A solid, if opinionated, look at parenting from a teacher’s perspective.
A veteran teacher shares parenting lessons learned from her students.
In this debut guide, Essalat offers parents insights derived from her work as a teacher and principal. The book covers both practical tips—for instance, when students make negative comments about themselves or their classmates, she requires them to create a list of positives on the same subject—and a broader argument. She makes the case in favor of establishing high expectations, stepping back to allow children to make mistakes and learn from them, and establishing lifelong habits of independence and self-reliance. The chapters are organized thematically, and each includes anecdotes from the author’s teaching experiences—she is not a parent herself, which she acknowledges from the outset. She also delivers concrete suggestions for parents to implement with their children to improve family relations, school performance, and general preparedness for adult life. The topics will be familiar to many readers of parenting books, from social media use and respectful behavior to managing homework and having productive conversations. But with its focus on the collaborative relationship between parents and teachers, the book presents a unique viewpoint. The writing is generally strong and well informed, based on practical experience and a solid understanding of child development. (Both references and additional resources are included in the backmatter.) But Essalat’s tone can be alarmist at times, particularly regarding social media (she tells students they are “putting our entire community in jeopardy” by posting videos that include the school’s name), as well as judgmental (“If someone isn’t going to make the time, have the time, spend the time with their own kids, then why have them at all?”). She also displays a touch of kids-these-days exasperation (“Just how little our kids appreciate things anymore”). For readers who appreciate the back-to-basics, traditionalist tone of the book, it can be a useful collection of advice and strategies for strengthening relationships with children and helping them to succeed in school. The volume also supplies a well-crafted insider’s perspective on how teachers view their students and how parents can best work with them.
A solid, if opinionated, look at parenting from a teacher’s perspective.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951412-05-0
Page Count: 145
Publisher: The Collective Book Studio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A somber, sage book about art-making that deserves a readership beyond Cave’s fan base.
The Australian alt-rock icon talks at length about the relationship between faith, death, and art.
Like many touring musicians stalled during the pandemic, Cave pursued an autobiographical book project while in quarantine. But rather than write a standard memoir, he instead consented to a book of extensive interviews with U.K. arts journalist O’Hagan, photography critic for the Guardian and a feature writer for the Observer. Cave chose this approach in order to avoid standard rock-star patter and to address grittier, more essential matters. On that front, he has plenty of material to work with. Much of the book focuses on his 15-year-old son Arthur, who died from an accidental fall off a cliff in 2015. The loss fueled Cave’s 2019 album, Ghosteen, but Cave sees the connection between life and art as indirect, involving improvisation, uncertainty, and no small amount of thinking about religion. “The loss of my son is a condition; not a theme,” he tells O’Hagan. Loss is a constant in these conversations—during the period when they were recorded, Cave’s mother also died, as did his former band mate Anita Lane. Yet despite that, this is a lively, engrossing book energized by Cave’s relentless candor—and sometimes counterintuitive thinking—about his work and his demons. His well-documented past heroin addiction, he says, “fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life.” Grief, he suggests, is surprisingly clarifying: “We become different. We become better.” Throughout, he talks about the challenges and joys of songwriting and improvisation (mostly around Carnage, the 2021 album he recorded with band mate Warren Ellis during this period) and about the comfort he gets answering questions from fans and strangers on his website. O’Hagan knows Cave’s work well, but he avoids fussy discographical queries and instead pushes Cave toward philosophical elaborations, which he’s generally game for.
A somber, sage book about art-making that deserves a readership beyond Cave’s fan base.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60737-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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