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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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The brains behind America’s pastime

Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half physical, Yogi Berra once said. That precise calculation is debatable, but, however you cut it, the game has always been the thinking person’s sport. So it’s appropriate that each of these books on the national pastime highlights some aspect of baseball’s brain.
NonfictionReligion & Spirituality

The Easter season’s promise of renewal

Feature by Howard Shirley

Easter is a time for self-discovery and reflection on relationships, faith and the soul. Five new books offer fresh perspectives to help readers find God, themselves and each other, and renew their hearts for another year.

Rediscovering the meaning of the gospel is the soul of N.T. Wright’s Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good. Wright has a gift for cutting through religious dross to the essence of faith, and this book is no exception. Challenging conventional views of what is meant by “gospel,” Wright calls for an understanding of the Good News as just that: good and news. Like an ancient herald declaring “There is a new king—everything has changed,” so too is the gospel, and that change is as immediate and world-shaking today as it was on that first Easter morning.

Wright’s book is a call to stop defining Jesus by what fits our culture, but as the world-changing king He is, with believers as active participants in His kingdom, building it now, brick by brick. Fascinating and uplifting, Simply Good News is the must-read book of the year for every Christian. It will surprise you, it will challenge you, and it will make you see the world and your faith with fresh eyes—good news, indeed.

WORLDS APART
Discovering God’s kingdom is the theme of Chad Gibbs’ Jesus Without Borders: What Planes, Trains, and Rickshaws Taught Me About Jesus. A native of Alabama—“the buckle of the Bible Belt”—Gibbs grew up surrounded by the culture of the Christian South. While on a European vacation, he observed churches very different from those at home, prompting him to think about how Christianity itself must differ around the world. For more than two years, Gibbs hopped around the globe on a quest to see these differences for himself, calling on contacts everywhere from Africa to Australia. In all, Gibbs visited 12 countries, worshiping with Christians of all cultures and hearing their experiences of faith—often in lands where that faith was in the minority. The result is more than just a travelogue of sites and curiosities; it’s an insightful examination of the assumptions made by American Christians and a look at how much we can learn from other views of the faith. Gibbs has a gift for humor—Jesus Without Borders is a very funny book—but also a greater gift for exploring profound questions about how culture alters faith, and how what we think it means to be Christian is at least partially the result of the society in which we live. Enjoyable and eye-opening, Jesus Without Borders will take you on a journey you did not expect and change you for the better along the way.

Unexpected discoveries also lie at the heart of Called: My Journey to C.S. Lewis’s House and Back Again, by Ryan J. Pemberton. A successful young marketing writer, Pemberton had his life spun completely off track when he was jolted by a profound certainty that God wanted him to leave his comfortable, well-paying job in Oregon and travel around the world to study theology at Oxford. Facing obstacles of financing and finding living space for himself and his wife, and of course the rigors of the most prestigious academic setting in the world, Pemberton found himself in an unexpected place, where he could only rely on faith to carry him through. Called is his account of those challenges, and of the surprises God had in store for him throughout—including the opportunity to live in C.S. Lewis’ Oxford home. Told in vignettes both simple and sublime, Called is a record of faith and revelation, and a reminder that life with Jesus will shake up all our expectations—but that upheaval will be worthwhile.

LOOKING INWARD
Sometimes discovery must come not only for ourselves, but also for others in our lives. Donald Miller, the best-selling author of Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, confronts this reality in his latest memoir, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy. In his typically straightforward, revealing manner, Miller shares his difficulties with finding and keeping an intimate relationship, culminating in a year-long quest to change himself from an actor playing at love into a human being able to trust another with his heart. As with all his books, Miller’s faith lies at the center, guiding him through this journey of self-discovery. As Miller prayerfully lays bare his own habits of manipulation and deception, he exposes these same tendencies in the rest of us, pointing the reader and himself toward the openness and honesty that God intends for us to share with those we love.

Discovering the self is also at the heart of Jessica N. Turner’s The Fringe Hours: Making Time for You. “Fringe hours” is Turner’s phrase for moments of unused time that pass unnoticed on the edges of a busy day, moments that can be redeemed to restore the spirit and pursue passions. Since Turner’s work is aimed at the busy American woman, I recruited the perspective of one I know well—my wife, Betsy. Reading the book with me, she offered her thoughts: “The Fringe Hours gives a lot of suggestions for ways to find and do what you love when you are limited by time, finances, job and family constraints. As a woman who measures herself against peers, this book helps me get excited about my passions (what makes me tick) and pursue what I need (rest and quiet time) without feeling guilty about what I’m not doing or being. Turner’s transparency about her life, as well as the survey comments from other women in the book, are refreshingly candid and compassionate. Her book extends grace, hope and inspiration to the reader. After reading this, I actually feel excited about my own fringe hours.” The book features short segments and brief questions, making it easy to glean inspiration and insight, even if the reader only has a few “fringe moments” to spend. If you’re feeling a bit lost in the whirlwind of daily pressures, The Fringe Hours can help you find yourself again.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Easter is a time for self-discovery and reflection on relationships, faith and the soul. Five new books offer fresh perspectives to help readers find God, themselves and each other, and renew their hearts for another year.

Time to go your own way

Graduation: a special time when feelings of joy and celebration collide with a healthy dose of sheer terror. All of those hours of hard work have finally paid off in the form of a high school diploma or a university degree . . . but what’s next? How to make it in the real world is a big question with no easy answers. Whether your grad needs some level-headed advice on living well from some of our greatest authors, a few first-job stories or a collection of essays from much-admired leaders, four new books offer plenty of calming wisdom.
NonfictionMemoir

A mother lode of treasured advice

Feature by Alice Cary

The lessons we learn from our mothers shape who we are, even the lessons we don’t particularly appreciate. Those lessons keep coming year after year,  and their most valuable messages stay with us forever.

NPR journalist Scott Simon’s mother was a character in every way, a funny, gorgeous, gracious woman whose last days inspired her son to write Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime. Simon’s memoir expands upon tweets he sent to his 1.25 million Twitter followers as his mother lay dying of lung cancer in a Chicago hospital in the summer of 2013.

Her devoted son found his mother so funny and interesting that he decided to share her final moments with the world. As he explains, “She was an old showgirl who gave a great last performance.” And tweets such as this one helped him process what his family was going through: “I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.”

Patricia Lyons Simon Newman married three times, and over the years, her many jobs included being a model, secretary, typist and an ad agency receptionist. She had worked in nightclubs and dated mobsters, and Simon’s father was an alcoholic comedian.

Simon interweaves memories of their colorful life together with descriptions of their time in the ICU. He recalls frustrating moments when needed medicine was delayed and moments of supreme grace as his mom rallies for a final visit with Simon’s wife. No doubt Patricia Newman would be proud of her son and his extraordinarily compelling, heartfelt tribute.

THERE IN SPIRIT
Alice Eve Cohen certainly has a complicated relationship with motherhood, and it smacked her in the face during a daunting period she chronicles vividly in The Year My Mother Came Back. Strangely, the ghost of her mother suddenly appeared, 31 years after her death, just when Cohen faced seemingly overwhelming personal challenges.

In a previous book, What I Thought I Knew, the divorced mother of an adopted daughter wrote about finding out at age 44 that she was six months pregnant, after years of infertility and months of strange symptoms.

In her latest book, her beloved surprise daughter, Eliana, is an active fourth-grader in need of painful surgery. At the same time, Cohen (now happily married) is diagnosed with breast cancer, just as her mother was years ago. Meanwhile, as Cohen’s older daughter, Julia, is about to leave for college, she gets in touch with her birth mother.

This collision of events results in a maelstrom of emotional upheaval for Cohen, who finds much-needed comfort in the presence of her mother’s spirit: “We revisit events from our past together. Sometimes we just talk. Always, my mother is there and she is not there.”

This thoughtful memoir shows how our past and present remain constantly intertwined, and how being a mother is a complex journey that’s often full of stunning surprises.

THE FAMILY TABLE
Cookbook author Pam Anderson and daughters Maggy Keet and Sharon Damelio, the trio behind the food blog Three Many Cooks, have always centered their lives on food, family and faith. When they began to collaborate on a cookbook, they realized they had much more to share than recipes. The result is a delectable biography of their family’s food history, Three Many Cooks.

They chronicle their “incredible, messy, hilarious, powerful, screwed-up, delicious, and life-changing love affair with food, with one another, and with the people we have come to cherish.” The book is told in alternating chapters by each of the three, with every reflection accompanied by a relevant recipe.

Anderson begins with memories of learning to cook comfort food like chicken and dumplings in the Southern kitchens of her mother, aunt and grandmother. In subsequent chapters she tells how as a young mother and wife of an Episcopal minister, she mastered the styles of Child, Beard and Claiborne.

These well-written, captivating accounts describe such things as Keet’s most memorable meal (at the home of a colleague in Malawi, Africa); the three women’s weight struggles; and an unforgettable dinner to celebrate Anderson’s mother’s 89th birthday.

This book will make readers hungry, not only for the wonderful meals, but for the camaraderie that accompanies each feast. As Pam says of a lunch shared with a dying friend: “I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the moment I started caring less about perfection and more about connection.”

MANY TYPES OF MOMS
Want to broaden your Mother’s Day experience beyond the greeting-card-and-box-of-candy routine? Dip into the wildly varied essays in Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now.

In 2010, blogger Ann Imig (Ann Rants) organized a live reading called “Listen to Your Mother” to celebrate the holiday. It was such a success that more readings have been staged. This collection of the readings is refreshingly diverse, touching and funny. It’s a book that’s easy to dip into and likely to bring immediate rewards.

In “More Than an Aunt, Less Than a Mom,” Jerry Mahoney writes about his husband’s sister’s decision to become an egg donor for their unborn child. This was tricky business for everyone involved, he acknowledges, adding: “But that didn’t mean we shouldn’t proceed. It just meant we’d have to educate people, to show them what a functional family we had and demonstrate that our family, like any other, was built on love.”

No matter what the makeup of a family might be, isn’t that what Mother’s Day is all about?

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The lessons we learn from our mothers shape who we are, even the lessons we don’t particularly appreciate. Those lessons keep coming year after year, and their most valuable messages stay with us forever.

Paris is a woman’s town

There is something irresistible about a talented American woman in Paris. She feels sexy and alive while strolling the city’s streets, confident the world will unfurl in her hand like a blossoming flower.
NonfictionFiction

Behind the battle

Feature by Kenneth Champeon

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo, which took place on June 18, 1815. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.

In his history, Waterloo, novelist Bernard Cornwell asks, why another book? Waterloo is among the most chronicled battles of all time. Paraphrasing the British general Wellington, Cornwell also concedes that describing a battle is like describing a dance. Yet it is describing this already well-chronicled dance in exacting detail that Waterloo attempts to achieve.

Still reeling from Napoleon's wars of conquest, Europe is appalled to learn that he has returned triumphantly from exile, retaken Paris and set his sights on Belgium. It falls to Wellington ("the unbeatable") to stop Napoleon ("the unbeaten"). Spoiler alert: He does! But the outcome is never certain in Cornwell's telling. He even points to Frenchmen like Victor Hugo, who tried to snatch a literary victory from the jaws of putative defeat.

Waterloo is wonkish as military history goes. Much attention is paid to the arithmetical and geometrical difference between columns and lines, for example. It therefore suffers from a lack of historical context, but compensates by quoting liberally from the battle's participants. Cornwell refers to a massive model of the battlefield residing today in a British museum. His book is largely the play-by-play of that model in motion.

Waterloo may be the first modern battle, both in its intensive use of artillery and its appalling rate of casualties. The dead bodies becoming mud themselves suggests the First World War. Bodies forming great fatty pyres, or being ground up for fertilizer, or their teeth extracted—or Napoleon's loose talk about exterminating barbarians and the Parisian woman's capacity for replenishing the war dead—are a reminder of the inhumanity of the Second.

Like Ken Burns, Cornwell clearly prefers to focus on the more dulce et decorum est aspects of pre-modern conflict, the gallantry and bravery, the tear-jerking letters home. He's written an elegy for war before the machines took over—poignant and inspiring but ultimately nostalgic.

PHILOSOPHY OF WAR
If the battle appears now to us as an exercise in romantic futility, imagine what it must have seemed to the hordes of rabbits near the battlefield. This thought experiment motivates Leona Francombe's The Sage of Waterloo, an unusual but effective "tale" weaving philosophical history with animal story, as if the last chapter of 1984 had been recounted by the fauna of Animal Farm.

The tale is told by William, a rabbit named after the allied commander William of Orange. It's mainly a dialogue between William and his sagacious grandmother, Old Lavender, concerning the baffling behavior of their superiors in the food chain. They conclude that rabbits would never engage in wholesale killing and that humans are only irrational for doing so. 

Francombe later posits that women don't care much for war either, suggesting that she is using her rabbits as symbols for women. Indeed, Francombe leans rather heavily on the testimony of one actual English woman, Charlotte Eaton, who witnessed the battle's aftermath. Francombe praises the "female sensitivity" Eaton brings to her account, a sensitivity she finds lacking in accounts by male writers, among whom she might include Cornwell.

This may be true, but otiose. If Waterloo proves anything, it is that men, and not just armchair warriors, tend to delight in violence. Old Lavender is right when she says that "war desperately needs a female perspective," but Francombe might be discouraged to dwell much on the female capacity for aggression, from Queen Elizabeth to today's pro-military "security moms.” In Cornwell's Waterloo, one dead soldier is a woman in disguise.

As the sage herself repeats, too much comfort "dampens the brain.” Nietzsche couldn't have said it better. But despite these inconsistencies, the novel is an exquisite and amusing meditation on a battle whose meaning clearly invites debate, by humans or otherwise. 

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.

Wise and witty books for dad

If you’re searching for a gift for dear ol’ dad, two celebrity memoirs and two accounts of unusual personal quests are among our recommendations for a Father’s Day reading list.
NonfictionMemoir

The best medicine

Feature by Heather Seggel

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

Laughter can tighten your abs, soothe your mind and increase your empathy. Lighten up your summer reading with two funny new books that have both heart and brains.

When Patricia Marx, a New Yorker staffer, former “SNL” writer and Harvard Lampoon alum, commits to four months of brain fitness, watch out. “I could use some buckling down,” she writes. “My mental skyscape has too many aircraft aloft.” Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties details her often hilarious forays into IQ testing, online brain games, electrical brain stimulation and mindfulness meditation to combat the regrettable effects of aging. The book is peppered with wacky diagrams drawn by Marx; most are intentionally primitive, but her Millard Fillmore, on a list of “Presidents to Forget,” is surprisingly on the money. There are also a variety of puzzles and quizzes; only some are real, but all are funny. 

Marx’s efforts don’t always go as planned—she elects to learn Cherokee for the benefits of being bilingual, but confuses it with Navajo, the language she intended to learn. She still makes impressive gains for the time invested, and offers tips for those who want to give it a try. Crossword mavens may want to pick up a sudoku, or a Cherokee phrasebook, as it’s the process of learning something new that builds brain strength.

Since one of the meditation techniques mentioned here is laughter, merely reading this book could help your hippocampus feel the burn. Start with Marx’s suggestions, then plot your personal brain boot camp since sadly, liposuction is not an option for shaping up an aging brain.

Like diners at a popular Italian restaurant chain, readers of popular suspense writer Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella enjoy the sense that “when you’re here, you’re family.” Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?, the duo’s latest collection, is true to form, featuring riffs and one-liners about relationships, fitness, work and family traditions. (Christmas ornaments that have seen better days or that memorialize beloved pets? “If you’re maimed or dead, you’re on our tree.”) 

This book—the sixth from the mother-daughter team—brings the sad news that Mary, the family matriarch who figures in many of Scottoline’s funniest true and fictional stories, has died. The loss leaves Serritella more reflective about life and love just as she re-enters the dating pool, but she recalls venting about her love life to her grandmother one day and receiving this reply, written on a dry erase board: “Motto: Who needs it?” (When Mary realized that people were taking photos of her dry-erase messages to preserve them for posterity, she began writing things like, “Eat sh*t.”) Scottoline notes that the richness of her mother’s love unexpectedly made the grieving process more bearable. 

Take this collection to the beach (Spoiler: It doesn’t make you look fat after all!) and consider it a drama-free family reunion.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Laughter can tighten your abs, soothe your mind and increase your empathy. Lighten up your summer reading with two funny new books that have both heart and brains.

NonfictionMemoir

The cold hard truth

Feature by Deborah Hopkinson

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

It’s no surprise that Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, is still in print. The harsh reality of survival near the Poles continues to make gripping reading, especially from the safety of our own homes. 

In 81 Days Below Zero, journalist Brian Murphy pieces together the improbable story of a young World War II pilot named Leon Crane. On December 21, 1943, Crane set out from Alaska’s Ladd Field on a test flight in a B-24D Liberator bomber. On a whim, co-pilot Crane grabbed two packs of matches, knowing that the pilot had a fondness for smoking a pipe. That quick action might just have saved his life. 

Somewhere near the Yukon River, a failed engine and elevator controls sent the plane spiraling toward the ground. Crane managed to bail out, becoming the only member of the five-man crew to survive the fiery crash. 

Crane’s situation was dire. His flight suit was intact and he had his old Boy Scout knife, but he’d forgotten his mittens on the plane. Crane’s first act was to grab piles of driftwood near a frozen river to spell out a huge SOS in the snow. But he soon realized that without a last-minute radio call, rescuers would have little idea of their location or where to search. A week after the crash, hunger drove Crane to a decision: His only chance of survival would be to walk out of the wilderness.

Using military records and interviews, Murphy has meticulously pieced together details of Crane’s trek, as well as later efforts to identify the remains of his fellow crew members. The result is a riveting tale of survival. It seems that Crane, who died in 2002, seldom spoke about what happened in 1943 and was always reluctant to be seen as a hero. Murphy’s account brings his inspiring story to light. 

Our second survival story is a first-person account by one of the lucky few to survive a sinking ship. Matt Lewis, author of Last Man Off, was just 23 in 1998 when he joined the crew of the Sudur Havid, a South African fishing boat. Lewis signed on as a scientific observer to ensure compliance with fishing regulations and watch for endangered albatrosses. A trained marine biologist, he was pleased to have a job in his field, even if his first sight of the rusty 30-year old boat gave him pause: “That’s the boat I’m living on for the next three months. Is it too late to change my mind?”

The boat left Cape Town on April 6, 1998. Two months later, on June 6, a couple of hundred miles from South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic, the Sudur Havid began taking on water in a violent storm. The crew had no choice but to abandon ship. Without leadership from those in charge, Lewis stepped up to organize the escape onto three life rafts and was the last man to leave the ship. 

What followed was a grueling ordeal: Of the 38 men on board, 17 perished. Based on Lewis’ own recollections and testimony at the South African inquiry, Last Man Off is a sobering reminder of the power of the sea.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s no surprise that Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, is still in print. The harsh reality of survival near the Poles continues to make gripping reading, especially from the safety of our own homes. 

Making it count in the classroom

Between high-stakes testing and the high price of college, school can seem stressful and uninviting. But four new books show how education can inspire children, uplift communities and transform the future.
NonfictionParenting

Advice for parents: back off

Feature by Amy Scribner

The era of helicopter parenting is officially over, if this new crop of parenting books is any indication. Gone are the days of tracking your child’s every move and fighting her every battle.The focus now is on preparing children for the real world by letting them venture out and even—gasp!—make mistakes. 

In How to Raise an Adult, former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims argues that we are so focused on our children that “what they eat, how they dress, what activities they pursue [and] what they achieve have be- come a reflection of us. Of how we see ourselves. Like their life is our accomplishment. Like their failures are our fault.”

In her years as Dean of Fresh- men at Stanford, Lythcott-Haims watched as parents encroached on their children’s collegiate pursuits, showing up for social events and contacting professors. She once saw a woman in her mid-20s walking around campus, looking for the engineering building. How did Lythcott-Haims know? Because the mother of this Ph.D. candidate was doing all the talking. It’s a wonder parents haven’t moved into the dorms.

How to Raise an Adult is a bit of a manifesto, and I mean that in the best way. Lay off the Adderall, stop fretting that the Ivy League is the only route to success and let your children have unstructured time to dream, play and do nothing. Raising an adult, Lythcott-Haims posits, means letting go.

UN-ENTITLERS
With chapters titled “They’re Not Helpless” and “Overcontrol,” parenting expert Amy McCready makes clear starting with the table of contents that she finds overparenting to be underwhelm- ing. In The Me, Me, Me Epidemic, McCready, who founded Positive Parenting Solu- tions, dishes out advice in a crisply no-nonsense tone on everything from peer-pressure-proofing your kids to navigating social media.

“If we dish out empty praise and lavish rewards for the type of behavior that should be expected (such as not pitching a fit because we won’t buy them a new action figure or not making rude noises in a restaurant) we’re writing a recipe for an entitled child, one who thinks he takes ‘special to a whole new level,’ ” McCready writes. McCready offers tools she calls “Un-Entitlers,” which are like vitamins to instill capability in children. My favorite is Mind, Body and Soul Time, in which parents give an uninterrupted 10 or 20 minutes to their children and let the kids choose what they do together. It’s simple and surprisingly effective.

LIVE AND LEARN
I have a son entering middle school this fall, so The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey was a gift to me. With common-sense advice on how to stand back and let your children learn through their mistakes—including an entire chapter on navigating the hormone-drenched middle school years—this book is one of my new favorite parenting manuals.

Lahey is a warm, engaging writer who spent years in the trenches as a middle school Latin and English teacher. She advocates a lovingly hands-off approach that instills confidence from an early age.

“As adults we all have our own bullies to deal with: mean bosses, vicious enemies, and jealous peers,” she writes. “How your kid learns to deal with those people in their childhood, when failure means a day or two of hurt feelings or social exclusion, can mean the difference between a thin skin and a strong sense of self.”

TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS
Forget gimmicky baby toys—all your child really needs is you. Vanderbilt University child development researcher Stephen Camarata offers an antidote to all the products marketed to guilt-rid- den parents in The Intuitive Parent. “What does a baby really need to know?” he writes. “That his parents love him, will take care of him, and will encourage him and empower him to learn. This does not require special videos, special toys, special DVDs or computer programs.”

Camarata starts with a fascinating section on the science behind child development. (How many au- thors can make something called brain plasticity interesting? Very few.) Then it gets even better, as Camarata lays out his case for why parents need not obsess over every developmental milestone, instead focusing on what he calls intuitive parenting, simply enjoying your child and reacting to his activities. The father of seven children, Camarata blends research and experience to create a parenting book that lets parents off the hook.

SUCCESSFUL STARTERS
The co-authors of Raising Can-Do Kids are perhaps an unlikely duo—Jen Prosek is a public relations executive and Richard Rende is a developmental psychologist. But the partnership works. Raising Can-Do Kids is both interesting and actionable, written from the points of view of someone who under- stands development and someone else who understands what skills it takes to make a great entrepreneur. Together, they identify seven traits that entrepreneurs need (curiosity and risk-taking are among them) and show parents how to cultivate these qualities in their children.

Perhaps most intriguing is their exploration of snowplow parents, who are apparently helicopter parents on steroids. As they write, snowplow parents “don’t just try to control a child’s environment and experiences but overtly eliminate perceived obstacles in a child’s path. Requesting that a specific child not be in your child’s class is one thing; demanding to review the class roster is quite another.” Makes that Stanford mom seem almost reasonable, doesn’t it? 

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How To Raise an Adult.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The era of helicopter parenting is officially over, if this new crop of parenting books is any indication. Gone are the days of tracking your child’s every move and fighting her every battle.The focus now is on preparing children for the real world by letting them venture out and even—gasp!—make mistakes.

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