A thorough and well-intentioned safety guide for parents.
In this third book in his self-help series, Quesenberry draws on his years of professional training and personal experiences to help parents keep their teens safe.
The author is a retired air marshal who spent his working life training new recruits in situational awareness. In these pages, he shares his acquired wisdom and strategies with parents, so they can teach their teens to “identify and process environmental cues to accurately predict the actions of others” and keep safe accordingly. By revealing some of the tactics and behaviors of child predators, Quesenberry hopes to educate readers about the dangers that teens face online and out in the world. He explains “pre-incident indicators” that predators may use to manipulate a potential victim, and encourages kids to pay attention not just to their environment, but also to their intuition. Some sections lean more toward more traditional parenting advice, which isn’t Quesenberry’s area of professional expertise, although he does cite experts and includes a bibliography of sources. He’s clear about which strategies he’s used with his own teens, including teaching self-defense techniques and driving rules. Each chapter has a section of “practical exercises,” which are designed to help parents teach their teens skills to deal with dangerous situations. Many readers will likely take issue with the physical aggressiveness of a “sneak attack” game—agreed to by parents and kids in advance—in which a parent overpowers an inattentive teen, pins them to the ground, and tickles them to teach them a lesson in situational awareness. But although this sort of role-playing seems extreme, the author also stresses the reality of attacks in which kids could find themselves unable to react defensively. Each chapter concludes with a summation of key points, which may serve as a useful refresher for those consulting the book again after an initial reading.
A thorough and well-intentioned safety guide for parents.Pub Date: April 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1594398926
Page Count: 184
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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