Book Review Archives - Early Learning Nation

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

K.C. Compton·Aug 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.

Book Review: Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Our Children

K.C. Compton·Feb 24, 2023·6 min read

In her excellent book, Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, Dr. Susan Linn brings this insidious behemoth to the foreground and underscores it with bright red lines.

Book Review: Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

K.C. Compton·Sep 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.

The Reeducation of Uché Blackstock, the Doctor Disrupting “Medical Apartheid”

Mark Swartz·Jan 23, 2024·5 min read

Uché Blackstock didn’t plan to become a radical physician, but the pain and death she witnessed at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn radicalized her.

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

K.C. Compton·Mar 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.

Chronicling a Social Catastrophe, So We Can Prepare Better for the Next One

Mark Swartz·Oct 25, 2022·4 min read

At the start of the pandemic, Anya Kamenetz realized her apartment had a built-in alarm system. It went off at...

Grandmothering While Black – Our Policies Were Not Built for the Rise of Grandma-Led Households

Haley Swenson·Apr 24, 2024·7 min read

When it comes to caring for and educating children in the United States, Black grandmothers have never been on the...

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

K.C. Compton·Oct 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: A Surgeon’s Road Map to a “Parent Nation”

Mark Swartz·Apr 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: The Emotionally Intelligent Child

Mark Swartz·Aug 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.

Back and Forth: Talking with Author Rebecca Rolland about Talking with Children

Mark Swartz·Oct 26, 2023·5 min read

Rebecca Rolland’s The Art of Talking with Children: The Simple Keys to Nurturing Kindness, Creativity, and Confidence in Kids explores...

Book Review: Why and How to Abolish the Child Welfare System

Mark Swartz·Sep 14, 2023·4 min read

The history of racism in the United States and its ongoing impacts on children and families experiencing state-sponsored displacement are on full display in this collection edited by Dettlaff.

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