An informative and practical guide for adults who want to be successful storytellers.
A pair of early childhood educators offers techniques for telling effective and entertaining tales to kids.
In this parenting book, debut author West and Sarosy (A Father’s Life, 2019) draw on their experiences as Waldorf and forest school educators to present methods that make storytelling work. The book explores the neuroscience behind the human fondness for tales. The authors encourage parents to focus on the connections they are able to form by sharing stories with their children rather than developing expertise in dramatic performance or plot and structure (“Because storytelling is about the relationship, not the narrative”). After explaining how to tell tales, the work concludes by urging readers to build links through stories with people of all ages. Each chapter includes several exercises designed to allow readers to strengthen their storytelling muscles as well as examples of tales the authors have told (for instance, a child reluctant to wear a backpack hears about a turtle who wants to shed her shell). The book guides readers through the ties narratives forge between the real world and kids’ imaginative play. The volume examines ways to defuse tension and mitigate arguments through tales (“The story doesn’t resolve the conflict, it creates intimacy”) and to educate children without becoming didactic (“The story of an RNA sequence gone hopelessly awry is not so different from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”). The book is well written and deftly conveys its lessons to readers, avoiding preachiness as it argues that storytelling is a way to provide kids with the attention they crave. The authors are encouraging throughout, making a solid case for storytelling as a skill that can be developed by anyone and practiced effectively by amateurs. Readers will walk away from the book feeling empowered and capable. The sample tales do a fine job of demonstrating how children can be satisfied by simple narratives, and the exercises (“Find Something Small and Make It Big”; “Change Your Voice”) deliver guidance while inspiring readers to experiment.
An informative and practical guide for adults who want to be successful storytellers.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-55027-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Earth Children
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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