A handy addition to any first-time parent’s library.
Psychotherapist and early childhood education expert Norbeck (Education/McDaniel College) combines research with common-sense advice in his brisk debut offering for parents of very young children.
Norbeck seems to truly understand the hectic, interruption-prone life of parents, as the format of his slim guide—which discusses childhood learning and development through age 6—offers memorable, useful tips in segments that can be read in a short amount of time. Ten rules for parents, such as “Find Toys That Teach,” are divided into chapters with professional research summaries. But readers who cringe at the word “research” can take heart—the book’s language isn’t particularly academic, and many of the studies Norbeck cites are far from boring. For example, in Rule 5 (“Respond to Your Child’s Needs”), he briefly discusses the “shyness gene” researched by the University of Maryland’s Nathan Fox, who concluded that 80 to 85 percent of shyness and anxious behavior in humans is biological, though environmental and social factors can greatly intensify it. Likewise, says Norbeck, early identification and intervention can alter anxious behaviors in a positive way. Chapter research summaries are coupled with practical ideas for everyday life; for example, parents of a shy child are urged to gradually expose the child to new experiences, instead of being overprotective. Some of the author’s advice is familiar, such as his adaptation of a governmental guideline for prenatal care, which urges pregnant women to not smoke. Other ideas, however, may surprise even veteran parents. For example, in Rule 2, (“Talk With Your Baby, A Lot”), Norbeck introduces the idea of learning sign language with babies. The author also provides references and several “Best Media Recommendations,” including Dr. Harvey Karp’s 2002 book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which advises how to calm crying babies. Although specific toys and activities are mentioned, this isn’t an exhaustive list of arts and science projects. Instead, very solid and usable ideas are laid out as a foundation to build a lifetime love of learning.
A handy addition to any first-time parent’s library.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479281015
Page Count: 134
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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