An entertaining, informative, and enlightening narrative on the German methods of parenting that will have many in the U.S....
How an American woman altered her parenting methods to mimic her new German neighbors.
When Zaske (The First, 2012) moved with her husband and young daughter to Berlin, she discovered that her German neighbors handled parenting quite differently than what she was used to in the U.S. In this well-written mix of personal reflections and sociological data, the author explains why she decided to change how she raised her daughter and newborn son in order to fit in with German attitudes toward parenting. Although skeptical at first, she soon discovered that many of her fears and concerns regarding playground safety, a parent’s need to be ever watchful, and engaging in endless play rather than academics were unwarranted. Her children thrived under the less-controlling lifestyle and became far more secure and self-reliant, as do most German children. Germans allow even the very young to use knives and matches under supervision and older children to walk to and from school or to the playground unaccompanied by an adult. Like many Europeans, they emphasize the importance of being outside regardless of the weather, with infants left well bundled in strollers while parents shop or eat lunch indoors; visits to numerous parks and green spaces are also common. Nudity is readily accepted, and human sexuality is taught early in the schools, providing children with a solid knowledge base from which to make informed decisions before they reach puberty. Zaske also examines the difference between the German educational system’s intentional teaching and awareness of the Holocaust and the U.S. and its “cursory treatment of our country’s historical crimes.” Even though the author’s children didn’t reach their teens while they were in Berlin, she includes important details about the freedoms German teens enjoy, including specially designed sites where they can congregate with friends.
An entertaining, informative, and enlightening narrative on the German methods of parenting that will have many in the U.S. reconsidering how they’re raising their children.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16017-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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