book review – Page 3

What I Wish I’d Known: Book Binding

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Horror of horrors. I bought a used copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and a section of pages immediately fell out! Because of course they did.

Broken copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

Now what am I supposed to do?? Until now, I’d just stuffed the pages back into the book and stuck it back on the shelf. Except I’d just started reading this book! And now I have a toddler! There was no way this book would survive marginally intact.

I turned to social media for help, as you do.

I recently bought book tape to repair some spines (totally aspirational – haven’t gotten around to it yet), but that didn’t seem like the right tool to repair something inside the book. And apparently that was right. A librarian recommended a special kind of glue. My reaction: ugh something else I have to buy and don’t know how to use. But sure. I’d do it. It’s a good skill for a book hoarder to know.

But then someone came along with a radical idea: take it to an office supply store and put it on a spiral binding. I admit I scoffed a little at first. That would ruin the book!!1! But she had a great point that with a spiral binding, it could lay flat, and that sounded nice. After sitting on it for a week or so, I decided that was actually a brilliant idea.

I had already intended to print out my Exploring Nature with Children curriculum PDF and make it spiral bound, so why not hit two birds with one stone? And they came out great! Pretty cheap for a store too, $14 for both bindings and to cut the original binding off my book.

Maybe one day I’ll get my own spiral binding-thingy-majigger!

Book Review: The Plug-In Drug by Marie Winn

What a title, amirite?? I can’t deny it; the title is what sucked me in. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life. That’s pretty inflammatory. Imagine the reactions and debates you’d get from posting this picture on your social media!

It’s actually quite a lot milder than I expected. Downright reasonable. She obviously doesn’t want you to have screen-time, especially before certain ages, but she knows that’s not on the agenda for many people and especially not for parents’ media consumption. She gives great advice for reducing screen-time even if you have no plan to eliminate it.

This updated edition includes some information about modern screens, but no book currently available yet give a full analysis of those new forms of media. The studies need time to make long-term predictions, though there are some studies floating around already. Though, like the author, I think we can extrapolate many common-sense conclusions of what their effects might be based on a couple of generations of TV consumption, a generation of desktop computer usage, and our own reactions to new media (I can sure tell you about my own smartphone addiction).

We’re not a screen-free home, but we’re very close to one. We watch TV on a laptop every day for about a half hour. During dinner, no less! ::gasp!:: But it’s tv for us, not the kids, though they’re present, which is getting to be more complicated as the toddler gets older. We watch the news. One angle to TV consumption I haven’t yet seen addressed in this age of new media is how we watch TV: it’s a 20 minute clip, but we take 30-40 minutes to watch it. Because we constantly stop it to debate the material we just heard, add additional info we know on the subject, or share what the segment just reminded us of. It’s a very interactive, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite times of day. Let’s be honest: it’s usually the only intellectual conversation I get with an adult all day long, and in person no less! With a guy I sorta like! And if I were being even more honest, I like the structuring of our conversation. My day is full of baby, toddler, and information related to babies and toddlers. Some days, I don’t know what else I’d talk about with my husband when he came home. Rather than racking my brain for something “interesting” (and he’s very picky about what interests him), we have topics provided by a third party in a way that interests us both and then gives us equal footing to them discuss and debate. When my brain is fried at the end of a day of tantrums (both mine and the children’s), that is worth its weight in gold. The power of a simple pause button, effectively.

I think this approach to screens deserves study: how can we make new media more interactive and utilize its ability to actually stimulate interaction between real human beings?

But if you’re like me and have a smartphone problem, I highly recommend the free app Moment. (Check out this slightly-out-of-date review on Lifehacker.) I liked it so much I even paid for a premium account (after using the free version for about a year I think) so I could do the harsher bootcamp. I cut an average of 42 minutes a day of phone usage in two weeks. That was about two weeks ago, and I have good and bad days, but I am using my phone less than I was before. I’m sure I’ll write a more comprehensive post about that soon enough because it’s amazing. (They also have a free sister app called Focus that helps you stay off your phone while driving. Unfortunately, they haven’t worked out using the app when you also use your phone as a GPS. I just checked my app, and it says I spent 3.5 hours on my phone while driving in the last month, which was almost entirely GPS time. But the verbal reminders to turn off my phone are why I use it.)

Book Review: Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

As central as children and family are in the Jewish world, there really isn’t that many parenting books. I was even surprised how few books there are on the halacha related to raising children, especially babies. (There are a fair number of books on chinuch, as in teaching Jewish law and practice to your children, but those have seemed to me often limited to just ritual practice matters and often skewed toward male children, based on perusal in bookstores. Having girls, I haven’t bothered to buy any yet but probably will soon enough.) But when I asked around for the halachic considerations of having a newborn, the response was overwhelmingly:

Friend/Facebook: What do you mean? What’s there to know?

Me: Like halacha of kids. I’ve heard people talking about how you need to change diapers differently on Shabbat. Rules for how to sort toys to clean them up. Feeding meat and milk to kids. Can you wash breastmilk or formula bottles in a meat dishwasher? C’mon. How do you not see a million questions here?

Friend/FB: I never thought about that. It seemed obvious. / I just did what I had to do and didn’t ask questions I didn’t want answers to. / I just did what my mom or friends do.

Color me shocked. We analyze everything. Everything. Every detail of life. Why did I see so little discussion of halacha with kids? There are some books, mostly older. (I don’t recommend them – ask your posek/mom/friends. Way too many issues involved, and the books just give the most stringent answer based on assumptions that aren’t always articulated clearly.)

There’s a similar lack of books about parenting Jewishly, though there are more coming out all the time, mostly from the non-orthodox perspective, which I think is interesting. I have several Jewish parenting books I’m going to be reading over the next year or so, so look forward to more reviews! But let’s start with an excellent one: Raising a Child with Soul: How Time-Tested Jewish Wisdom Can Shape Your Child’s Character.

Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

But what if you’re not Jewish? Is this still worth a read? Sure, why not? Given the nature of the parenting publishing world, I read a lot of parenting books explicitly written from a Christian perspective (heck, most of the Charlotte Mason community writes from this perspective). I’ve learned a great deal from them. You take what works and leave what doesn’t, and that’s true for every parenting book we encounter. Personally, I find it interesting to read parenting books that present cultures very different from my own, whether Christian, Dutch, or French. (Those are the groups I’ve read the most about.) Seeing common questions from a very different perspective of your own and with very different justifications or assumptions, you can analyze your own perspective and assumptions with a fresh eye.

I was so happy to discover this book at the library. I knew about the author’s mother, Rebbetzin Jungreis from the Hineni Center in Manhattan. When I was in my first year of law school and not actively affiliated with a community, I began watching Shalom TV since my roommates had cable (my first time with cable in 10 years at the time!). I was floored to find a Jewish channel on tv! Each Shabbat morning, I would watch a parsha shiur by Rebbetzin Jungreis on Shalom TV, and it was a major part of what pulled me back into shul and my conservative conversion (affectionately referred to as Conversion 1.0). When I learned that her daughter had written a book on parenting, I knew I wanted to read it. But at the time, I didn’t have any kids! Then of course I forgot about it.

I highly recommend this book. I like that this book gives Jewish sources and perspectives on the gentle parenting practices thankfully prominent today. But while still being authoritative and maintaining a clear distinction between parent and child, which I personally think is an important component of gentle parenting. There must be a foundation of respect of a parent, just because they’re the parent. While a child deserves respect as a born person, my home is still a benevolent dictatorship at the end of the day. She can’t understand every reason for the actions I take, and that’s ok and means I don’t always have to explain myself in the here and now. She’ll understand later. And while I’m happy to reconsider a situation based on new facts, I’m not trying to raise a lawyer who negotiates every decision. That’s not always a popular thing to say in the crunchy-ish groups I belong to, but my own life experience has shown that friend-based parenting isn’t a model I believe in.

And that’s also the model Charlotte Mason advocates. Both would argue that a child deserves a reason if they ask, but they also must be obedient regardless of whether they understand our reasoning or not. I believe both offered this excellent advice: if you tell your child to do something (and you shouldn’t overwield this power), and the child asks “why,” they can have an answer. But only after they’ve done what you asked. After they’ve obeyed quickly and cheerfully, they can come back to you for an answer and discussion. Funnily enough, they rarely come back because during the action, they magically remembered the reason you’ve explained to them 32 times before. It was usually just a stalling tactic. You’ve respected their request, respected their personhood by making reasonable requests in the first place, and also demanded the obedience that builds good character.

This book doesn’t explicitly say so (that I remember, but I remember hints at it), but Jewish parenting fulfills a key aspect of CM’s parenting advice: your child should understand that you too are bound by rules and must do the things you “ought” with quick and cheerful obedience just like they have to. Parents must obey Gd and the secular laws, just as a child must obey his parents. Few religious communities make that as clear to children as halachically-observant Jews. We have so many opportunities to model quick and cheerful obedience in our own behavior: “I’d really like a piece of cheesecake, but I just ate meat. I’ll have to wait three (or six or whatever) hours. Darn! Oh well. Wanna go read a book?”

The only downside of this book is that I didn’t connect well to the examples given. The author’s work is obviously primarily with very wealthy families. I’m not wealthy. It seemed that many of the parents were not orthodox like the author (and myself, though we are likely from very different orthodox communities), but I didn’t find that to be a barrier to connecting with the examples. Maybe that’s because I haven’t always been orthodox, but I think both orthodox and non-orthodox folks can connect with these examples.

On the other hand, I did have a hard time connecting to the example because I have different parenting practices than they do. I don’t (yet) have iPad and Disney World battles, and I hope that my parenting practices will nip most of those questions in the bud. For example, we’re not totally screen-free, but we’re close to it.

But I’d love to have summer home and international vacation problems. Hook me up!

Tl;Dr: Check it out, Raising a Child with Soul is definitely worth a read. Very practical and presents a different model of authoritative parenting than I’ve seen before, though many writers today tackle that fine line between permissive and authoritarian parenting. If you struggle with that line between being a crunchy parent and a traditional American parent, this one will speak to both sides of you and harmonize the best parts. If you lean toward one side or the other, you might benefit from a different viewpoint that’s still closer to the middle of the parenting spectrum.

Book Review: Plan Bee by Susan Brackney

Want an easy and enjoyable nature study read? This is it! Short, funny, and really easy to understand. You too can begin fact-checking board books that mix up bumblebees and honeybees!

The author dreamed of raising backyard chickens. And then when she finally bought a house, the city outlawed them. Plan B: bees. Sort of by accident. (I loved this story, btw.)

Like the best living books, this is one written by a non-expert who became an expert because she loves her subject. And loves sharing what she learned with other people. I discovered this quite by accident when I discovered the animal book shelf at the library (call number 595), and I’m so glad! Let’s be honest, it was short and had an eye-catching cover.

I highly recommend Plan Bee: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Hardest-Working Creatures on the Planet as a quick-enough-to-read-on-Shabbat read!

Book Review: Hava Nagila by Sheldon Feinberg

This book is about the most perfect Jewish living book I can imagine. It’s very short, and a quick read. But O.M.G. this story, y’all. I can’t even find this book on Goodreads, but there are a couple of used copies on Amazon. I doubt it’s in print, but it really should be. It’s a book not written by an expert on Jewish music. Just a student of the subject who really loves his teacher’s work, and every ounce of that passion and love comes across in the pages. I was sucked in and couldn’t put it down.

I heard on the Jewish Charlotte Mason Facebook group that there was a great children’s book about Hava Nagila and the story of its creation. I quickly found only one book titled Hava Nagila in our library system and ordered it, not at all considering whether there might be multiple books on this topic. (I’m going to blame that obvious oversight on newborn sleep deprivation – this was in the very early days.) It’s not a children’s book, though it could certainly be read to children. In fact, I think this could be a great inspirational story for elementary and middle school-aged kids.

I’m recommending it as #MotherCulture, but I think it’s a great read for anyone Jewish. (It probably requires too much prior knowledge for me to recommend it to non-Jews as a general rule.)

In a nutshell: the song Hava Nagila, you know, the most famous Jewish song on earth, was written by a 12 year old boy. TWELVE YEARS OLD. As a homework assignment!! And was not at all recognized for it. It spread through his class and to their families and then to the shuls of those families, slowly all over the world. It was generally attributed then (and now) as a “traditional” song, but it’s not. He created it around the turn of the century. The only downside of this book is that there’s almost no mention of years, especially in the early parts of the story. So I could only estimate the timeline as the story progressed, which I didn’t like, but I was willing to forgive because the story is so good.

Moshe Nathanson went on to a great body of work as a Jewish educator and cantor in the flagship synagogue of the Reconstructionist movement in Manhattan. He profoundly influenced American Jewish education by training hundreds (was it thousands? I forget) of Jewish day school teachers in Jewish music in the early 20th century and even wrote the book on Jewish music education that was used at the time. (Is it still used? I don’t know.) He even taught my father-in-law at his yeshiva as part of a traveling Jewish music educators program! Yet my FIL had never heard any of these accomplishments, just that he was a talented cantor and teacher. He must have been as humble as the book author asserts, since he could have capitalized on his connection to Hava Nagila, but even today, many (most?) people don’t know it’s a modern song with a known composer.

Oh yeah. He also wrote the song we use for bentching. Another song always attributed to the ether as a “traditional” tune. No big deal.

And there’s still more to the story. Check it out. Really.

I’m not normally the “omg!!!11!” exclamation point person, but this book made me one. I highly recommend it for a quick, easy, and downright enjoyable read. It even gave my cold, dark heart the warm fuzzies.