family – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families

By Scott J. Pearson | November 15, 2024November 15, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Family is a bedrock of human civilization. After all, it’s where we first learn to care for ourselves, work for others, and socialize among each other. However, life is not always easy on families, and many eventually separate as time proceeds. Separation often takes a heavy toll. For those who suffered under slavery, dehumanizing conditions continually forced separations among spouses, parents, and children. On top of that, the Civil War caused a social upheaval that’s…

Daughters of Green Mountain Gap: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | January 6, 2024December 23, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Primum non nocere, reads a key line of the Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm.” For millennia, healthcare workers have tried to remember this ethical principle, yet human nature still often takes over. As is too common with religious differences, it’s far easier to squabble than to collaborate. In our modern world, science supersedes belief, no? And enlightened, western religion supersedes mystical religions of the land, right? In the past 40-or-so years, many have come…

Family Psychology

Parenting Teens with Love & Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible Adulthood

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023May 18, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

When my daughter was younger, I enjoyed reading Love and Logic for parents of young children. I found it helpful for establishing a good relationship with my daughter. And she has become a healthy preteen now. She is socially conscious, in an academic magnet school, and mostly interested in mature things. Importantly, she has become friends with my wife and me. Some of the credit for that goes to the framework the Love and Logic…

Biography-Memoir

Leaving: How I Set Myself Free from an Abusive Marriage

By Scott J. Pearson | April 11, 2023January 22, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

An abusive marriage filled with domestic violence is one of the worst possible outcomes of a marriage. While betrothed, it can be hard to foresee this result, but it can take a lifetime to recover from the trauma. If children are involved, they, too, can be scarred with worse mental health outcomes. Sometimes, social constraints – such as living in a patriarchal culture or under a country’s oppressive, misogynistic legal system – can make matters…

Biography-Memoir

Benjamin Banneker & Us: 11 Generations of an American Family

By Scott J. Pearson | April 2, 2023April 2, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Living in the Revolutionary War period, Benjamin Banneker was a genius in an age of American greatness. He was a freed black man in Maryland who built a clock out of wood (yes, you read that right), published several almanacs, and critically helped survey the land for the District of Columbia. Rachel Jamison Webster found out in recent years that she is a white relative of his. A writing professor at Northwestern, she constructs a…

Family Fiction-Stories History

An Enemy Like Me: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | January 24, 2023December 18, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Even my 11-year-old daughter observes that World War II still defines our modern era. It brought the United States of America into prominence; it ushered in a relatively peaceful Europe; it set the boundaries of communism and democracy; it opened up Americans’ eyes to the global order. Many younger people are realizing this history’s impact as their parents and grandparents have recently deceased. In this book, Brown seeks to kindle one fictional family’s history, from…

Biography-Memoir Psychology

An Impossible Wife: Why He Stayed: A True Story of Love, Marriage, & Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | March 10, 2022March 10, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

A century ago, people with mental illness was handled through a sanitarium. Since the advent of helpful but imperfect medications in the latter twentieth century, however, many with mental illness now live in the community. As a result, they have to deal with stigma around their illness – both others’ and their own. Siddoway (simply Rachael in the tale) tells a true story of her parents and her family. She shows how hard their lives…

Fiction-Stories

A Conspiracy of Mothers: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | September 4, 2021September 4, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

This story of race, family, and other “ties that bind” is a product of its environment – South Africa around the end of apartheid – as much as it is a story of universal human nature. Told from multiple perspectives, it represents the hard work of reconciliation in a culture divided by so many ephemeral things like ethnicity or skin color. It is also a story about real horrors also dividing us like sexual abuse,…

Fiction-Stories

The Vanishing Half: A Novel by Brit Bennett

By Scott J. Pearson | July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

This story contains themes from many strands of life: race, grief, family, sexuality, LGBTQI+ issues, authenticity, estrangement, speaking lies or truth, and self-determination. None of these predominate in the narrative; rather, they seem to dwell together in just the right amount. Perhaps that’s why it’s won so much acclamation since being published a year ago. Bennett’s tale begins in a small town in Louisiana with an African-American family under Jim Crow. The father was lynched…

Family Kids

Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien

By Scott J. Pearson | December 13, 2020December 13, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

J.R.R. Tolkien is most well known as the author behind the famed series The Lord of the Rings. He was also an Oxford don (in the field of Anglo-Saxon literature) and a family man who was widely adored for his overactive imagination. He wrote little publicized letters to his children every year at Christmastime by posing as Father Christmas (the equivalent of Santa Claus), replete with this trademark imagination and with drawings and paintings. His…