Reviews for Keys to Parenting Your Teenager (Barron's Parenting Keys)

The average rating for Keys to Parenting Your Teenager (Barron's Parenting Keys) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-18 00:00:00 Marc Lasecki Re-read this bad boy for research purposes. The spectacle is a concept that's very swanky to talk about in dinner parties like George Orwell's 1984, but it is often simplified and, ironically enough, objectified by its debaters. Everybody acknowledge we live in the society of spectacle, but either don't believe its rules apply to them or adopt a defeatist attitude towards it. What is the spectacle, then? Debord has a great way of summarizing it: the colonization of human life by commodities. It's people arguing over iPhones vs Androids. People crafting their identity around fictional characters (* ahem * Tyler Durden * ahem * ) and shunning their relationship to their real environment. It's people thinking hard work alone will lead them anywhere they want because they've been told by people who haven't necessarily worked harder than them in order to become successful and who are very self-conscious about protecting the social order they prosper in. You get the gist. We live in a neoliberalism economy where the most important think we can do is buy, so the best way we can turn the system around it by starting to think critically about your own consumerism. It's 2017. Let's make Guy Debord cool again.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-08 00:00:00 Brent Polos I never went to university'nor did the majority of my friends'and so never received any manner of guidance or instruction, or even bar table theoretical bullshitting, at the academic level to go along with my burgeoning interest in philosophy, politics, and culture. For better and for worse (and mostly the latter) I have carved my own path through the tangled thickets of critical genius and doctrinal snares, a haphazard sampling of great minds from across the ages, non-systematic and initially stemming from the tutelary prose of Bertrand Russell. For this reason, I found myself coming to the Marxist exponents without a solid grounding in the master's thought'and, thus, ofttimes ended up more confused and/or led down erroneous trails than I presumably would have been with a sounder grasp of the theoretical details. Or not: mayhaps a certain amount of ignorance, or naïveté, actually allowed me to penetrate the occlusions or obfuscations that ensnared more deeply immersed adepts. Who, apart from The Shadow, knows? In any case, Society of the Spectacle was amongst my first forays into the labyrinthine philosophical-cultural terrain of the postwar twentieth-century. I found it a tantalizing and mysterious conundrum, with moments of a profound and shocking clarity but, overall, quite difficult, a serious challenge to follow, unpack, and comprehend. As Jimmy Cline nicely puts it: Even for a theoretical text written by an extreme leftist, in the late sixties, in Paris, this is a convoluted read. The saying goes that life's a circus, but Debord seems to be addressing what exactly must constitute a (post)modern society such that the triumphal late-capitalist incarnation of the circus'with its gaudily omnipresent cultural, political, and economic performers, venues, and effects'need be generated and configured in order to mold and maintain it as such. I read this back in the late-nineties, and truth to tell I can hardly remember any clear-cut details. Unless the book really gripped me, my shelf life for reliable reading memory is about, oh, five years, max. I would love to have another go at it soon'perhaps after I have finally gotten around to ingesting my electronic copy of Sadie Plant's Situationist exposition'as I would (hopefully) have a better understanding of what exactly Debord was trying to say and why he was trying to say it; determining its relevance in the new century'in relation to such a springboard effort as, say, Heath and Potter's collaboration'should prove an interesting task, especially now that the spectacle can be both more and less circumscribed with the advent of a vast array of media mediums that operate 24/7. As for the prose itself'these piquant poetic puzzles and artful allusions, these polished arrangements of a bespectacled, chain-smoking, Gallic sphinx'I trust they have lost none of their Gordian charm to the abrasions of time.