A valuable instructional resource for anyone invested in understanding and helping young people.
Longtime child services professional Kearney provides concrete, practical strategies in this guide to working with children and young adults ages 6 to 18.
Few would argue that working in youth development, whether in a paid or volunteer capacity, is an easy job. The awareness of children’s needs and interests requires patience, compassion and, crucially, extensive training, which many in the field do not receive. Kearney’s resource fills that gap by offering clear instruction to anyone involved in youth programs, including tutors, counselors, youth ministers and group leaders. (The introduction provides an extensive list of intended readers.) The book’s unfussy organization—with sections arranged by age and broken down into physical, cognitive, social and emotional development—ensures quick access to relevant information. The topics covered range from a child’s self-evaluation to peer influence, gender relations, language skills, appearance and group dynamics. While there’s a consistent message of positivity, the advice and activities are far from monotonous. Instead, Kearney supplies specific tools applicable to distinctive age groups. For instance, whereas those working with children ages 6 to 8 are encouraged to help develop motor skills through appropriate computer games, individuals working with 15- to 18-year-olds will find tips pertaining to texting etiquette and cyberbullying. Elsewhere, the generality of advice such as “teach younger children how to resolve conflicts” and “offer nutrition and cooking activities” allows interpretation and creativity. Children “mature at different rates and possess different temperaments,” Kearney says, which means that those working with youth require flexibility for any sort of structured, activity-based program. Given the wide scope of the book, some of the advice is necessarily broad, but as Kearney notes before introducing a helpful selection of further resources, this “is a starting point, not an endpoint.”
A valuable instructional resource for anyone invested in understanding and helping young people.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1935-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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