Parents and educators will discover a wealth of information to inspire and help “make childhood a better place.”
An informative road map for those who want to maximize their children’s material environment.
When architecture critic Lange (The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, 2014, etc.) had her first child, she “came to see each successive stage of childhood development as an opportunity for encounters with larger and more complex environments.” Her approach is primarily historical and design-focused as she explores five specific topics that make up the “designed-for-childhood environment”: blocks, house, school, playground, and city. Corrugated cardboard boxes appeared in the 1870s, and children quickly saw their appeal as playthings. Wooden beads and blocks gained popularity around 1900. Blocks designed by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, became popular when Milton Bradley began manufacturing them in the 1870s. Lange then traces the development and sophistication of blocks from the Danish LEGO (leg godt or “play well”) to “Minecraft” to Zoob, each crucial to stimulating children’s imaginations. Next up is house; as the author writes, children “need furnishings couched to their frames but also to their abilities.” The high chair dawned in the 1830s, followed by kid-size dishes. In 1929, Parents magazine featured the “Whole-Family House.” Lange teaches us about Maria Montessori, the “magic of the storage wall,” and the significance of Peter Opsvik’s multipurpose Tripp Trapp chair. School focuses on how “pedagogy and architecture go hand in hand.” The first spaces in America called “play grounds” were created in Boston in 1885 out of piles of sand, and the first jungle gym was installed in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1920. Lange argues that “segregating children’s play from the flow of urban life creates its own problems.” She hands out A ratings to cities (Rotterdam, Oslo, Seattle) who are redesigning city spaces in terms of children’s welfare. Disneyland gets an A-plus for its exemplary “child-friendly outdoor environment.”
Parents and educators will discover a wealth of information to inspire and help “make childhood a better place.”Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-635-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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