Memoir of the much-admired pediatrician and prolific author.
Brazelton (Emeritus, Pediatrics/Harvard Medical School) opens with frank comments about his own unhappy childhood, his distant relationship with his parents and his early talent for taking care of small children. He skims through his medical education and naval service and hits his stride when he turns to the years when he began to combine the practice of pediatrics and psychiatry. A more accurate title for this book would be Learning to Observe, for Brazelton became a keen observer of newborns and from these observations developed with his colleagues the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, a comprehensive scale for understanding the temperament of newborns that is still taught and used today. He also explains Touchpoints, a theory of the forces that drive child development that is taught to professionals at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and to parents in a series of popular books. For general readers—i.e., those who are not new parents—the most fascinating parts of the memoir are most likely to be his accounts of his experiences studying newborns in other cultures: Mayans in southern Mexico, Guatemalans, Kenyans, urban and rural Japanese, Chinese, Navajos in Arizona and Greeks on the island of Thera. The author is not shy about his accomplishments, and he appears to take special delight in telling of encounters with vocal admirers, of his put-downs of those less respectful, and of his brushes with the famous. Readers familiar with Brazelton’s books and articles on babies and children may relish this close-up look at the man who guided them through the vicissitudes of parenthood; others, not so much.
Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1667-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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