shoes, to follow directions of more than one step, and to learn to write. Even after he was diagnosed with ADHD, Quie clung to her belief that her education in child psychology, and her and her husband’s dedication to parenting, would be enough to help William thrive. For years, she grew angry with William’s teachers who refused to acknowledge the difficulties that children with ADHD can face. Eventually, William was prescribed Adderall and, over time, the family developed routines to help William make it through each day. Quie’s yearning to help her son will be keenly relatable for many, and over the course of the book, she strikes an appealing tone of compassion. She also punctuates the text with well-timed moments of humor: “my mind had a heyday casting spells on Dr. Morris. A flat tire on his way home from work, a vicious complaint to the medical board, a grandchild who only ate Pop-Tarts.” The author also mixes in diagnostic terminology in a natural way, such as explanations of ADHD subtypes and stimulants used for treatment. Readers who are close to children who may be struggling with ADHD will find solace in Quie’s story.
An unflinching, earnest, and vulnerable parenting account.Pub Date: May 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63489-217-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Wise Ink
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2019
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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