A parenting manual that’s soft on research but warm, wise, and often original.
A debut guide to becoming a fun, supportive parent.
Many people believe they’ll be good parents before they actually have a child. Then they fall apart at the piercing screams of a toddler’s tantrum, or wonder why a child refuses to go to sleep. Authors Wipfler and Schore wrote this book for these moments. They assure parents that their children are normal, despite behavior that seems unmoored. More importantly, they reassure parents that they are normal, too—that feelings of anger and resentment are natural companions to joy and wonderment. Wipfler and Schore call their method “Hand in Hand Parenting,” because they posit that families function best when parents and children feel close and connected. They recommend five tools for strengthening those connections: “Regular Special Time,” with parents giving full attention to an activity that the child chooses; “Staylistening,” or remaining close but largely quiet as a child works through emotional upsets; “Setting Limits,” so that children do not hurt themselves or others; “Playlistening,” or play that elicits stress-relieving laughter; and “the Listening Partnership,” in which parents share feelings and experiences with other understanding adults. Together, the authors say, these tools head off problems and let children do necessary emotional work. The book’s structure allows busy parents to quickly find solutions to specific problems and shares expertise in a fun, flowing style: “We win our children’s hearts (and respect) when we get down on our knees and wrestle with them,” the authors note. “We can bond with one another over watermelon-seed-spitting contests and squirt-gun battles.” Overall, the book offers plenty of wisdom. However, the authors should have cited specific, scientific research to back up some claims. They tell many stories of children who seem to be processing the negative emotions of their own difficult births, for example, but they provide no evidence that proves that trauma is actually stored that way. Some of their solutions, such as sharing deep emotions, may not be comfortable for everyone. That said, the authors will likely help parents find imaginative, calm ways to help their children become adults.
A parenting manual that’s soft on research but warm, wise, and often original.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974593-0-2
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Hand in Hand Parenting
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2016
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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