An empathetic and intensely useful series of instructions on helping kids grow after a divorce.
In this guide, a psychologist and family therapist focuses on shepherding children through the upheaval of divorce.
This latest book from Nightingale (It’s a Bedroom, Not a Boardroom, 2016, etc.) advises readers on some of the many complexities involved in helping kids deal with their parents’ divorce and build personal resources that will serve them throughout their lives. The author urges parents to remember that as upsetting as a divorce is, it’s one episode in the whole life of a child, who will grow up to implement whatever lessons that the breakup teaches. “If you’re undecided about what to make a big deal out of, and what you want to rise above,” Nightingale counsels, “picture your child telling the story of this situation to your grandchild, and then your grandchild telling it to your great-grandchild.” The author reminds readers that each child is unique. When she sees kids in the course of her professional practice, she often lets them lead the conversations about how they’re feeling. This narrative thread runs throughout the book, with Nightingale opening each chapter with a brief fictional sketch designed to dramatize some of the key items under discussion. The manual ends by summarizing some of its central points: that parents should not just talk about expressing feelings but model how to do that; that they should work to give children the tools they need to cope; and, crucially, that they should keep the things they can change separate from the things they can’t. A short list of recommended books for further reading is appended. “In my 35 years practicing as a therapist, I have never seen the path of divorce be ‘the easy way out,’ ” Nightingale writes. “It’s a complicated, messy event and everyone in the family feels the pain.” The main strength of this short guide is the way the author mixes this bedrock of extensive professional experience with an unflagging empathy throughout, both for the children and for the parents going through a divorce. Virtually every page conveys the feeling of talking with a sympathetic and calming friend who’s had far more experience grappling with divorce and knows all the right things to say. The points most often made here in various iterations are twofold: that each child will react differently to divorce, and that this event, which Nightingale calls a “tragedy,” can have a silver lining, laying the groundwork for kids to build coping skills that will serve them all their lives. The author deftly reminds her readers of several things they might be forgetting, such as the fact that everything children know about divorce they likely learned from TV and movies, and that one of the biggest mistakes parents make during the turmoil of the breakup itself is to forget that their kids may be intentionally avoiding the subject of how they feel about it. In these and other cases, the author asserts, it’s better to “lead with curiosity” rather than always be instructing. Resisting the urge to jump in and offer quick fixes (or bribes) is the best way adults can signal that they see children as resilient and capable.
An empathetic and intensely useful series of instructions on helping kids grow after a divorce.Pub Date: May 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-889755-08-3
Page Count: 78
Publisher: Nightingale Rose Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 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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