In a book subtitled ``Advice for Kids on Making the Most of a Special Relationship,'' Dr. Ruth dispenses more of her uniquely practical advice, this time on ``how to make the love between you and your grandparents not only live but flourish.'' As part of the discussion, Dr. Ruth not only explains how the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren have changed for the better during modern times, but also what constitutes a grandparent. She then proceeds to show how the relationship is much stronger when it's a ``two-way street.'' Dr. Ruth's step-by-step advice on how to maintain a close relationship with grandparents who are far away, how to ``adopt'' a grandparent, how to talk to grandparents even if parents get divorced, even how to teach their elders how to use the VCR or a computer will help readers build bridges of communication. Pearson's delightful black-and-white illustrations will appeal to readers and make the book—packed with wisdom—accessible. (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-31873-5
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.
Essayist Handler debuts with a memoir of loving sibling bonds cruelly interrupted.
The author’s eight-year-old sister Susie died of leukemia in 1969, when Handler was ten. Their sister Sarah had been ill since infancy with Kostmann’s Syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder like leukemia, but much more rare; she died at age 27 in 1992. Yet Susie and Sarah were at her 1998 wedding, the author avers. They remain vividly present in memory, appearing in the waking reveries and sleeping dreams of their healthy sibling. The girls’ parents were liberal Yankee Jews transplanted to suburban Atlanta in the ’60s. They lived with their children on “a lush street where professors and doctors grew big gardens and tied bandannas around the necks of their Irish setters.” Dad, a crusading labor lawyer, was terrified by his daughters’ illnesses. He went a bit mad, was hospitalized, fled to the Far East and then returned for a divorce. (Perhaps, Handler muses, Dad was angry with her for having a future.) Mom pretended all was well, but the entire family was plunged into darkness by the deaths of two daughters. The author’s stark, lucid prose probes what those losses did to her parents and to her. Handler moved from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola society to the coke culture of Los Angeles. She maintained a journal and kept pertinent ephemera. In 2004-05, she obtained and pored over copious medical files on her sisters’ symptoms, medications and clinical trials. With a sure grasp of revelatory detail, the author recalls homely verities from a vanished life. Her memory piece is an elegy for her dead sisters, who are not quite lost as long as they live in her thoughts.
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-648-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
In a series of 25 short episodes taking place in their daily life, Elliott and Lucy make consciously eco-friendly decisions. Corlett imagines that these two young people have been so turned on by a pair of "green crusaders" who visited their school that they have a series of aha! moments. Each chapter opens with a humorous illustration and ends with a question to readers about what action the children took, further questions connecting the issue with readers' own lives, some fast facts and an inspirational quotation or two. Choices range from bringing bags to the supermarket and eating locally to carpooling, giving gifts of time instead of things, washing hands and most clothes with cold water and even the purchase of a new car. The children's middle-class lives are recognizably complex and full, and the author acknowledges that families have different preferences and priorities. His message that children can model for adults is clear, but his approach is fresh and his examples reasonably realistic. For elementary readers who care, this may be welcome reinforcement. (Inspirational short stories. 8-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9455-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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