Synopses & Reviews
A parenting guide to adolescence - a sensible and considerate resource for navigating your teen to adulthood, transforming a traditional time of strife into an opportunity for positive growth for both you and your child. For parents, nurturing their teens to become healthy, well-adjusted adults seems more challenging now than ever before. There are many pressures for kids to grow up faster than they should. Here, renowned adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., and award-winning journalist Susan FitzGerald offer parents a practical, thoughtful strategy for guiding children through all the turning points on the way to adulthood - the "whens" and "hows" of adolescence.
Letting Go with Live and Confidence helps parents achieve five goals:
- Manage Their Own Emotions. Many parents are conflicted about their teens growing up. The desire to keep things the way they've always been may get in the way of wise parental decisions. This book addresses the emotional turmoil that surrounds letting go, and urges parents to care for themselves, so they can better care for their children.
- Reduce Conflict Around the Whens. It's the everyday "When can I?" questions that trigger many struggles. Parents will learn to turn potential sources of conflict into opportunities for growth as they consider 18 scenarios, including When is my child ready to stay home alone? Get a cell phone? Manage money? Date? Drive?
- Minimize Anxiety Over the Hows. Certain subjects are tough to talk about and the stakes in these conversations are high. How in the world do you talk about sex? Drugs? Peer pressure? Parents will learn how to approach critical topics with honesty and clarity, increasing the chances that they'll actually be heard.
- Gain Confidence To Make the Right Decisions. Parents reading this book will be better prepared to make decisions because they'll have a strategy to apply to each situation and gain new insight into their child's developmental needs.
- Understand That Nurturing Independence Is An Act of Love. The ultimate goal of parenting is to produce a well-adjusted adult. When teens understand that their parents support their independence, they're less likely to rebel. As importantly, when independence is not a battle, families can move toward lifelong interdependence.
Letting Go with Live and Confidence is filled with the latest findings on successful parenting and is infused with Dr. Ginsburg's expert advice on how to build resilience in teens. This comprehensive volume also contains stories from real parents from diverse backgrounds who have faced the challenges of raising teens. Empowering and groundbreaking, this book is a one-stop resource to parenting teens in the twenty-first century.
Review
"Ginsburg (pediatrics & adolescent medicine, Children's Hosp. of Philadelphia) sticks to the "seven C's" he outlined in his well-regarded Building Resilience in Children and Teens and shows how a sense of competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control leads to healthy outcomes for both parent and teen. Here, he centers on the adolescent years and charts out five goals for parents: managing emotions around letting go, reducing conflict, minimizing anxiety, becoming confident in your parenting ability, and understanding that nurturing independence is an act of love. His style is pleasant and concise and, while 30 chapters and 350-plus pages on teenagers may sound like Gitmo to some readers, his advice will be of great value to parents who stick with his program. Recommended." -Library Journal
Review
"An eminently readable, down-to-earth, and spot-on book...You'll end up feeling that Ginsburg is sitting right in your living room (and wishing he were!), handing out wise, practical advice, reminding you that there is so much more right with your teen than wrong. Letting Go with Love and Confidence is likely to end up being your teen years bible."
Review
"A wonderful guide...refreshingly up-to-date and down to earth. Dr. Ginsburg is deeply respectful of both parents and teenagers." -Wendy Mogel, Ph.D., author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee
Synopsis
The captivating story of the titans, engineers, and pilots who raced to design a safe and lucrative passenger jet.
In Jet Age, journalist Sam Howe Verhovek explores the advent of the first generation of jet airliners and the people who designed, built, and flew them. The path to jet travel was triumphal and amazingly rapid-less than fifty years after the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, Great Britain led the world with the first commercial jet plane service. Yet the pioneering British Comet was cursed with a tragic, mysterious flaw, and an upstart Seattle company put a new competitor in the sky: the Boeing 707 Jet Stratoliner. Jet Age vividly recreates the race between two nations, two global airlines, and two rival teams of brilliant engineers for bragging rights to the first jet service across the Atlantic Ocean in 1958.
At the center of this story are great minds and courageous souls, including Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, who spearheaded the development of the Comet, even as two of his sons lost their lives flying earlier models of his aircraft; Sir Arnold Hall, the brilliant British aerodynamicist tasked with uncovering the Comet's fatal flaw; Bill Allen, Boeing's deceptively mild-mannered president; and Alvin Tex Johnston, Boeing's swashbuckling but supremely skilled test pilot. The extraordinary airplanes themselves emerge as characters in the drama. As the Comet and the Boeing 707 go head-to-head, flying twice as fast and high as the propeller planes that preceded them, the book captures the electrifying spirit of an era: the Jet Age.
In the spirit of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It in the World, Verhovek's Jet Age offers a gorgeous rendering of an exciting age and fascinating technology that permanently changed our conception of distance and time, of a triumph of engineering and design, and of a company that took a huge gamble and won.
Synopsis
A parenting guide to adolescence -- a sensible and considerate resource to navigating your teen to adulthood, transforming a traditional time of strife into an opportunity for positive growth for both the parent and child. For parents, "letting go" and nurturing teens in today's world to become healthy, well-adjusted adults is more challenging now than ever before. There are many new pressures and opportunities for kids to grow up faster than they should. Here, renowned adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., and award-winning journalist Susan FitzGerald offer parents a practical, thoughtful strategy for guiding children through all the turning points on the way to adulthood -- the "whens" and "hows" of adolescence.
As Dr. Ginsburg explains, it is these everyday decisions and conversations that have the greatest potential to foster resilience and build confidence. From cell phones and the Internet to handling issues surrounding sex, friends, dating, driving, staying home alone and more, Ginsburg's three-step litmus test can apply to any decision: Is it safe? Is it practical? Does it meet my standards for morality and decency?
Letting Go with Love and Confidence provides fresh, positive guidance and deals with the ordinary but still important issues of parenting -- not just the painful extremes. Empowering and groundbreaking, with stories from real parents, this book is a comprehensive, one-stop resource to parenting teens in the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., M.S.Ed., is a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine at The Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and an expert on parenting teens. Regularly voted a "Top Doc" by
Philadelphia magazine, he speaks across the country and lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two teenage daughters.
Susan Fitzgerald is an award-winning journalist. She lives outside Philadelphia.