An articulate, highly informative, and enjoyable puppy-parenting primer.
A guide for compassionately helping puppies, rescue dogs, and older traumatized canines live their best lives, based upon neuroscience and strategies developed for aiding at-risk children.
At the time the highly respected parenting guide The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family (2007), coauthored by Sunshine, was about to be published, the author adopted a fragile puppy. The tiny brown pup, part of a litter born behind a gas station, was but several weeks old; the puppy had been separated from her mother and siblings too early to learn any rules of the jungle and was painfully frightened, dehydrated, and loaded with worms. After dealing with the medical issues, it was time to teach Hazel, as the increasingly wild brown ball of fluff came to be called, how to become a good canine citizen. But, as Sunshine writes, “Puppy training guides failed me. Nothing in their pages explained what to do with a scrambling, out-of-control bundle of teeth and claws.” And then she was struck by a thought that has resulted in this lucid and informative volume: Perhaps the pages of The Connected Child held valuable insights for raising a puppy. (Like pre- and non-verbal children, dogs communicate their needs to anyone who pays close attention.) Taking a calm, nonjudgmental approach to understanding Hazel’s behavior in terms of her underlying neurological and emotional needs—much as she would with at-risk children—the author began rewarding the pup for “good” behavior and giving her “do-overs” for her mistakes. Sunshine’s guide adopts the approach of “therapeutic parenting,” in which the pup is given the benefit of the doubt. Despite copious neurological and biological discussions, the text is easily understandable—it’s an approachable compendium of scientific research and fascinating “reflections from the field” case studies from like-minded experts. A bonus is the inclusion of surprising and intriguing behavioral tidbits, such as the small-scale study conducted in a rescue facility showing that dogs who raised their inner eyebrows were adopted more quickly. The techniques advocated here are designed to offer puppies (and difficult older dogs) patient, compassionate instruction that relieves their anxiety and leads to close bonding between canine and human.
An articulate, highly informative, and enjoyable puppy-parenting primer.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780757324956
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Health Communications Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
