Despite its vague, somewhat saccharine title, this short book is a subtle, psychologically and imaginatively rich guide to one of the important ways in which children learn how to be more fully human: namely, kindness. Paley, a former kindergarten teacher, a MacArthur Award recipient, and the prolific author of many books about children and education (The Girl with the Brown Crayon, 1997, etc.), describes how very young students transform themselves and one another by taking in, narrating, and sometimes dramatically acting out tales of kindness and other acts of goodness. “The infant returns a smile; the schoolchild returns a story,” she observes. Beginning with the true account of Teddy, a multi-handicapped boy in a London school who wears a padded helmet and is treated sensitively by a “normal” student, she delves into the matter of how children, at their best, find ways of reaching out to those in need, thus allowing themselves and their peers to grow morally. Yet her book is less about “the kindness of children” than about the imaginative and ethical power of narratives about goodness for young minds. Her writing’s allusive—e.g., she makes reference to traditional Jewish teachings about kindness—and sometimes poetic. On occasion, the book suffers from hyperbole, as when Paley writes about children’s acts of goodness that “rock the [moral] universe.” Perhaps because she believes that children are “often more kind to each other than unkind,” Paley doesn—t delve enough into the interplay between children’s propensities for kindness and for cruelty. This is unfortunate, especially since the single time she writes about a child who reports being hated and shunned by her peers is the volume’s most interesting section. But in general, Paley instructively illustrates how the children with whom she interacts so well are “making sense of all the unspoken messages” articulated to them while they—re also creating “little homes for one another where everyone can imagine playing and no one is left out.”
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-50358-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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