Here are 100 books that Childhood and Society fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to write over 30 books and over 1000 articles. Not even my late beloved mother would have wanted to slog through all of them! Now, thanks to Teachers College Press, I have published my overview book. In addition to collecting the “essays” on Mind that I consider most important, I have also added autobiographical material and “legends,” which provide context for the wide spectrum of themes and pieces. The chance to reflect on a life of research has stimulated me to identify the works that had the greatest influence on my thinking and writing about the range and depth of human cognition.
This remarkable book, by one of the major anthropologists of the 20th century, intertwines two enterprises; it is both a fascinating account of his ethnographic work in Brazil in the 1930s and a penetrating reflection on what it’s like for a Parisian educated scholar to understand and convey what he later termed “the Savage Mind.”
Artfully written, this book exemplifies the best of social science and literary artistry—and serves as a model for all who want to write evocatively about their calling.
A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology
This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." From the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss found the societies he was seeking among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. More than merely recounting his time in their midst, Tristes Tropiques places the cultural practices of these peoples in a global context and extrapolates a fascinating theory of culture that has given the book an importance far beyond the fields of anthropology and continental philosophy.…
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to write over 30 books and over 1000 articles. Not even my late beloved mother would have wanted to slog through all of them! Now, thanks to Teachers College Press, I have published my overview book. In addition to collecting the “essays” on Mind that I consider most important, I have also added autobiographical material and “legends,” which provide context for the wide spectrum of themes and pieces. The chance to reflect on a life of research has stimulated me to identify the works that had the greatest influence on my thinking and writing about the range and depth of human cognition.
From early childhood, I was deeply involved with classical music. But I was never able to explain its power and appeal to others—nor, indeed, to myself. Despite chatter to the contrary, I was convinced that music was not simply about “emotions.” From Langer, I learned that the arts are more effectively described as capturing the forms and the juxtapositions of diverse feelings.
Langer also modeled how to integrate philosophical and psychological ways of thinking. That amalgam stimulated me to become a founding member of Project Zero (PZ) at Harvard University, the research organization with which I have been associated since 1967. PZ has been built on ideas about “the human use of symbols and symbol systems,” as detailed by Langer as well as her contemporary (and PZ founder), Nelson Goodman.
Modern theories of meaning usually culminate in a critique of science. This book presents a study of human intelligence beginning with a semantic theory and leading into a critique of music.
By implication it sets up a theory of all the arts; the transference of its basic concepts to other arts than music is not developed, but it is sketched, mainly in the chapter on artistic import. Thoughtful readers of the original edition discovered these far-reaching ideas quickly enough as the career of the book shows: it is as applicable to literature, art and music as to the field of…
Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, has spent over a half century working with and studying young children and creating numerous courses on how best to nurture early development. She has lectured widely in many countries and is the author of over 600 articles and chapters, and dozens of books on children and their caregivers. For nearly 40 summers she conducted an annual workshop “Quality caregiving for infants and toddlers”. As a licensed New York State psychologist, she has worked with families to ameliorate troubles in development and behavior. In Beijing, she was invited to give the “Dr. Alice Honig award” to a prominent Chinese pediatrician. She was awarded the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Academic Excellence.
Vividly and poetically, Dr. Kaplan describes the emotional development of infants, including the choreography of each stage, through ‘holding on and letting go,’ and ’no-saying’ in the Separation / Individuation stage, to a psychological rebirth by the end of the toddler period. The writer carefully delineates the struggles of each baby toward this rebirth as a person who can handle the contradictions of his or her own feelings and those of the parents.
Provides insight into the process by which an infant is separated from oneness with its mother, revealing the impact of this separation on human behavior throughout life.
Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, has spent over a half century working with and studying young children and creating numerous courses on how best to nurture early development. She has lectured widely in many countries and is the author of over 600 articles and chapters, and dozens of books on children and their caregivers. For nearly 40 summers she conducted an annual workshop “Quality caregiving for infants and toddlers”. As a licensed New York State psychologist, she has worked with families to ameliorate troubles in development and behavior. In Beijing, she was invited to give the “Dr. Alice Honig award” to a prominent Chinese pediatrician. She was awarded the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Academic Excellence.
Psychiatrist Dr., Greenspan illuminates in careful detail for parents six emotional milestones on an infant’s journey toward becoming a more self-regulated person with an organized sense of self. He provides positive and wise supports for parents to help each child along this pathway.
Greenspan outlines the six stages of emotional growth in early childhood and explores the ways in which they are communicated, emphasizing parental interaction as the key to a child's healthy, emotional maturation.
Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, has spent over a half century working with and studying young children and creating numerous courses on how best to nurture early development. She has lectured widely in many countries and is the author of over 600 articles and chapters, and dozens of books on children and their caregivers. For nearly 40 summers she conducted an annual workshop “Quality caregiving for infants and toddlers”. As a licensed New York State psychologist, she has worked with families to ameliorate troubles in development and behavior. In Beijing, she was invited to give the “Dr. Alice Honig award” to a prominent Chinese pediatrician. She was awarded the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Academic Excellence.
By three years of age, toddler brains are two and half times as active as those of adults and they stay that way for a decade. New brain imaging techniques reveal how powerful adult-child positive interactions are for enhancing brain development from birth. With large print, charming infant and toddler photos, and easy-to-read charts, this book should galvanize parents and program personnel to support care providers’ frequent, sensitive, and enriching social interactions from birth onward to enhance and optimize early brain development.
Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, has spent over a half century working with and studying young children and creating numerous courses on how best to nurture early development. She has lectured widely in many countries and is the author of over 600 articles and chapters, and dozens of books on children and their caregivers. For nearly 40 summers she conducted an annual workshop “Quality caregiving for infants and toddlers”. As a licensed New York State psychologist, she has worked with families to ameliorate troubles in development and behavior. In Beijing, she was invited to give the “Dr. Alice Honig award” to a prominent Chinese pediatrician. She was awarded the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Academic Excellence.
Building on the brilliant work of Dr, Selma Fraiberg, who published Ghosts in the Nursery, detailing the consequences for impaired mother-infant relationships when the mother has had traumas in her past and then is “unable” to hear her own baby’s cries and need for nurturance, these authors go further. They provide specific details of how, during the first three years of life, insecure attachments, violence, abuse, terror, neglect, and prenatal ingestion of drugs, lead to impaired brain development, emotional disturbances, and later violent behaviors.
This new, revised edition incorporates significant advances in neurobiological research over the past decade, and includes a new introduction by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, a leading researcher in the field. When Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was published in 1997, it was lauded for providing scientific evidence that violence can originate in the womb and become entrenched in a child’s brain by preschool. The authors’ groundbreaking conclusions became even more relevant following the wave of school shootings across the nation including the tragedy at Columbine High School and the shocking subsequent shootings culminating most recently in…
I experienced being a parent as a return to my own childhood. As much as I enjoyed teaching my children, I loved learning from them as well. That got me thinking about how one might recapture the joys and insights of childhood. As a philosopher interested in education, I have long wondered whether we leave childhood behind or somehow carry it with us into old age. I discovered that several important philosophers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Rousseau have keen insights about the relation of childhood to adulthood. And the biblical Jesus seems to have been the first person to suggest that adults can learn from children.
What if children are not little adults but a different species? Perhaps children are butterflies who develop into caterpillars? Child psychologist Allision Gopnik asks wonderful questions about human development. She notes that most of us produce our best art and ask our deepest questions (“Why is the sky blue?”) as small children.
Childhood, she says, is our time of basic research; adulthood is the time for practical applications. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she celebrates the unique gifts of childhood, but she does not offer suggestions about how we might recapture those gifts.
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik ― a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother ― explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and more conscious than adults. In a lively…
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to write over 30 books and over 1000 articles. Not even my late beloved mother would have wanted to slog through all of them! Now, thanks to Teachers College Press, I have published my overview book. In addition to collecting the “essays” on Mind that I consider most important, I have also added autobiographical material and “legends,” which provide context for the wide spectrum of themes and pieces. The chance to reflect on a life of research has stimulated me to identify the works that had the greatest influence on my thinking and writing about the range and depth of human cognition.
A history and biography buff since my childhood, I learned from Hofstadter how one can humanize (without debunking) American political giants, from the founding fathers to Lincoln, to the two President Roosevelts. He provides social and cultural context and identifies concerns like democratic procedures and norms in which enduring national themes emerged and evolved.
The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired…
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to write over 30 books and over 1000 articles. Not even my late beloved mother would have wanted to slog through all of them! Now, thanks to Teachers College Press, I have published my overview book. In addition to collecting the “essays” on Mind that I consider most important, I have also added autobiographical material and “legends,” which provide context for the wide spectrum of themes and pieces. The chance to reflect on a life of research has stimulated me to identify the works that had the greatest influence on my thinking and writing about the range and depth of human cognition.
No American writer of the 20th century could make ideas and personalities come alive as effectively as Wilson; he did this both for the sweep of the Russian Revolution (the Finland Station in St Petersburg is where Lenin launched the Revolution); and for specific individuals, books, and artistic performances. I was delighted to discover that Wilson was also Richard Hofstadter’s literary inspiration.
One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution
Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea―that it is possible to construct…
I experienced being a parent as a return to my own childhood. As much as I enjoyed teaching my children, I loved learning from them as well. That got me thinking about how one might recapture the joys and insights of childhood. As a philosopher interested in education, I have long wondered whether we leave childhood behind or somehow carry it with us into old age. I discovered that several important philosophers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Rousseau have keen insights about the relation of childhood to adulthood. And the biblical Jesus seems to have been the first person to suggest that adults can learn from children.
“Never rush childhood but let it ripen in the child”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first philosopher to see children as more than adults-in-training. As someone who loved revisiting childhood as a parent, I simply adored this celebration of the world of a child.
In this philosophical novel, Rousseau is tutor to Emile from infancy to adulthood, and we watch Emile discover the world without any use of schools or books: “I hate books!” says the world-famous author. Purely through experiential learning, Emile matures, falls in love with Sophie, and becomes a model citizen. Rousseau pioneers the idea of learning through natural consequences: if Emile breaks the window in his room, he gets to enjoy a cold room.
Alan Bloom's new translation of Emile , Rousseau's masterpiece on the education and training of the young, is the first in more than seventy years. In it, Bloom, whose magnificent translation of Plato's Republic has been universally hailed as a virtual rediscovery of that timeless text, again brings together the translator's gift for journeying between two languages and cultures and the philosopher's perception of the true meaning and significance of the issues being examined in the work. The result is a clear, readable, and highly engrossing text that at the same time offers a wholly new sense of the importance…
