A provocative critique of modern society.
Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey, 2006, etc.) focuses on the lives of children in her continued exploration of the role of nature in giving meaning to our lives.
“Why are so many children in Euro-American cultures unhappy?” asks the author. “Why is it that children in many traditional cultures seem happier, fluent in their child-nature?” Griffiths goes beyond the current debates on child-rearing practices—e.g., overstructured play, too much time online and too little quality family time—and examines what she considers a more fundamental flaw: the separation of children from a natural environment. After all, “human nature is nested in nature which co-creates the child.” These days, writes the author, children “are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in the cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and…rigid schedules of time.” They are prevented from testing their environments by a risk-averse, overprotective society. Griffiths compares the stultified lives of modern children to her own exuberant Welsh childhood, when she and her brothers engaged in all the mischievous joys of being young and nearly carefree. Still, she also finds her own childhood to have been flawed. Although she experienced greater freedom, she lacked contact with the wilderness. In contrast to the relative constraints on her life then, she points to what she considers to be the greater freedom of young people growing up in traditional cultures—e.g. the !Kung children of the Kalahari or the Ye’kuana of Venezuela. According to the author, these children receive more maternal nurturing and close attention in the first years of their lives but then are encouraged to learn self-reliance at an earlier age. She contrasts the consumerism and “the protocol of ownership” that children learn today to the wisdom that children living in traditional cultures absorb by knowing “the words for varieties of trees or birds.”
A provocative critique of modern society.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1619024298
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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