a web publication and a community that supports mothers in all aspects of their identities
Even if you don't recognize Nick Hornby's name, you'll recognize the
titles of some of his books that have been made into movies: Fever Pitch
, High Fidelity , and About A Boy. I have to admit, I've never read
any of them, but High Fidelity is one of my favourite movies - mostly
because I have a thing for John Cusack. But when I realized that the
same person had written all these books, I had to take him out for a
spin and check out his goods for myself. And that's how a literary crush
is born.
But back, for a moment, to the book. A Long Way Down is the story of
four people whose lives, on an ordinary day, would likely never
intersect. But this is no ordinary place, and no ordinary day.
It is, in fact, New Year's Day, and our four protagonists meet
on the roof of a 15-story building in London, where each of them have
come to commit suicide.
© 2006, Danielle Donders ( Postcards from the Mothership)
Silken Laumann is an amazing athlete and an accomplished woman. She is, unfortunately, not a Pulitzer-level author. Child's Play is not a bad book, but it suffers from excessive repetition and is competent, not beautiful.
I still read the whole thing, over one weekend, because the subject and material are compelling: our kids don't play anymore. Playgrounds are deserted on weekends and after school. Schoolyards are empty within twenty minutes of the last bell. When kids are given time to play, they mill around; they've never learned the games. She recounts parents who despaired over their children's inability to play and who volunteered at schools to teach them playground games and even wrote manuals of skipping songs.
© 2006, Andrea McDowell ( Beanie Baby)
First things first: There is no such thing, ok, as Nature Deficit Disorder; and if you are a mean-spirited person, you can read the entire book and yell at him in your head, "but there's no such thing as Nature Deficit Disorder!" However, as this is a point that the author himself makes on several occasions, I think it's unfair.
So let's just dispense with the whole Nature Deficit Disorder thing, and talk about the argument he's making: That kids need to have exposure to non-human, non-built environments for their healthy development; that this is increasingly difficult, because non-human non-built environments are being mowed over by the day; that, to boot, we rarely let our kids play in them the way they'd want to even when we do have access to them for fears of wild animals, human predators, and so on; that kids are dissociated from their local environment because they don't know where their food comes from or their water comes from or their garbage goes or what the names of the plants and trees are; and that the current state of environmental education in schools is traumatizing because it focuses on how the environment is going to hell in a handbasket without ever providing a counter-balancing connection to the local environment the kids actually live in. He argues that this is harmful both for the kids and for the environment, since it is unlikely that children who grow up having been connected to the earth only through traumatic apocalypse scenarios will become committed environmentalists as adults.
© 2006, Andrea McDowell ( Beanie Baby)