Host of CBN's Parent Talk Radio, psychologist Leman (Were You Born for Each Other?, 1990, etc.) here offers a plan of action—``Reality Discipline''—for dealing with common family problems. The term ``Reality Discipline'' is based on child-rearing specialist Rudolf Dreikurs's work on the logical consequences of human behavior, which, in a nutshell, finds that certain actions and attitudes result in certain consequences. Here, Leman has revised and expanded the concept into a technique for managing ``your personal life, your marriage, and your children with love, respect, and effectiveness.'' The author is a master at simplifying and a whiz at thinking up catchy phrases. He's also fond of making lists (e.g., ``The Nine Ways Reality Discipline Can Strengthen Your Family'' and ``A Baker's Dozen Ways To Fill His Love Bank''). Every chapter ends with two lists, one designed to sum up the chapter and the other to get the reader started on applying its principles in real-life situations. Each also concludes with notes that are definitely not scholarly, including such references as Leman's other books and the Bible. But then Leman is not writing for the scholarly but, rather, for those who will either not notice or not mind his deliberate repetitiveness of key ideas. His advice is neither profound nor new, but it is sensible and clearly expressed, and the examples he provides from his own experiences are entertaining and believable. Sound advice delivered in sound bites.
Pub Date: March 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-29944-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing but weakly argued introduction to an underexplored subject. Youcha (coauthor, Drugs, Alcohol, and Your Children, 1989) contends that today's conflicts over day care are nothing new- -indeed, that children have always been looked after by complex and various combinations including relatives, older siblings, employers, paid strangers, intimately known slaves, servants, and settlement-house workers. She convincingly uses historical example to challenge the amnesiac contemporary notion that biological mothers have always been full-time care-givers. She also wrestles with some psychologically complicated historical situations: the colonial apprentice/master relationship (children as young as six could be hired out); Southern black ``mammies'' and white mistresses raising, often wet-nursing, each other's children; child factory labor; 19th-century utopian communities like the Shakers, in which children were the responsibility of the whole community and individual parent/child attachments were frowned on. She also examines 20th-century upper-class solutions like boarding schools and nannies, foster care, and postWW II comprehensive day care institutions. Her examples do add nuance to received wisdom about what constitutes traditional motherhood. But Youcha's narrative is inconsistent: Sometimes she tries to describe situations objectively; sometimes she adopts a decisively opinionated slant; her interpretations often falter and backpedal. Writing about the antebellum South, she cites evidence that children could become more attached to their mammies than to their mothers, yet in comparing the mammy to today's nannies, she discounts that possibility. She changes her tone abruptly, too, in characterizing the utopians as by turns unfeeling and progressive. There is ample evidence that their child-care practices were both of these things, but Youcha doesn't weave contradictory elements together. A solid use of provocative historical cases to raise new questions in the contemporary child-care debates, but with its rough style and chaotically veering judgments, it doesn't provide answers.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19336-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
Candid and inspiring.
Redbook editor-in-chief Morrison finds a bigger, more honest and balanced self amid the ruins of her marriage.
The author had recently been fired from her magazine job, had an infant son and a house in Brooklyn when her husband sighed and pronounced, “I’m done with this.” To his credit, he didn’t bolt or have an affair, but stayed put until they ironed out the divorce process—though it would take a toll. In a firm, bell-clear voice, Morrison charts her passage from misery to redemption. It wasn’t easy, and the story plays well on her confusion—circling, revisiting, contradicting—reading like a tumult of self-recrimination. Hardly a shrinking violet, she lived at a somewhat cool remove, not trusting happiness. She worked too much; nothing was ever enough; she was volatile and dramatic: “The distance between my brain and my mouth is very, very short.” Yet that brain is capacious and active, and Morrison emerges as a sympathetic character, overthinking, overwhelmed and not blind to the irony of “running a magazine all about women and love and marriage and stuff…Isn’t it rich?” There is plenty of unhappiness in these pages—not self-indulgent, but revelatory—and it all leads to genuinely hard-won epiphanies that are gratifyingly modest and useful for readers in similar situations—don’t marinate in anger; beneath fear is solid ground; fix the immediate problems, often things happen “just because”; optimism and forgiveness work wonders. If her comparisons are sometimes unsettling—“divorce is no virus; it’s lung cancer”—readers will get the drift.
Candid and inspiring.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9556-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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