THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children by Ann Hulbert (Knopf, 450pp., $27.50). Faced with the wall of parenting manuals in...
...Then, in the 1920s, John Broadus Watson advised parents to greet their children with handshakes, never kisses...
...Then Benjamin Spock came to prominence, urging parents to trust themselves...
...Spock said the most common problem is hesitancy...
...Peggy Noonan's book comes at an important time...
...The reader will come away at least with the knowledge that if their home lives are any indication, the experts didn't know much more than the people buying their books...
...Jeremy Lott...
...The book contains some puzzling slights...
...Other columns record her reactions to other news, from the year's corporate scandals to the Academy Awards...
...Reciting every antiwar cliché ever known, Hedges warned that war in Iraq would soon cause fascism to descend on America...
...A collection of her Wall Street Journal columns throughout the year after September 11, A Heart, A Cross, and a Flag is a living record...
...Around 1900, there was G. Stanley Hall, who wrote that discipline shouldn't begin until age eight, and L. Emmett Holt, who thought toilet-training should be accomplished at three months...
...Faced with the wall of parenting manuals in bookstores these days, a parent can understand why Dr...
...When it isn't focusing on military minutiae such as promotions, benefits, and paternity leave, the book relentlessly drives home an old refrain: War is hell...
...It begins with her column on September 13, 2001— and she leaves in place the factual and spelling uncertainties the column contained at that confused and terrible time...
...Still, Raising America is meticulously researched, with a sixty-four-page bibliography...
...Longtime New York Times war reporter Chris Hedges caused a stir this spring with his commencement speech at Rockford College...
...indeed, a major theme of the book is the call for all Americans to record their memories before they fade...
...She focuses on a pair who offer opposing advice in each era...
...a decade or so later, Arnold Gesell, the country's first school psychologist, wrote child-centered books in which the parents were all but invisible...
...The result is poignancy without sentimentality, and is well worth a read...
...This may come as a surprise to Hedges, but most of us, including the students who nearly booed him off the stage, knew that already...
...Susie Currie A Heart, A Cross, and a Flag by Peggy Noonan (Free Press, 256 pp., $25...
...A Heart, A Cross, and a Flag contains much practical advice, as well, from recommendations for memorials to what citizens should do to stay on the lookout for potential terrorists...
...While James Dobson, John Rosemond, and even Gary Ezzo each have over a dozen citations, attachment-parenting pioneers William and Martha Sears, a doctor-and-nurse team who have sold millions of books (and baby slings), have a scant two pages between them...
...His new book claims to be an objective ques-tion-and-answer discussion of war, but the melodramatic editorial packaging and the slant of the questions and answers make it clear that this is an extension of the Rockford address...
...Noo-nan uses her own perspectives—as a conservative, a mother, a Catholic, a New Yorker—not to limit her scope but to say something new about what are now very old topics...
...There are surely other contenders, given that five times as many parenting books were published in 1997 as in 1975...
...In the final section of Raising America, Hulbert passes the warm, fuzzy Spock mantle to T. Berry Brazelton and Penelope Leach...
...Erin Sheley What Every Person Should Know About War by Chris Hedges (Free Press, 175 pp., $11...
...Noonan's gifted narrations of her experiences draws us into remembering what we ourselves were doing when the dreadful news came...
...He was followed by Austrian émigré Bruno Bettelheim, who ruthlessly blamed parents for their children's autism...
...Ann Hulbert's Raising America surveys four generations of those who have fostered that: the "parenting professionals...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 42
