A candid and useful, if sometimes familiar, guide to the challenges of parenting in an era of distraction.
A debut parenting book shares ideas for creating happy, fulfilled families.
As a mother of three and grandmother of four, Rutherford has lived the advice she gives in this easy-to-read, occasionally humorous guide. She aims to help parents not only get through their days, but enjoy them as well. Her main idea is often heard but rarely followed. “The solution,” she says, is “getting back to the basics, so family life is less chaotic. By basics, I mean spending an entire day without any electronics whatsoever and focusing instead on interacting with your kids, and perhaps playing a board game or going for a walk with the family after dinner.” Her tone is warm and amusing. After hearing the news of a new baby in the family, “grandpa and I were total blubber butts.” Some of her suggestions, such as the list of activities for a summer vacation, are worth hanging on the refrigerator for those inevitable moments when bored children and frustrated parents collide. Others, however, are so obvious that the audience can finish her sentences: “Read to your baby every day. The rhythm of your voice will soothe and content them.” Her voice belongs to her generation but may feel dated to younger readers. Does anyone make sloppy Joes anymore? How many parents of young children were old enough to watch television when Phyllis Diller was a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show? These are quibbles, however, in a thoughtful book that is comprehensive—she covers everything from deciding between cloth and disposable diapers to preventing skin cancer and creating family journals—and serves as a helpful primer for new or soon-to-be parents. Rutherford begins her book by explaining that she took the title from her Scottish grandmother, who often said, “Having a baby’s like having a cup of coffee, wee darly.” The author confides that she still doesn’t know what her grandmother meant, but it works as a metaphor for the confusion of parenting.
A candid and useful, if sometimes familiar, guide to the challenges of parenting in an era of distraction.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-93566-8
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2017
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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