A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.
An occupational therapist offers a series of strategies for improving students’ functional behaviors.
“It’s impossible to effectively provide therapy, teach, or parent a student who is kicking you,” writes Pagano in his slim, interactive nonfiction debut. In the pages of his book, he looks at the challenges facing teachers, therapists, and parents who are dealing with children who throw tantrums, hit, bite, or simply refuse to pay attention. The author provides practical methods grouped under the structure of FAB: Functionally Alert Behavior strategies, designed to center children and ground them in their surroundings and in immediate, achievable tasks. “Predictable rules and procedures set a safe, reliable structure that enhances self-control,” Pagano notes. Drawing on his decades of experience working with kids, the author lays out a series of approaches based on things like sensory modulation or “pressure touch” strategies. These strategies emphasize building strong kinesthetic skills to boost visual perception and common abilities. The book includes interactive forms for use by both kids and their therapists as well as ample illustrations, from children’s drawings to uncredited photographs of the author interacting with students. The key innovation here is the implementation of what Pagano refers to as “physical self-regulation strategies,” which provide “active sensory-motor” tactics that can be fitted into the students’ daily routines in order to improve their day-to-day functional behaviors. Throughout the book, the specific procedural advice being offered is clearly stated, deftly detailed, and uniformly optimistic in tone. Parents, teachers, and caregivers will find a great deal of food for thought in these pages when it comes to positive reinforcement, mindfulness, and physical massaging as a way to focus children and help them gain the self-control that will avoid or restrain the acting-out behaviors that can make teaching them so challenging. The volume’s combination of practical and interactive material will make it exceptionally useful to any adults facing the problems that unruly kids can present.
A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73282-190-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pagano FAB Strategies, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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