Current alarm over U.S. student global rankings will help give this persuasive book the consideration it deserves.
An intriguing look at parenting paradigms in countries where children are deemed to be the best adjusted.
Gross-Loh (The Diaper-Free Baby, 2007, etc.), a first generation Korean-American with a doctorate from Harvard, spent five years raising four kids in Japan. This experience challenged her assumptions about child-rearing and inspired her to investigate whether or not the ideas about parenting held by Americans—or at least, those who are middle class to affluent, raising college-bound children—are empirically based realities or cultural norms. Most readers can guess the answer, as well as the conclusion that there is a lot wrong with how American youth are prepared for adulthood, especially as compared to their Scandinavian, Western European and East Asian counterparts. But Gross-Loh’s patient, grounded explication and engaging personal anecdotes make this a much more positive, culturally expansive contribution to the discussion than most parenting books. This is not to say that readers won’t occasionally become frustrated by the repetitive idealization of certain overseas child-rearing practices. Gross-Loh acknowledges and identifies with the challenge of modeling approaches like France’s two-hour, fresh, multicourse school lunch; Japan’s first-graders running family errands as a means of developing self-reliance and judgment; or Finland’s individualized education plan for each student, executed by highly qualified teachers and trained professional specialists. The book would be stronger if the author delved further into practical strategies that frazzled American families in isolated suburbs could use immediately, short of enrolling their children in a Swedish forest school. Nonetheless, this is a strong survey of such well-chosen topics as where babies sleep, materialism, eating habits, self-esteem, unstructured time, kindness, chores, education and independence. Gross-Loh's recurring theme is that American parents, who experience more angst and judgment than those abroad, inculcate their children with plenty of individualism and tolerance but not enough empathy or autonomy.
Current alarm over U.S. student global rankings will help give this persuasive book the consideration it deserves.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58333-455-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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