Book Review Archives - Early Learning Nation

Why Invest in Public Campaigns to Promote Marriage When What’s Needed Are Effective Policies?

New Two Parent Privilege Book Strikes a Nerve

Haley Swenson·Oct 12, 2023·7 min read

Prior to becoming a mother, Emily Ford worked as a personal fitness trainer in the Salt Lake City, Utah area....

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

Mark Swartz·Feb 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: 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: 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: 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.

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.

Book Review: Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty

Unfiltered Portraits of Underpaid Mothers

Mark Swartz·Apr 25, 2023·4 min read

Getting Me Cheap presents the stories and struggles of working women and mothers relegated to jobs on the labor market's lowest rungs.

Book Review: How to Raise a Viking: The Secrets of Parenting the World’s Happiest Children

K.C. Compton·Jun 26, 2024·6 min read

While Helen Russell’s clever, well-researched exploration of the parenting culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries might not fully map onto the experience of most families in the U.S. or U.K. (Russell’s original home), it offers refreshing insights that can help parents relax a bit, give themselves heaps of grace and have much more fun raising their family.

Book Review: Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege and Building a Just World

K.C. Compton·Nov 8, 2022·5 min read

Jaffe doesn’t blame parents of privilege—a category to which she belongs—for the terrible circumstances of other children’s lives, but she does make clear that we all have a responsibility and a role in creating and perpetuating that disparity.

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

Mark Swartz·Oct 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: 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.