A calm, clear, and encouraging read for mothers who seek to optimize their children’s well-being.
This debut parenting book by a teacher and mother of three provides instructions on how to meet children’s needs and build a supportive family.
Bartow is a certified professional life coach, and she has gleaned many observations about parenting and child behavior from her years as an educator. She also worked to raise her own children to be happy, successful adults. In this book, she provides detailed insights into “how to be the mom your children truly need,” as the book’s subtitle promises. She presents them in the form of 12 chapters, each covering an emotional, mental, or spiritual gift that a mother can provide a child. For example, “The Gift of Intrinsic Motivation” discusses the importance of having children do tasks with the goal of doing their best rather than with the expectation of a reward. Bartow gives examples of her own daughter’s labors with difficult schoolwork and tells of the pride that the youngster had with its completion. Although the book specifically focuses on the role of mothers, it also offers reflections on how parents can collaborate, especially in a chapter titled “The Gift of a United Front.” The author explains her concepts simply and backs them up with examples from her own life—most often from her parenting but also from her time in the classroom. Memories of her own childhood, too, provide a window into a youngster’s perceptions and concerns. Overall, Bartow writes with a clear, deliberate voice that’s easy to follow. One of her key messages is the importance of being honest and direct with children in all circumstances—from preparing young tots for trips to the supermarket to discussing the topic of sex with adolescents. She also illustrates how children can learn valuable lessons when they’re allowed to have their own experiences and aren’t protected from challenges or natural consequences. However, Bartow distinguishes punishment, which she characterizes as a hurtful, vindictive response, from discipline, which she paints as a logical, appropriate action. The book also covers religious faith, urging mothers to allow their children to explore it even when their own beliefs may differ.
A calm, clear, and encouraging read for mothers who seek to optimize their children’s well-being.Pub Date: March 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4735-3
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.”...
The writing life at age 85.
In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy….” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me….For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544287044
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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