A solid, nonjudgmental advice book for parents.
A detailed guidebook, the third in a series, on how to make more conscious decisions as a parent.
While the first two volumes of this series were spearheaded by Lichtman’s wife and co-author, Gloria J. Walther, Lichtman (co-author Eye to Eye Volume 2, 2011) takes the lead here in a book that’s half parenting advice, half self-help. As with the first two volumes, in which parents were taught ways to help their children learn by understanding the consequences of their behaviors, the focus here is on helping parents navigate their own thought processes. In Lichtman’s view, the key to successful parenting is to change one’s unconscious habits, that seemingly never-ending chatter in one’s mind, so as to effectively isolate and solve everyday parenting problems. With a sympathetic tone, he writes, “Given that your Unconscious Mind does all the doing, unless you can find a way to consciously choose what your Unconscious does, you are consciously out of control.” While this may sound familiar to readers who’ve studied meditation, the ideas here are presented in a relatively new and fresh way. For instance, rather than simply encouraging readers to slow down and visualize a different outcome for how to deal with, say, a procrastinating child, Lichtman argues for a more well-rounded approach, something he calls creating “imaginary experiences,” in which a parent imagines a solution using a variety of senses: “An Imaginary Experience can include visual (images), auditory (sounds), kinesthetic (intuitive feelings, touch, movement, pressure, temperature), olfactory (smells) and gustatory (taste) aspects.” Many of his suggestions involve homing in on specific situations and reimagining them through writing as a way of slowing down and consciously framing a particular issue. While the book feels slightly repetitive at times, the author does a fine job of explaining his theories in clear-cut, accessible language. Although the science behind his ideas could be presented more thoroughly, the anecdotes he uses to help readers along are generally very effective.
A solid, nonjudgmental advice book for parents.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1453796023
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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