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Book Review

Book Review: “The Stolen Year” by Anya Kamenetz: Heart-Wrenching, Heart-Warming Stories of Children in the Pandemic

Mark Swartz·October 13, 2022·4 min read

Children and the people who love them endured a lot in 2020 and 2021. This was one of the most trying times in human history, and NPR education correspondent Kamenetz eloquently and humanely depicts the panic that reigned in every household, office, court and classroom.

Book Review: A Surgeon’s Road Map to a “Parent Nation”

Mark Swartz·April 12, 2022·5 min read

Dana L. Suskind, surgeon and “self-trained social scientist,” balances an incredible amount of empathy and urgency in her second book, Parent Nation.

Book Review: Children’s Health and The Peril of Climate Change

Mark Swartz·February 7, 2023·4 min read

Every year, air pollution-related causes kill more than half a million children before their fifth birthdays, and an even greater number are afflicted by lasting damage to their developing brains and lungs.

Book Review: Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

K.C. Compton·September 8, 2022·6 min read

Essential Labor is both a memoir and a call to action. The caregiving crisis the US finds itself in now will outlast the pandemic and we must figure out ways to care for each other.

Book Review: No Longer Welcome: The Epidemic of Expulsion from Early Childhood Education

K.C. Compton·March 8, 2023·6 min read

Children 2, 3 and 4 years old—especially boys and Black children—are being kicked out of their schools at “staggering rates,” she writes—more than three times that of K–12 school children.

Book Review: Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One

Majora Carter’s Community Manifesto Starts with Real Estate

Mark Swartz·February 1, 2022·3 min read

Gentrification is a subject that has launched a million listserv arguments. It often starts with complaints from longtime residents of...

Book Review: Screaming on the Inside: How Modern Motherhood Explains the Child Care Crisis

Elliot Haspel·December 6, 2022·4 min read

As a man, a husband and a father, it turns out reading a book about motherhood could hardly be more valuable.

Book Review: The Emotionally Intelligent Child

Mark Swartz·August 9, 2022·3 min read

Rachael Katz (MS Ed.) and Helen Shwe Hadani (Ph.D.) are excellent companions for mothers, fathers and caregivers of young children. Their views on parenting derive from their own families, as well as extensive reading into the science of brain development.

Book Review: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

K.C. Compton·October 5, 2022·5 min read

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Paul effectively makes the case that most of the metaphors we have for cognition are not useful because they allude to Western society’s assumption that thinking only happens inside the brain: the ubiquitous admonition to “use your head.”

Book Review: Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

K.C. Compton·August 18, 2022·6 min read

Along with this history of metastatic industrial development, staggering pollution, relentless corruption and breathtakingly bad policy, Rector presents the other side of the coin: the fierce, courageous, dogged commitment of activists pushing back decade after decade, demanding cleaner air, better working conditions and water that wouldn’t poison their children.