Child-Safety Books

This book was outstanding! Not only were the visuals and concepts brilliant, but the message delivered my Ms. Mangal was inspiring. I hope that you not only share this book with your sons and daughters, but also hope our educators can get their hands on it and make it mandatory for today's youth to read, learn, and enjoy!!
-H. Parks, UCLA

I bought this book for the peaceCENTER, which is the local organizer for the Million Mom March for gun safety. Not trusting my own reaction, I passed the book around our core group of peace educators. The bullet is adorable, and therein lies the rub. If I were a young child, I would want to find a gun RIGHT NOW so I could play with the cute little bullet and look down the barrel to take a peek into her wonderful gun house. Towards the end of the book, the stray bullet is pregnant with a baby bullet. The illustrations are beautiful and the author's sincerity was never doubted, but the intended age level is in no way sophisticated enough to understand that Ms. Bullet is an attractive nuisance and not a potential playmate. For those looking for a good gun education book for young children, I would recommend Guns Are Not For Fun, which we also bought through Amazon, not nearly as pretty but delivering an unambiguous gun safety message.

My son adored this book as a toddler. He loved the colors, the shapes, the kids, everything. I would try to hide the book from him (because I had actually gotten it for my Kindergarten aged daughter and he was chewing on it, giving it his best love) but he lurked about, found all my little spots, and then HE began hiding it from ME.

This book caught my daughter's eye at the bookstore. I saw the last two pages, coated in street signs and I thought -- I've found a winner book! Although this book does have redeeming qualities, including the topic itself, the roadsigns to learn, and some advice; it contains too many "don'ts" and not enough "dos". So in my case, I wouldn't buy it again or for a friend. Children hear enough, "don'ts" let's use books to gently, repeatedly, and perhaps strongly suggest to them "what to do", rather than "what not to do." There are also suble suggestions to the adult, that could not possibly be aimed at the child board-book audience. Examples of this include: "Going too fast is wrong, going through a red light is wrong!" and "Honking for no reason is wrong!" Was this book written to teach kids about street safety, or to teach the adults in a board book fashion?

I ordered this book a while back to help with a research paper I was writing. I failed to do much legwork before I ordered it and I way overpaid for information I could have gotten for free with a little research on the Internet. It is a very short book with the basic facts about the incident. It is probably well-suited for adolescent readers at most. It is fairly objective and well-written, but surely not what one would expect for the price.

Blue Cheese Breath and Stinky Feet: How to Deal With Bullies by Catherine Depino is not a bad book. It gives some good, practical advice on how to stand up to bullies. Unfortunately, it does not go far enough. It assumes its technique will work. But in reality, many times Depino's technique won't work. Bullies just keep coming - then what? The other way this book falls short is that it only addresses one type of bullying, the classic verbal abuse and threats of physical aggression. If you want a book to help your child who has to live in the real world, the book They Call Me Chicken: A Story of Courage by John Caporale, a psychologist, is the way to go. This book is for 3rd-6th graders and doesn't try to teach kids to stop others from teasing and bullying when they can't, but instead teaches kids how to cope with it in a manner where they can truly maintain their self-esteem. And what's more, it shows kids how to cope with all types of bullying situations, from the classic beat-you-up type to the more subtle manipulative coercion. This book should be in every elementary school classroom in the country. You can find it right here on Amazon.com.

Eighteen years have passed since the incident at Chernobyl, and fifty years since the optimistic speech given by Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission quoted at the top of page 14 in this book, CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER by Nichol Bryan (World Almanac Library, 2004). The book attempts to provide individual insights on the issues which remain, which have often become political arguments about problems that remain to be solved. The technology involved showed tremendous advances since basic subatomic particles started to be identified after the discovery of the neutron in 1932, but simply providing electricity to an advanced infrastructure for modern societies required unprecedented dependability that was keeping people up at all hours when most people will be better off sleeping.

"No wonder so many countries invested heavily in nuclear power -- the United States alone built more than one hundred plants between 1944 and 1985. The amount of U.S. electricity provided by nuclear power grew to 20 percent. In countries such as France, with fewer coal supplies, almost three-quarters of all electricity was generated by nuclear power plants by the mid-1980s." (pp. 14-15).

"People became concerned about how to dispose of the used atomic fuel rods, which remained dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. Plutonium, one of the elements in these `spent' fuel rods, is also one of the deadliest substances known. And, plutonium can be used to make atomic bombs. Many worried that the spread of nuclear power plants could lead to more countries having nuclear weapons." (p. 15).

Chapter 2 describes the safety test run on the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl in April, 1986. In the event of other electrical failures, the electricity provided by the turbine for that reactor core might not be enough to shut down the operation of the reactor. "Because the same water that cooled the reactor also ran the turbines, the process that controlled the reactor started to seesaw. As the turbines turned faster, the water flowed more quickly in the reactor and cooled it down. Consequently, as the heat in the reactor dropped, it produced less steam to power the turbines, so the turbine slowed down. Plant operators made constant adjustments to the speed of the turbines and the placement of the control rods in a frantic attempt to control the reactor." (p. 19). The neutrons in the core of the reactor were able to produce a chain reaction much faster than anyone could insert control rods to slow down the neutrons that generated heat by splitting atoms when "At 1:23 A.M., the operators at Chernobyl lost the battle. Power output in the reactor suddenly jumped to one hundred times the normal amount. The radioactive fuel in the reactor core started to burst apart. The steam in the reactor core exploded. Seconds later, another explosion ripped through the reactor. The twin explosions destroyed the core of Unit 4 and blew off the reactor's 1,100-ton (1,000-tonne) roof." (p. 20).

"By late afternoon, many of the smaller fires around the plant had been put out. Then a new blaze erupted. The graphite used in the reactor core began to burn. Graphite is a form of carbon, similar to coal. It burns with an intense heat. Firefighters couldn't put out the graphite fire with water. It burned for ten days, sending more radioactive smoke into the air." (p. 21). One of the firefighters' wives said, "It was strictly forbidden to talk about this. `Your husbands got poisoned with gases,' the families of the firefighters were told." (p. 23).

This book identifies the person responsible for informing the world that a catastrophe was taking place:

"On April 28, Cliff Robinson, an engineer at Forsmark Nuclear Plant 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Uppsala, Sweden, walked through a radiation detector to get to his office. He was startled to hear the alarm go off. When Robinson measured the radioactivity of his shoes, he found levels never seen around the plant before. `My first thought was that a war had broken out and that somebody had blown up a nuclear bomb,' Robinson recalled." (pp. 27-29). Some people's feelings were hurt by the announcements which followed, and President Ronald Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes carefully defended the position of the United States by declaring:

"The United States Government at no point encouraged inaccurate reporting on the accident. If some reports carried in the mass media were in fact inaccurate, this was an inevitable result of the extreme secrecy with which the Soviet authorities dealt with the accident in the days immediately following it." (p. 32).

The biggest disagreement has been in the number of people who are dying as a result, and the miraculous survival of all the people who are not dead yet. The media recently have shown a real interest in reporting the precise numbers of people who died due to any particular incident, however daily such incidents might have become. There aren't any wild numbers in this book, like a global 500,000 or the 100,000 abortions sought by women who had been exposed to radiation and did not want to risk giving birth to a monster. "Ukrainian nuclear experts estimate that more than two thousand five hundred deaths were caused by the disaster. But other scientists, noting that half a million people got higher radiation doses from Chernobyl, estimate the death toll at closer to five thousand." (p. 36). Farms were the primary recipients of radioactive material. "And, randomly scattered `hotspots' of fallout from Chernobyl will produce radioactive crops for at least another three hundred years." (p. 37). "The government of Belarus also estimated that Chernobyl would eventually cause $235-billion worth of lost production in that country." (p. 37). Pictures on page 37 show the deactivation of Reactor Number 3 on December 15, 2000, the last of Chernobyl's reactors.

This is a good book, but rather simple if compared to the works of Beth Leonard. I would have like to have seen reference material sources for home schooling, the applicable U.S. laws and tests, grade level constructs, methods to contact schools before and after the trips, psychological viewpoints from accredited sources and how you integrate the children back once the journey is over. The author seems to spend more time on infants than the older kids. She has good ideas for things-to-do on trips, but I feel that these will run out by the time you hit your first blue water. This is a start though and if that is what was intended, then it does the job. If you are looking for the advanced to expert primer, continue your search in professional cruising magazines and books.

The book that I read about was "Sports Injuries" by Lawrence Clayton, Ph.D. It told me about the many sports injuries and how to prevent them. It tells you how dangerous sports can be while you play them.

The first injury that they talk about in the book is head injuries. It tells you what to do if someone has a big cut on his or her head that is bleeding badly. Or what to do if someone has a bump on their head. They also explain what to do if the victim is knocked unconscious.

The second injury that they discuss is about neck injuries. I learned that if someone has a serious neck injury then you should try and keep the victim perfectly still unless they are in danger. (Example- Fire) If the person moves then they are putting their selves in serious danger of further injury.

There are a lot of injuries in the book that they talk about. There are to many of them to talk about and put on this paper so I just named a couple of the major ones. All injuries can be major but the two I named are the most important.

So all in all from reading the book I would say that it was a pretty good book. It had a lot of helpful information in it that I did not know until I read it. It was easy to read and pretty interesting because I play sports and want to know the injuries I could get from playing them.

Though a helpful resource for parents and schools struggleing with Youth Hate, it looks and reads like an elementary reader on issues not G rated. Supposedly aimed at creating a "vivid example and careful historical analysis" the book is to "show the deep and painful ways in which prejudice has been expressed". Even a perfunctory reading would conclude it is neither careful nor vivid, showing only a cursory view of the painfulness of prejudice. The unsubstantiated generalities are bothersome to read.

The book is riddled with contradictions: she writes: "the largest percentage of hate crimes are committed by young white men--looking for excitement, so called thrill seekers don't belong to a group" and spends endless pages pointing out leaders of the movements. She mistakenly combines the Christian Identity with the ideology of the Aryan Nations, and claims both to be affiliates of the skinheads with very little if any cited support. She points to leaders of the movement and then incorporates militia cells which are traditionally leaderless. She compares others crimes with elements of open-burning to cross burnings claiming the only distinctions are the hate motivation. Not that notion is theoretically wrong, it is too simple: other arson not involved with prejudice occurs out of hate as well and them some occur for financial gain or pure drunken recklessness. The book ends will 11 unhelpful pages discussing local and globalized efforts to combat hate.

This book missed its mark; it could have been a real tool for parents and teachers dealing with youth subculture of Hate instead of putting itself as an academic composition. Reading like a public service pamphlet supplied by the federal government I am sure many troubled parents, peers and primary schools could utilize the work if it were coupled with a section on coping with white hate in you children, family or school section. In fact I, writing from rural Ohio, will donate my copy to the local library on the chance that a less-academic parent needs it for that very purpose.

As it stands now, the book it is too simplistic to be of worth to anyone else. It does, however, prove to be a good source of photographic depictions of hate which seems to reinforce my point.

While a good instructional book on martial arts basics, the book could go further in its presentation of practical self-defense techniques. The book tends to focus more on the technical aspects of martial arts and self-defense throughout the majority of the text, with self-defense not being covered in any detail until near the last third of the text.

It is still a good resource book with some applicable techniques. I was simply hoping for a more comprehensive look at practical self-defense techniques for children than a tretise on punching, kicking, and stances.

The book is an easy read. Though in the suggested age range of the audience, 9-12, I wonder how many will actually bother to do so. Having observed kids of that age fluidly use the computer for browsing, email and Instant Messaging, I have the nagging feeling that this book is largely irrelevant to most of them.

In some ways, and perhaps inadvertantly, the book reflects a generation gap. Many children in the US have never known a world without computers and the Web. Also, children are tending to go on the Internet at earlier than 9. And not just at home, where parents can try to restrict their activities. But also at school and public libraries. The book tends to underestimate their experience levels.

Frankly, by the time a child is 9, which is the earliest recommended age for the book, much of its advice is tedious or redundant. Take for example usernames and passwords. The book devotes several pages to explaining what these are. Too late. Many 9 year olds already have usernames and passwords, and have had these for several years. I can readily envisage eye-rolling if a teacher passes this book around class, and starts reading these passages.

Granted, there will indeed be students who lack much or any computer experience. So perhaps for them, the book has merit. But there is another problem. To the extent that this lack of experience reflects a lower IQ or attention span, the book is unlikely to garner their attention. The book is 100% text. Strictly black and white. Not a single illustration. Those students will not tend to be grabbed by the book. It is not a coincidence that when you go to a bookstore and look at kids books, that so many are lavishly illustrated. All the more so with textbooks, because those face a harder problem than fiction, in holding the reader's attention.

The large publishers of kids books know this, and go to considerable expense to gin up their books with lots of colour figures. Because they have found, for competitive reasons, that they must do so. The publisher of this particular book, Lulu Press, perhaps lacks those resources.