bookpagedev

History

The real story of the Roman Empire

Review by bookpagedev

In recent decades, some historians have challenged the conventional view that there was a decline and fall of Rome. These historians write instead of a period of late antiquity characterized by transition and transformation. Other scholars question whether it was barbarian invasions so much as a change in Roman military policy that led to Rome’s changed status. In The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins not only vigorously defends the conventional view, but explains the complex realities of the Roman empire and its neighbors in fascinating detail.

Ward-Perkins, who is particularly concerned with the impact of economic change throughout the empire, convincingly demonstrates that after the fall of Rome, there was a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. Everyone, kings to peasants, was affected. The decline in the quality of pottery, the absence of tiled roofs and good tableware and the almost total lack of coinage in daily use in the post-Roman West are all part of the same phenomenon.

Ward-Perkins says evidence strongly indicates that political and military difficulties destroyed regional economies. As the Roman state began to fragment, the intricately structured economy suffered.

Although life was difficult for many, popular revolts against imperial rule did not bring down the empire. Ward-Perkins says that is not surprising because Roman rule, and above all, Roman peace, brought levels of comfort and sophistication to the West that had not been seen before and that were not to be seen again for many centuries. He points out that the Germanic aggressors did not mean to lose the sophisticated economy; they wanted a share of it. However, their invasions led to the dismemberment of the empire and the destruction of the potent, yet fragile economic structure. The author makes a compelling case for his point of view and thus helps readers restudy and rethink a major period in world history. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

In recent decades, some historians have challenged the conventional view that there was a decline and fall of Rome. These historians write instead of a period of late antiquity characterized by transition and transformation. Other scholars question whether it was barbarian invasions so much as…
ParentingFamily & Relationships

Parenting: the toughest job you’ll ever love

Review by bookpagedev

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the umpteenth time, and he was already wet again. Was this normal? Was changing him so often doing more harm than good? We laughed at ourselves. All our preparations the brightly painted nursery, the baby books we had absorbed, the bottles, blankets and toys we had accumulated all our preparations had not quite prepared us for the bundle of need and energy before us. We soon realized that parenting was a never-ending series of judgment calls, and that from diapers to diplomas we’d be struggling with decisions about what was best for our child.

Fortunately, new parents, and long-time parents faced with new problems, need not feel completely alone in finding the best path to follow. Many sources of advice are available, including a huge array of parenting books that address the social context in which kids and parents find themselves today. BookPage has sorted through this season’s crop of parenting books and selected a few of the best.

A child psychologist and parent himself, James Garbarino delves beyond simple parenting predicaments and writes about the perplexing and even frightening dilemmas parents are confronted with in his new book, Parents Under Siege: Why You are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child’s Life. Written with child advocate Claire Bedard, this book offers a sober, realistic look at the challenges of raising children in the modern world. The authors assert that the world of American parenting changed forever after the events at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two students went on a shooting rampage that killed 12 of their fellow schoolmates and a teacher and then killed themselves. Garbarino recognizes that cookie-cutter strategies don’t work, but offers 10 tools to help parents become more acutely aware, more mindful, and more effective in dealing with growing children and adolescents. These tools include a periscope for Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Each Child’s Individual Temperament and a glue stick for Holding Together a Child’s World in Difficult Times. And what is a child’s world? Michael Thompson, Ph. D., and Catherine O’Neill Grace do a good job of depicting that venerable, vulnerable place in Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. One of the most fascinating chapters is titled In the Jungle: The Power of the Group in the Lives of Children, which reveals the social hierarchies and underlying forces exerting pressure on children (and adults as well) in group situations. Without knowledge of these social forces, Thompson argues, we make the mistake of thinking that tragic events are driven solely by bad kids’ or gangs.’ He points out that human beings hunger for group identity and closeness, and that there are gangs of good kids in our schools too, driven to band together by the same needs and invisible yet powerful forces. Thompson is an ardent advocate of smaller schools and uses the last two chapters to outline what schools and parents can do to help ensure safe, nurturing environments where each child is acknowledged and affirmed on a daily basis. Interestingly, Thompson uses almost the same words to describe the values he would promote in teaching children good citizenship and good friendship empathy, responsibility, sharing, self-sacrifice, self-disclosure and faithfulness that Michele Bora, Ed. D., employs in her book, Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues that Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing. Her plan for raising good kids from ages 3 to 15 includes fostering the following list of values, each discussed in its own chapter: empathy, conscience, self-control, respect, kindness, tolerance and fairness. The slogan getting back to basics might well be dusted off and used to mean teaching the basic fundamentals of human decency instead of the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic! This theme is expanded on in Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age by Dan Kindlon, Ph. D. Kindlon praises baby boomers for being emotionally close to their children and for raising kids who confide in their parents more than earlier generations, but he also finds them too indulgent. We give our kids too much, he says, and we demand too little of them. Like the authors above, Kindlon believes that raising honest, charitable, compassionate, and emotionally intelligent children should be a top priority. He advocates setting reasonable limits with clear consequences for overstepping them and advises parents to choose three basic rules that they are unflinchingly consistent in enforcing. But he maintains that the foundation for stricter parenting must be built on love, time and caring, and points to research that finds families who eat dinner together and openly communicate ideas and concerns produce healthier children both physically and mentally.

Of course, even if you follow all these guidelines, like many parents, you may find that your emotionally intelligent, tolerant, respectful 15-year-old will walk out the door one day to go to soccer practice and return home having changed into some bizarre character with a wild look in his eye, strange hair and stranger clothes. If so, you’ll need to read Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind, by Michael Bradley, Ed. D. Based on brain research which shows that teens do experience a temporary imbalance that causes some of their irrational behavior, this book will help you get through that maelstrom called adolescence. Still, there is no one book that can teach someone how to parent. Each child is different and brings individual challenges and joys to the task (and a few gray hairs to the head). But these books provide information, support and guidance that can help you build confidence in your parenting skills. The authors remind us of choices we can make and steps we can take to raise good, caring children (who will probably read parenting books so save them and pass them on!) and who will also become good, caring parents one day in their own right.

Linda Stankard is the mother of two she has the gray hairs to prove it and she is still honing her parenting skills after 22 years.

 

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the…

Biography

Recalling a painful era

Review by bookpagedev

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses into the social structure of Mississippi at a time when it was at the center of historic change.

W. Ralph Eubanks, publishing director at the Library of Congress, discovered in 1998 that his parents’ names had been on a watch list developed by the infamous Sovereignty Commission, established by the Mississippi legislature in the 1950s as a means to preserve segregation. Intrigued, Eubanks began to explore how his parents were placed on the list. His search eventually led him to retrace his Mississippi childhood, a process described in the compelling new book, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past (Basic, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 0738205702). A combination of memoir and political history, Eubanks’ book is by turns a charming remembrance of a rural boyhood and a chilling reminder of racism’s legacy.

Eubanks’ personal narrative about growing up in the segregated South turns conventional perception on its head. He actually had, to a large degree, an idyllic childhood on a farm outside Mount Olive, Mississippi. His sheltered world was shattered only when his class became the first to integrate the local school.

The search for the truth about his parents (placed on the watch list only because they were educated black people) leads Eubanks to his own reconciliation with the world he left behind a quarter of century before. Eventually, he answers his children’s questions about Mississippi by taking a family trip to the state and reconnecting them to the rural roots that are an integral part of his character.

While Eubanks was reading Faulkner, Peggy Morgan was living a Faulkner novel. Writer Carolyn Haines chronicles this Mississippi woman’s life in My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story. Like Ever Is a Long Time, this is a book about the search for truth and the courage to confront it. Poor, white and uneducated, Morgan grew up in a large family dominated by an abusive, alcoholic father. In the social strata of the old South, only blacks were lower than Morgan’s family. Haines, a former journalist who has written numerous novels, portrays Morgan’s struggles to overcome the abuse that followed her from childhood into her own marriage with Lloyd Morgan, which eventually ended in abandonment and disaster.

Morgan and her mother each held a secret related to the civil rights struggle. According to Morgan, her mother died carrying the knowledge of who killed Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Morgan herself had information about the murder of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was shot to death in his own driveway. It took more than 30 years for her to summon the courage to testify against Byron De La Beckwith, who was finally convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994.

Haines’ crisp, readable account is an inspiring look at one woman’s effort to conquer the pain and hatred that marked her youth. Read together, these two books provide a rich context for understanding the segregated South and the power that race held in creating its structure. J. Campbell Green is a Nashville businessman.

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses…

Keying in on Benjamin Franklin as popular scientist

Review by bookpagedev

Were the endlessly curious Benjamin Franklin to awaken and pop his balding head into the affairs of America 2005, he would find a discouraging similarity between the current suppression of stem cell research and the resistance he met in developing and popularizing the lightning rod. While he suffered no official wrath for his invention, he did have to endure the vituperations of those who maintained it was an offense against God to attempt to ward off His destructive bolts. Whatever the era, it seems that some people just can’t stand the idea of humanity controlling its own destiny. Although Franklin generally respected and supported religions, he tended to view God more as a benign onlooker than as a cosmic meddler.

Philip Dray builds his study around Franklin’s many experiments with electricity, but he tells a far broader story than that in Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America. Dray’s previous books focused on the 1950s and 1960s, and he won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Prize for 2002’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. For this latest book, he turns to an earlier period in America’s history with equally impressive results. A substantial part of his narrative is devoted to the intellectual excitement of the 18th century. Franklin and his peers in America and Europe shared their questions, experiments and discoveries via incessant meetings and personal correspondence, the latter of which they routinely collected and bound into pamphlets to sell to eager audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Franklin’s fertile and open mind, coupled with his genius for making processes understandable, kept him at the head of the scientific pack. Dray observes that It was probably a union of . . . two impulses [Franklin’s] interest in investigating that which had not yet been adequately explained, and the urge to fix what could bear improvement that drew his attention initially to the phenomena of thunder and lightning, and led to his greatest invention. Prosperous though he became, Franklin didn’t look to his scientific findings and inventions for wealth, electing instead to share what he knew as well as what he thought.

As a poor and unlettered man who had propelled himself to prosperity and intellectual eminence, Franklin was the perfect symbol for America’s potential. Thus on missions both political and scientific, he was welcomed into the highest social circles in London (before the Revolutionary War) and Paris (during the war). In these ancient societies where birth and rank were still exalted, he shone from individual worth, a powerful manifestation of the democratic ideal.

Franklin took his final leave of Paris in 1785 and used the seven-week voyage back to Philadelphia to determine with amazing accuracy, Dray says the location and width of the Gulf Stream. Observation and reason had proven so effective in unlocking nature’s secrets it only followed that Franklin and fellow thinkers sought to apply these same tools to designing more rational societies. Sometimes it worked.

The Franklin Dray conjures up is amiable, inquisitive, open, generous and serenely above the fray. After all these years, he’s still setting the standards. Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Were the endlessly curious Benjamin Franklin to awaken and pop his balding head into the affairs of America 2005, he would find a discouraging similarity between the current suppression of stem cell research and the resistance he met in developing and popularizing the lightning rod.…
ParentingFamily & Relationships

Parenting: the toughest job you’ll ever love

Review by bookpagedev

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the umpteenth time, and he was already wet again. Was this normal? Was changing him so often doing more harm than good? We laughed at ourselves. All our preparations the brightly painted nursery, the baby books we had absorbed, the bottles, blankets and toys we had accumulated all our preparations had not quite prepared us for the bundle of need and energy before us. We soon realized that parenting was a never-ending series of judgment calls, and that from diapers to diplomas we’d be struggling with decisions about what was best for our child.

Fortunately, new parents, and long-time parents faced with new problems, need not feel completely alone in finding the best path to follow. Many sources of advice are available, including a huge array of parenting books that address the social context in which kids and parents find themselves today. BookPage has sorted through this season’s crop of parenting books and selected a few of the best.

A child psychologist and parent himself, James Garbarino delves beyond simple parenting predicaments and writes about the perplexing and even frightening dilemmas parents are confronted with in his new book, Parents Under Siege: Why You are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child’s Life. Written with child advocate Claire Bedard, this book offers a sober, realistic look at the challenges of raising children in the modern world. The authors assert that the world of American parenting changed forever after the events at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two students went on a shooting rampage that killed 12 of their fellow schoolmates and a teacher and then killed themselves. Garbarino recognizes that cookie-cutter strategies don’t work, but offers 10 tools to help parents become more acutely aware, more mindful, and more effective in dealing with growing children and adolescents. These tools include a periscope for Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Each Child’s Individual Temperament and a glue stick for Holding Together a Child’s World in Difficult Times. And what is a child’s world? Michael Thompson, Ph.

D., and Catherine O’Neill Grace do a good job of depicting that venerable, vulnerable place in Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. One of the most fascinating chapters is titled In the Jungle: The Power of the Group in the Lives of Children, which reveals the social hierarchies and underlying forces exerting pressure on children (and adults as well) in group situations. Without knowledge of these social forces, Thompson argues, we make the mistake of thinking that tragic events are driven solely by bad kids’ or gangs.’ He points out that human beings hunger for group identity and closeness, and that there are gangs of good kids in our schools too, driven to band together by the same needs and invisible yet powerful forces. Thompson is an ardent advocate of smaller schools and uses the last two chapters to outline what schools and parents can do to help ensure safe, nurturing environments where each child is acknowledged and affirmed on a daily basis. Interestingly, Thompson uses almost the same words to describe the values he would promote in teaching children good citizenship and good friendship empathy, responsibility, sharing, self-sacrifice, self-disclosure and faithfulness that Michele Bora, Ed.

D., employs in her book, Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues that Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing. Her plan for raising good kids from ages 3 to 15 includes fostering the following list of values, each discussed in its own chapter: empathy, conscience, self-control, respect, kindness, tolerance and fairness. The slogan getting back to basics might well be dusted off and used to mean teaching the basic fundamentals of human decency instead of the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic! This theme is expanded on in Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age by Dan Kindlon, Ph.

D. Kindlon praises baby boomers for being emotionally close to their children and for raising kids who confide in their parents more than earlier generations, but he also finds them too indulgent. We give our kids too much, he says, and we demand too little of them. Like the authors above, Kindlon believes that raising honest, charitable, compassionate, and emotionally intelligent children should be a top priority. He advocates setting reasonable limits with clear consequences for overstepping them and advises parents to choose three basic rules that they are unflinchingly consistent in enforcing. But he maintains that the foundation for stricter parenting must be built on love, time and caring, and points to research that finds families who eat dinner together and openly communicate ideas and concerns produce healthier children both physically and mentally.

Of course, even if you follow all these guidelines, like many parents, you may find that your emotionally intelligent, tolerant, respectful 15-year-old will walk out the door one day to go to soccer practice and return home having changed into some bizarre character with a wild look in his eye, strange hair and stranger clothes. If so, you’ll need to read Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind, by Michael Bradley, Ed.

D. Based on brain research which shows that teens do experience a temporary imbalance that causes some of their irrational behavior, this book will help you get through that maelstrom called adolescence. Still, there is no one book that can teach someone how to parent. Each child is different and brings individual challenges and joys to the task (and a few gray hairs to the head). But these books provide information, support and guidance that can help you build confidence in your parenting skills. The authors remind us of choices we can make and steps we can take to raise good, caring children (who will probably read parenting books so save them and pass them on!) and who will also become good, caring parents one day in their own right.

Linda Stankard is the mother of two she has the gray hairs to prove it and she is still honing her parenting skills after 22 years.

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the…

HistoryBlack History

Recalling a painful era

Review by bookpagedev

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses into the social structure of Mississippi at a time when it was at the center of historic change.

W. Ralph Eubanks, publishing director at the Library of Congress, discovered in 1998 that his parents’ names had been on a watch list developed by the infamous Sovereignty Commission, established by the Mississippi legislature in the 1950s as a means to preserve segregation. Intrigued, Eubanks began to explore how his parents were placed on the list. His search eventually led him to retrace his Mississippi childhood, a process described in the compelling new book, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past. A combination of memoir and political history, Eubanks’ book is by turns a charming remembrance of a rural boyhood and a chilling reminder of racism’s legacy.

Eubanks’ personal narrative about growing up in the segregated South turns conventional perception on its head. He actually had, to a large degree, an idyllic childhood on a farm outside Mount Olive, Mississippi. His sheltered world was shattered only when his class became the first to integrate the local school.

The search for the truth about his parents (placed on the watch list only because they were educated black people) leads Eubanks to his own reconciliation with the world he left behind a quarter of century before. Eventually, he answers his children’s questions about Mississippi by taking a family trip to the state and reconnecting them to the rural roots that are an integral part of his character.

While Eubanks was reading Faulkner, Peggy Morgan was living a Faulkner novel. Writer Carolyn Haines chronicles this Mississippi woman’s life in My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story (River City, $27.95, 368 pages, ISBN 1579660428). Like Ever Is a Long Time, this is a book about the search for truth and the courage to confront it. Poor, white and uneducated, Morgan grew up in a large family dominated by an abusive, alcoholic father. In the social strata of the old South, only blacks were lower than Morgan’s family. Haines, a former journalist who has written numerous novels, portrays Morgan’s struggles to overcome the abuse that followed her from childhood into her own marriage with Lloyd Morgan, which eventually ended in abandonment and disaster.

Morgan and her mother each held a secret related to the civil rights struggle. According to Morgan, her mother died carrying the knowledge of who killed Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Morgan herself had information about the murder of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was shot to death in his own driveway. It took more than 30 years for her to summon the courage to testify against Byron De La Beckwith, who was finally convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994.

Haines’ crisp, readable account is an inspiring look at one woman’s effort to conquer the pain and hatred that marked her youth. Read together, these two books provide a rich context for understanding the segregated South and the power that race held in creating its structure. J. Campbell Green is a Nashville businessman.

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses…
Arts & Culture

The accidental embedded reporter

Review by bookpagedev

War reporters are a breed apart. Armed with guts and a notebook, they seek out the action, eagerly ignoring bullets and bombs for a story. Picture Ernie Pyle in World War II, slogging through the frontlines of Europe. Imagine the ruggedly handsome Robert Capa photographing the violence of French Indochina. These are the men we think of as, if not fearless, at least undaunted. Chris Ayres of The London Times wants it to be known that he is not one of those men. In fact, he unabashedly admits, he is one of those who find themselves running in the opposite direction of the action, in short, a coward.

War Reporting for Cowards follows the extremely reluctant British journalist from a cushy assignment covering balmy Hollywood to the muddy frontlines of Iraq. Leaving his air-conditioned apartment in L.A., Ayres travels across the world to sleep crammed in a Humvee with three U.S. Marines. Their job, aside from keeping their grudgingly accepted embed alive, is to race along the near edge of enemy lines, looking for base sites for long-range artillery. Front lines don’t come much fronter. Ayres’ book is exciting, revealing and very, very, funny. Ayres knows his own limitations and never tries to paint his adventure as anything other than it is: a harrowing yet empowering journey for a young man learning he has more about him than he thinks. Ayres makes no attempts to protest or proselytize, and the book is all the better for it. He simply tells his experiences, and tells them delightfully well.

And while the book is humorous, Ayres doesn’t dodge reality. His experiences at Ground Zero on 9/11 are suitably horrifying and unashamedly gripping. Even the comic absurdity of Ayres’s presence on the battlefield (a fleshy young man in a bright blue Kevlar vest a natural target, his military handlers gleefully point out) does not lessen the severe reality of the war. War, like life, is full of contradictions. Gung-ho marines can come to appreciate nervous journalists, and a self-professed coward can find within himself his own measure of courage.

 

War reporters are a breed apart. Armed with guts and a notebook, they seek out the action, eagerly ignoring bullets and bombs for a story. Picture Ernie Pyle in World War II, slogging through the frontlines of Europe. Imagine the ruggedly handsome Robert Capa…

ParentingFamily & Relationships

Parenting: the toughest job you’ll ever love

Review by bookpagedev

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the umpteenth time, and he was already wet again. Was this normal? Was changing him so often doing more harm than good? We laughed at ourselves. All our preparations the brightly painted nursery, the baby books we had absorbed, the bottles, blankets and toys we had accumulated all our preparations had not quite prepared us for the bundle of need and energy before us. We soon realized that parenting was a never-ending series of judgment calls, and that from diapers to diplomas we’d be struggling with decisions about what was best for our child.

Fortunately, new parents, and long-time parents faced with new problems, need not feel completely alone in finding the best path to follow. Many sources of advice are available, including a huge array of parenting books that address the social context in which kids and parents find themselves today. BookPage has sorted through this season’s crop of parenting books and selected a few of the best.

A child psychologist and parent himself, James Garbarino delves beyond simple parenting predicaments and writes about the perplexing and even frightening dilemmas parents are confronted with in his new book, Parents Under Siege: Why You are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child’s Life. Written with child advocate Claire Bedard, this book offers a sober, realistic look at the challenges of raising children in the modern world. The authors assert that the world of American parenting changed forever after the events at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two students went on a shooting rampage that killed 12 of their fellow schoolmates and a teacher and then killed themselves. Garbarino recognizes that cookie-cutter strategies don’t work, but offers 10 tools to help parents become more acutely aware, more mindful, and more effective in dealing with growing children and adolescents. These tools include a periscope for Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Each Child’s Individual Temperament and a glue stick for Holding Together a Child’s World in Difficult Times. And what is a child’s world? Michael Thompson, Ph. D., and Catherine O’Neill Grace do a good job of depicting that venerable, vulnerable place in Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. One of the most fascinating chapters is titled In the Jungle: The Power of the Group in the Lives of Children, which reveals the social hierarchies and underlying forces exerting pressure on children (and adults as well) in group situations. Without knowledge of these social forces, Thompson argues, we make the mistake of thinking that tragic events are driven solely by Ôbad kids’ or Ôgangs.’ He points out that human beings hunger for group identity and closeness, and that there are gangs of good kids in our schools too, driven to band together by the same needs and invisible yet powerful forces. Thompson is an ardent advocate of smaller schools and uses the last two chapters to outline what schools and parents can do to help ensure safe, nurturing environments where each child is acknowledged and affirmed on a daily basis. Interestingly, Thompson uses almost the same words to describe the values he would promote in teaching children good citizenship and good friendship empathy, responsibility, sharing, self-sacrifice, self-disclosure and faithfulness that Michele Bora, Ed. D., employs in her book, Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues that Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing. Her plan for raising good kids from ages 3 to 15 includes fostering the following list of values, each discussed in its own chapter: empathy, conscience, self-control, respect, kindness, tolerance and fairness. The slogan getting back to basics might well be dusted off and used to mean teaching the basic fundamentals of human decency instead of the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic! This theme is expanded on in Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age by Dan Kindlon, Ph. D. Kindlon praises baby boomers for being emotionally close to their children and for raising kids who confide in their parents more than earlier generations, but he also finds them too indulgent. We give our kids too much, he says, and we demand too little of them. Like the authors above, Kindlon believes that raising honest, charitable, compassionate, and emotionally intelligent children should be a top priority. He advocates setting reasonable limits with clear consequences for overstepping them and advises parents to choose three basic rules that they are unflinchingly consistent in enforcing. But he maintains that the foundation for stricter parenting must be built on love, time and caring, and points to research that finds families who eat dinner together and openly communicate ideas and concerns produce healthier children both physically and mentally.

Of course, even if you follow all these guidelines, like many parents, you may find that your emotionally intelligent, tolerant, respectful 15-year-old will walk out the door one day to go to soccer practice and return home having changed into some bizarre character with a wild look in his eye, strange hair and stranger clothes. If so, you’ll need to read Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind, by Michael Bradley, Ed. D. Based on brain research which shows that teens do experience a temporary imbalance that causes some of their irrational behavior, this book will help you get through that maelstrom called adolescence. Still, there is no one book that can teach someone how to parent. Each child is different and brings individual challenges and joys to the task (and a few gray hairs to the head). But these books provide information, support and guidance that can help you build confidence in your parenting skills. The authors remind us of choices we can make and steps we can take to raise good, caring children (who will probably read parenting books so save them and pass them on!) and who will also become good, caring parents one day in their own right.

Linda Stankard is the mother of two she has the gray hairs to prove it and she is still honing her parenting skills after 22 years.

I remember laying my first-born child down on our bed when we brought him home from the hospital. My husband and I stood looking down at this unpredictable, demanding little life force in awe and wonder. We had just changed his diaper for the…

Travel

What Mrs. Christie saw

Review by bookpagedev

When British journalist Andrew Eames set off from a London suburb to Baghdad via train in 2002, he wasn’t merely following in the tracks of Paul Theroux and Michael Palin, he was tracing the life-changing journey of one of the world’s most beloved writers. His book, The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, is part Christie biography, part travelogue and part history of the many regions through which Eames and his famous fore-traveler pass en route to the Middle East.

In 1928, with her daughter away in boarding school, the 38-year-old divorcŽe set off for Baghdad, lured by the Orient Express and the tales of her dinner companions. Iraq was a British protectorate at that time and fairly crawling with expats; nevertheless, with stops like Trieste ( the last full stop in western Europe before the alphabets begin to change ), Belgrade, Zagreb, Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Ur, this was not a journey for the trepid. Christie coped well, falling in love with both the scenery and her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.

The two would later buy a house in Iraq, living a lifestyle reminiscent of Karen Blixen’s in Kenya, in which Christie dressed for dinner and instructed her cooks in producing Žclairs made with cream from water-buffalo milk. She also acquired a knowledge of ancient pottery, dispensed medicines to the locals and became an accomplished photographer chronicling her husband’s digs. For her fans, however, the most important outcome from her Middle Eastern adventures was the inspiration to write stories like A Murder in Mesopotamia and Murder on the Orient Express.

The history of that train is just one of the topics covered in The 8:55 to Baghdad, which means the book sometimes feels like it’s veering off the tracks. For the most part, however, Eames is able to connect the disparate elements for a smooth-flowing narrative. By journey’s end, he’s made insightful comments on the changing fortunes of countries once under European imperial rule, tracked down people who knew Christie and managed to get out of Baghdad just as the war starts.

When British journalist Andrew Eames set off from a London suburb to Baghdad via train in 2002, he wasn't merely following in the tracks of Paul Theroux and Michael Palin, he was tracing the life-changing journey of one of the world's most beloved writers. His…
Children's & YA

Peter Newell books, 90 years young and still great fun

Review by bookpagedev

Despite television and the Internet, some books refuse to become extinct. Sure, there’s plenty of junk out there, but fine new books and reprints of classics also flourish. This may be pathetic optimism, but it seems there are good signs: the world-wide popularity of Harry Potter, the resurgence of interest in old-fashioned solid stories such as the Freddy the Pig series and now such items as Tuttle Publishing’s reprints of the charming books by Peter Newell. Peter Newell was born during the Civil War and died in 1924. Beginning his career with crayon portraits, he wound up illustrating everyone from Mark Twain to Lewis Carroll. His Alice illustrations are absolutely as clever and apt as those of John Tenniell. Several years ago they were the illustrations chosen to adorn Martin Gardner’s More Annotated Alice. However, he also wrote a number of amusing and cleverly illustrated books of his own. Critics have trouble finding any influences on Newell, because he was so resolutely independent. Even though he worked during the era of such wonderful illustrators as Howard Pyle and Winslow Homer, his style is very much his own. The three Newell books reprinted by Tuttle are facsimiles of the original books from the early years of the 20th century, and each is priced at $16.95. They are in a handsome uniform format, with black cloth spines and brightly colored covers featuring a signature orange. They make an appealing set. First, Tuttle reprinted The Slant Book, the most outrageous of the three. Because it is the story of what happens when little Bobby’s baby carriage goes out of control and rolls downhill, the entire book is printed at an angle. No, the typeface doesn’t slant; the book slants. The entire volume is tilted to the right. When you open it, it folds out like butterfly wings. Don’t worry that the books depend too much upon the gimmick, like a film with extravagant special effects and no story. Instead, like the creators of, say, the movie Toy Story, Newell builds elaborate and entertaining narratives around the gimmick. For example, the story in The Slant Book has a perfect narrative structure; its rhyming ABCB quatrains begin as the carriage starts moving and end as it crashes into a haystack and the adventure-prone Bobby flies through the air and lands safely in hay. Every scene is filled with action. Just a sampling: the carriage snaps a hydrant, crashes through a tennis net and undermines a ladder. Perhaps the most charming aspect is Bobby’s delight in the whole chaotic adventure.

The other two books feature a different structural gimmick: a hole in the middle of the page. The Rocket Book is the story of what happens when Fritz, the janitor’s bad kid, finds a fireworks rocket in the basement and lights its fuse. It tears through the ceiling and continues through the rest of the apartment building, emerging through tenants’ floors and exiting through their ceilings. The hole appears in the center of the page, throughout the book, foreshortened into an ellipse that Newell cleverly works into every single illustration. In Tuttle’s latest reprint, The Hole Book, Newell did the bookish equivalent of a Hollywood sequel. He used the same gimmick again, except the hole is round. Young Tom Potts is playing with a gun when it goes off. The rest of the book follows the bullet’s progress through the walls of the apartment building and then to the outdoors. By taking the bullet outside, Newell manages to take a device similar to the preceding book’s and make the story just as entertaining and perhaps funnier.

A critic once said that Peter Newell’s work was the first appearance of the humor of the absurd that would soon flourish in The New Yorker. Another comparison might be to the blithely unaware W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers, who never seemed to realize they were causing all their own problems, and who responded with a quip and a further adventure. Both Newell’s text and his drawings are merely meant to be amusing. He doesn’t agonize over the misbehavior of Fritz or Tom Potts. Nor does he have the kind of timid vocabulary that shows contempt for children’s intellectual hunger. On that note, let’s end with Newell’s own words his description of what happens when two boys are standing near a beehive as the bullet goes through it. The startled swarm came streaming out In temper hot and baneful, And drove the foe in awful rout, With volleys sharp and painful!

Despite television and the Internet, some books refuse to become extinct. Sure, there's plenty of junk out there, but fine new books and reprints of classics also flourish. This may be pathetic optimism, but it seems there are good signs: the world-wide popularity of Harry…

Fiction

Celebrating life through art

Review by bookpagedev

As we grow older, the significant persons and signal moments of our lives become, strangely, not dimmer, but all the more vivid in our memories. For John Berger, Booker Prize-winning author and the most acute art critic of his generation, memory assumes a startling reality as he approaches his 80th year. He encounters his dead mother in Lisbon and walks through the fish market with her. In a Krakow shop, he shares a bowl of soup with his deceased mentor. He braves once more the cool regard of a tutor, a man who committed suicide long ago, in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Madrid.

He converses with all these ghosts, and others, who in life crucially lent a hand in forming his character and sensibilities. Whether or not the words they speak are truly their own, or only things he imagines they would speak, does not matter. Here Is Where We Meet is where Berger meets and gives voice to those he has loved and pitied, so that the life-giving power of fiction takes on a beautiful concreteness. For once, posthumously but not belatedly (that is the point: it is never too late), Berger listens to his mother and takes her ghostly advice: Do us the courtesy of noticing us. Berger is perhaps best known for the political cast of his writing, particularly for the way he champions the working poor. His trilogy of novels, Into Their Labours, celebrates and mourns the peasant cultures of Europe. But this new novel rooted in his own life experiences helps to show how wrong it would be to reduce Berger’s imagination to politics. In every verbal portrait he paints, every line he draws his beloved ghosts, a Polish wedding that exceeds its proverbial joy, a newly discovered cave of paintings 30,000 years old the essential point is the dignity of work and of workers, the wonder of all art in which talent meets need, where the two forces arrive together. Even to make a savory pot of soup is worthy of praise. John Berger has always strung his lyre for such unsung glories. Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

As we grow older, the significant persons and signal moments of our lives become, strangely, not dimmer, but all the more vivid in our memories. For John Berger, Booker Prize-winning author and the most acute art critic of his generation, memory assumes a startling reality…
Children's & YA

Peter Newell books, 90 years young and still great fun

Review by bookpagedev

Despite television and the Internet, some books refuse to become extinct. Sure, there’s plenty of junk out there, but fine new books and reprints of classics also flourish. This may be pathetic optimism, but it seems there are good signs: the world-wide popularity of Harry Potter, the resurgence of interest in old-fashioned solid stories such as the Freddy the Pig series and now such items as Tuttle Publishing’s reprints of the charming books by Peter Newell. Peter Newell was born during the Civil War and died in 1924. Beginning his career with crayon portraits, he wound up illustrating everyone from Mark Twain to Lewis Carroll. His Alice illustrations are absolutely as clever and apt as those of John Tenniell. Several years ago they were the illustrations chosen to adorn Martin Gardner’s More Annotated Alice. However, he also wrote a number of amusing and cleverly illustrated books of his own. Critics have trouble finding any influences on Newell, because he was so resolutely independent. Even though he worked during the era of such wonderful illustrators as Howard Pyle and Winslow Homer, his style is very much his own. The three Newell books reprinted by Tuttle are facsimiles of the original books from the early years of the 20th century, and each is priced at $16.95. They are in a handsome uniform format, with black cloth spines and brightly colored covers featuring a signature orange. They make an appealing set. First, Tuttle reprinted The Slant Book, the most outrageous of the three. Because it is the story of what happens when little Bobby’s baby carriage goes out of control and rolls downhill, the entire book is printed at an angle. No, the typeface doesn’t slant; the book slants. The entire volume is tilted to the right. When you open it, it folds out like butterfly wings. Don’t worry that the books depend too much upon the gimmick, like a film with extravagant special effects and no story. Instead, like the creators of, say, the movie Toy Story, Newell builds elaborate and entertaining narratives around the gimmick. For example, the story in The Slant Book has a perfect narrative structure; its rhyming ABCB quatrains begin as the carriage starts moving and end as it crashes into a haystack and the adventure-prone Bobby flies through the air and lands safely in hay. Every scene is filled with action. Just a sampling: the carriage snaps a hydrant, crashes through a tennis net and undermines a ladder. Perhaps the most charming aspect is Bobby’s delight in the whole chaotic adventure.

The other two books feature a different structural gimmick: a hole in the middle of the page. The Rocket Book is the story of what happens when Fritz, the janitor’s bad kid, finds a fireworks rocket in the basement and lights its fuse. It tears through the ceiling and continues through the rest of the apartment building, emerging through tenants’ floors and exiting through their ceilings. The hole appears in the center of the page, throughout the book, foreshortened into an ellipse that Newell cleverly works into every single illustration. In Tuttle’s latest reprint, The Hole Book, Newell did the bookish equivalent of a Hollywood sequel. He used the same gimmick again, except the hole is round. Young Tom Potts is playing with a gun when it goes off. The rest of the book follows the bullet’s progress through the walls of the apartment building and then to the outdoors. By taking the bullet outside, Newell manages to take a device similar to the preceding book’s and make the story just as entertaining and perhaps funnier.

A critic once said that Peter Newell’s work was the first appearance of the humor of the absurd that would soon flourish in The New Yorker. Another comparison might be to the blithely unaware W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers, who never seemed to realize they were causing all their own problems, and who responded with a quip and a further adventure. Both Newell’s text and his drawings are merely meant to be amusing. He doesn’t agonize over the misbehavior of Fritz or Tom Potts. Nor does he have the kind of timid vocabulary that shows contempt for children’s intellectual hunger. On that note, let’s end with Newell’s own words his description of what happens when two boys are standing near a beehive as the bullet goes through it. The startled swarm came streaming out In temper hot and baneful, And drove the foe in awful rout, With volleys sharp and painful!

Despite television and the Internet, some books refuse to become extinct. Sure, there's plenty of junk out there, but fine new books and reprints of classics also flourish. This may be pathetic optimism, but it seems there are good signs: the world-wide popularity of…

Fiction

The lives of ordinary heroes

Review by bookpagedev

Diana McBride has been having a rough year. Her beloved husband, Tim, has left her, her alcoholic mother, Gloria, won’t stop calling to berate her, and her job at the local baby store, Teddy’s World, is hardly fulfilling. At 34, Diana realizes she is a far cry from the beauty queen she once was. To further complicate things, she’s decided to stop her treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, allowing a series of rules and daily rituals to take over her already besieged life. What Diana doesn’t know, however, is that one of her customers, the soon-to-be teenage mother Jamie Ramirez, is about to change her life.

In Little Beauties, National Book Award finalist Kim Addonizio lovingly constructs an unexpected friendship between Diana and Jamie, and leads her reader carefully through the women’s drastically different, yet increasingly intertwined lives. Addonizio makes some bold choices by addressing two very sensitive subjects: living with OCD and teenage pregnancy. By dividing her book into alternating sections of narration from both women, and Jamie’s unborn daughter, Stella, Addonizio creates a rich cast of characters, and shows us how even the most unlikely of friends have the power to dramatically alter each other’s lives. Addonizio makes it easy to relate to her characters. Diana is immensely self-aware: she knows that her rigid lifestyle and obsession with cleanliness has driven her husband away, but she is unable to overcome her compulsions. Jamie is in many ways a normal teenager: she fights endlessly with her authoritative mother, misses her best friend who went away to college and more than anything, she does not want to have a baby. Yet somehow, Diana and Jamie offer each other the support they need to overcome their individual struggles.

Fast-paced, insightful and full of life, Little Beauties transforms two women into unexpected heroes, inspiring us to fully appreciate the tenacity of friendship.

Abby Plesser writes from New York City.

 

Diana McBride has been having a rough year. Her beloved husband, Tim, has left her, her alcoholic mother, Gloria, won't stop calling to berate her, and her job at the local baby store, Teddy's World, is hardly fulfilling. At 34, Diana realizes she is…

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