Books, books, books

Too many books, too little time!

Never the less, here are some recent discoveries for our professional side, our personal side and for parents and children:

Books for our role with technology:'

Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television 

This is an older book on the effects of advertising on children.  

Distracted:  The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Last Child in The Woods 

Failure to Connect  

Books that bring us understanding of others:

This is a very, very small sample of some good books that promote understanding of others. 

www.multiculturalchildren

When I Was Young in the Mountains   Cynthia Rylant's enduring favorite "When I Was Young in the Mountains" is the tale of her own childhood growing up in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. The gently repetitive text details her everyday life, from swimming in a swimming hole (even if there were snakes!) to taking a bath to drinking cocoa made by her grandmother. Each page starts off with, "When I was young in the mountains . . . " By the final page, we see that not only did Ms. Rylant appreciate her low-tech, memory-making childhood, but she wouldn't have traded it for anything.

How My Parents Learned to Eat  Ina Friedman

This story is narrated by a little girl who describes how her parents met and adapted to one another's cultures.  The girl is blond like her American father and has beautiful Asian features she inherited from her Japanese mother. She tells the story of how they came to sit at the family table.

An American sailor meets a woman in Japan and is instantly smitten. Their attraction is mutual; however each worries about being able to adapt to the other's culture. The sailor learns to eat with chopsticks and the woman in turn learns to eat with a knife, fork and spoon. She approaches her grandfather, a kind, scholarly man who teaches her the British way of handling western utensils. Still she worries because her fiancé is American.
They meet again; their transcultural love shows they really have more common grounds than differences. Each is moved by the other's willingness to learn the other's culture and the results are heartwarming.

Everybody Cooks Rice Norah Dooley

Everybody Bakes Bread Norah Dooley  

Everybody Brings Noodles Norah Dooley

Everybody Serves Soup Norah Dooley

This series of books explores how people from different cultures share commonalties through food.

This delightful series of books takes the reader around a multi-cultural neighborhood visiting homes and seeing how the same ingredients are used in different families. 

Heather Has Two Mommies Leslie Newman the story of Heather, a preschooler with two moms who discovers that some of her friends have very different sorts of families. Juan, for example, has a mommy and a daddy and a big brother named Carlos. Miriam has a mommy and a baby sister. And Joshua has a mommy, a daddy, and a stepdaddy. In the afterword, the author (whose other children's books include Matzo Ball Moon) explains that although she grew up in a Jewish home, in a Jewish neighborhood, there were no families like hers on the television or in picture books. It is important that each child sees his or her family as “right”. 

Ages 8-12

Children Just Like Me  Anabel Kindersle (can be used with younger children as a read aloud book)

A delightful, attractive look at children from around the world. The authors spent two years meeting and photographing youngsters from every continent and more than 140 countries. The volume is divided by continent, which is introduced with photos of children, their names, and nationalities. Then a double-page spread features pictures of each child's food, eating utensils, housing, school, friends, and family. The text gives the young people a chance to comment on their favorite games, friends, and hopes for the future. The final section includes excerpts from the Kindersleys' travel diary. This book is factual, respectful, and insightful. It provides just the right balance of information and visual interest for the intended audience

For teachers and other adults:

To Be Free:  Understanding and Eliminating Racism

A book to be used with adults to educate about how the concept of race came to be. It has discussions about what constitutes racism and how different types of racism have played out in the past.  Imagine if we were free of racism--free from the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual toll that it takes on both racists and those subjected to racism. Imagine being free. Often, however, just the mention of the word 'racism' makes people nervous. Like if the subject doesn't come up, maybe it will go away. Like maybe it will slip forever into the recesses of a cave somewhere. Or maybe it will disappear magically, as if it never existed. Many people of color, however, deal with the reality of racism in all its forms on a daily basis--in stores, in schools, at work, on the bus, while watching television, listening to music, browsing the Internet, or reading magazines and newspapers. They can't pretend it away because it is always there in all its ugliness before them.
What if, however, we decided to acknowledge racism and talk about ways of preventing, reducing, and alleviating it? And what if we began the discussion among young people, before they solidify their beliefs about people and other races? 'To Be Free' is written to help facilitate that discussion.

Between the World and Me:  Ta-Nahisi Coates 

Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “The Mecca” for its revelatory community of black students and teachers—to the broader Meccas of New York and Paris. Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Coates is direct and, as usual, uncommonly insightful and original. There are no wasted words. This is a powerful and exceptional book.--

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures   

Ann Fadiman

 The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.n Crisis

 Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis:  J.D. Vance

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class through the author’s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.

Books for our Montessori Practice:

By Susan Mayclin Stephenson the following books are insightful, firmly grounded in AMI practice and inspiring.

Montessori and Mindfullness

The Joyful Child:  Montessori Global Wisdom from Birth to Three

Child of the World:  Montessori Global Education from 3-12

Please share your personal favorites with all of us so we can expand our knowledge of our world.  Books can be non-fiction, fiction, poetry or your own insights.