by Meghan Cox Gurdon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2019
An inspiring argument for sharing the joys of reading.
How reading aloud confers cognitive, emotional, and social benefits.
In her heartfelt first book, Gurdon, children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, makes an earnest, but unfortunately repetitive, case for reading aloud. Drawing on her experiences of nightly reading to her five children, scientific studies, interviews, and anecdotes, the author argues that when one person reads to another, “a miraculous alchemy takes place” in which “the ordinary stuff of life—a book, a voice, a place to sit and a bit of time” transforms “into astonishing fuel for the heart, the mind, and the imagination.” Children who are read to show “a quantifiable difference in brain function” compared with children deprived of this activity, according to many pediatricians. Based on such studies, the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes that reading daily to young children “stimulates optimal patterns of brain development and strengthens parent-child relationships” and, furthermore, “builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills that last a lifetime.” Gurdon urges parents to put down phones and iPads in favor of books, underscoring the difference between listening to a story and watching it on a screen. When children follow a story on video, researchers have found “the decoupling of vision, imagery, and language.” Well-versed in children’s literature, Gurdon cites more than 100 books that have the potential to build vocabulary and impart “vicarious emotional experiences.” In The Story of Babar, for example—which takes under seven minutes to read—the child “will see tenderness and catastrophe, fear and comfort, pride and anger, death, marriage, sorrow, and joy.” Besides developing language facility, empathy, and cultural literacy, reading aloud creates a deep bond between reader and listener, sweeping them together “in a lovely neurochemical tsunami.” “When we read to other people,” she writes, “we show them that they matter to us; that we want to give our time and attention and energy in order to bring them something good.” An appendix lists six pages of suggested stories for reading aloud.
An inspiring argument for sharing the joys of reading.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256281-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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