The Medieval Cookbook by Maggie Black

There are a few "medieval" cookbooks floating around, but this is the best I've seen so far. It's the kind of cookbook that you can actually sit down and read through.

The recipes are divided by era, social class, and function. There's a chapter on foods that were primarily associated with the cloister, for example, and a section for remedies. There are simple dishes with few ingredients that would be most appropriate for a side-dish or breakfast, and there are elaborate meals that belong more properly to a great feast.

Each recipe comes with a short introduction or with a contemporary passage describing the dish, followed by the ingredients list and instructions. Some license is taken with substitutions - sometimes multiple substitutions are indicated for choice - to deal with the fact that many of the ingredients are hard to find these days or no longer exist at all.

illustrations from contemporary sources are plentiful and printed in full colour, making this book a lovely source of medieval art as well.

I've tried a couple of the recipes over the years and enjoyed them. I'd love to throw a "Period Party" someday to really make use of this book.

What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn

Read: 22 September, 2011

I don't think that anyone questions the idea that our public schools are, by and large, failing kids. It's also no secret that programs like No Child Left Behind that require mass standardized testing promote "teaching the test," often at the expense of real learning. But in this collection of essays, Alfie Kohn goes a step further and argues that even grades should be dumped as an assessment tool.

Kohn ranks the evilness of the various assessment methods, with standardized tests at the top, followed by ranking methods (such as class ranks and grading on a curve), and ending with the assignment of grades. But each, he says, causes kids to view learning as a chore to get through rather than something they might choose to do.

The book is a collection of essays, so each chapter is a discrete unit. That being said, they've clearly been edited so that they make sense together, with references to other chapters for more information. The whole is brought together with a well-written introduction that serves to unify the individual essays in support of a common thesis.

I found Kohn's book to be very interesting and well-written. It challenged a lot of my assumptions (such as the bunk-ness of grade inflation), and has left me thinking a great deal about education. Only the chapter discussing Maslow was on the weak side, and I'm not sure what it was supposed to contribute to the thesis of the book.

If I had to find a flaw, it would be that while the current system is heavily criticised, Kohn is very light on the alternatives. I think this is a fairly important failing because he's challenging so many concepts that we take for granted that he absolutely must provide us with alternatives.

I don't know how much I agree with Kohn yet. I think that his arguments were very compelling on first reading, but I need to mull them over a bit longer before I come to a conclusion. He's definitely given me food for thought, though, and done so in a vehicle that was a pleasure to read. On that basis alone, I highly recommend What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated for parents of school-aged kids and anyone involved in education, at any level, formal or otherwise.

Raising a Secure Child by Zeynep Biringen

Read: 13 September, 2011

Raising a Secure Child starts from the same Daniel Goleman research that informed Emotionally Intelligent Parenting. Since the two were so similar in many ways, I can't help but to review the former in light of the latter.

I complained that Emotionally Intelligent Parenting provided sample dialogues to illustrate their points that were clearly idealized and read like something from the Stepford Wives. It was almost creepy. Raising a Secure Child, while making much greater use of dialogues and sample situations, did a much better job. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this was one of the book's most positive features. Every major point was backed up with a short vignette of a family either doing it right or doing it wrong that helped me see what the point should (or shouldn't) look like in practice. I found these to be a huge help in visualizing how I might out the advice into practice.

While Emotionally Intelligent Parenting focused on always saying the right thing, the focus in Raising a Secure Child was much more on the non-verbal interactions between parent and child. In other words, really meaning it is seen as more valuable than always having the right script handy. This made a good deal more intuitive sense to me.

Both books had the same emphasis on being emotionally present for kids (although, again, I felt that Raising a Secure Child made the point in a way that felt more practically applicable), and both talked about the importance of structure and limit-setting.

Raising a Secure Child spent a good deal of time on helping me to analyse my own upbringing to help me see how that might affect how I interact with my son. While it's something I have thought about a lot, I still found it helpful to go through in a more methodical sort of way.

And while it isn't applicable to my family, I do think the sections on children with special needs and getting through a divorce could be very useful.

Both books covered the full range from baby to young adult. I think that both are worth reading, but Raising a Secure Child is by far the better of the two.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth

Read: 9 September, 2011

There's a trick to reading parenting books: Never read them reactively.

It's a rule I'm normally really good at following, but I broke it when I picked up Health Sleep Habits, Happy Child. To make a long story short, my son sleeps wonderfully at night but is a terrible day napper. This often leads to some horrific bouts of crankiness, so I looked up infant sleep books at my local library to see if I could find something to help.

The central advice of Healthy Sleep Habits is to have babies take regular naps (and he does emphasize the "regular"). Great! I agree! Now how do we accomplish this?

Well, that's where the book starts to fall apart. Weissbluth recommends a sleep routine that may include things like reading a bedtime story (which excites my son because books are OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a bath (which excites my son because water is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a massage (which excites my son because physical contact is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), and a lullaby (which... Yeah, I think you get the point).

I realize that my son is a bit weird. The grandson of two professional track-and-fielders (one of whom held a world record for a year) and a professional mountain climbing instructor, he's predisposed to some rather heightened energy levels. Not only is he an unstoppable force, he's also hitting all of his physical milestones on the very early end of the spectrum.

So Weissbluth's advice doesn't seem to work for our family (and I refuse to even try the cry-it-out method that he says may help if the stable bedtime routine fails). Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a huge deal. I don't know any adults who need nipples in their mouths to fall asleep, so I can reasonably assume that TurboKid will eventually grow out of his sleep problems, like I did. I could just keep trying with the routine and that would be the end of it.

The problem with Weissbluth is that he peppers his book with comments like:

I think it possible that unhealthy sleep habits contribute to school-related problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities.

and:

Warning: If your child does not learn to sleep well, he may become an incurable adult insomniac, chronically disabled from sleepiness and dependent on sleeping pills.

These sorts of friendly reminders are helpfully printed apart from the text, presented in bold and segregated in little boxes, lest you fail to notice that you are irrevocably breaking your baby.

There were aspects of the book that I enjoyed, such as the breakdown of strategies by age. But these were so overshadowed by the fear-mongering that it's hard for me to write anything other than a negative review. It's bad enough that I'm dealing with a cranky baby and that I can't get the method to work. To add a level of desperation, to make my failure something that will turn my precious babe into a disabled drug user, is just cruel.

Bad, Weissbluth. Bad.