Detailed item info | Synopsis | The First Lady considers the difficulties of raising children in America today and outlines an ideal of broad community responsibility for the total upbringing of successful and healthy children. Her scope includes issues such as divorce, child safety, and other concerns of parents, teachers and child advocates.
Written when Hillary Clinton was the First Lady, IT TAKES A VILLAGE acknowledges the many challenges and difficulties of raising children in America and proposes an ideal of broad community responsibility for the total upbringing of healthy and secure children. Clinton draws on her own experiences as a child, mother, and lawyer, as well as those of concerned parents, teachers, and advocates for children--and she takes the time to listen to the important lessons that children can teach adults as well.
| | Size | | Length: | 318 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in. | | Width: | 5.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 15.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | For more than twenty-five years, First Lady Hiliary Rodham Clinton has made children her passion and her cause. Her long experience with children - not only through her personal roles as mother, daughter, sister, and wife but also as advocate, legal expert, and public servant - has strengthened her conviction that how children develop and what they need to succeed are inextricably entwined with the society in which they live and how well it sustains and supports its families and individuals. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child. This book chronicles her quest - both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public - to discover how we can make our society into the kind of village that enables children to grow into able, caring, resilient adults. It is time, Mrs. Clinton believes, to acknowledge that we have to make some changes for our children's sake. Advances in technology and the global economy along with other developments in society have brought us much good, but they have also strained the fabric of family life, leaving us and our children poorer in many ways - physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. She doesn't believe that we should, or can, turn back the clock to "the good old days". False nostalgia for "family values" is no solution. Nor is it useful to make an all-purpose bogeyman or savior of "government". But by looking honestly at the condition of our children, by understanding the wealth of new information research offers us about them, and, most important, by listening to the children themselves, we can begin a more fruitful discussion about their needs. And by sifting the past for clues to the structures that once bound us together, bylooking with an open mind at what other countries and cultures do for their children that we do not, and by identifying places where our "village" is flourishing - in families, schools, churches, businesses, civic organizations, even in cyberspace - we can begin to create for our children the better tomorrow they deserve.
| | Industry reviews | "Throughout this book, there is the sound of tempered frustration and unshakable determination, a missionary's zeal and a mother's vulnerability. 'It Takes a Village' is an honest book. It is not a book for cynics, but it will be welcomed by those who want to understand just who Hillary Rodham Clinton is and what we can do to help the children in our village."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Phyllis Burke (01/28/1996)
'"It Takes a Village' is filled with...creative programs, which not only meet the needs of children and their parents but, in the long run, save our communities and our nation lives and money....Somehow our village must have the gumption to elect to power and support those people who share Mrs. Clinton's belief that 'nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of our children.'"
New York Times Book Review - Katherine Paterson (02/11/1996)
"I had to write my own book because I want to stand by every word. I wanted the process of having to think through these things. You know, I've worked on these issues for so long, but to put into words what I feel about them, what I think is important--nobody could do that for me."
New York Times - Hillary Rodham Clinton (01/18/1996)
"What makes Clinton's book so important and timely is her understanding and articulation of the fact that we are not supposed to raise children in isolation but in communities, neighborhoods, towns, and villages of men and women who know (without having to be told) that we all have a responsibility to lend a hand.....In the best storytelling tradition, 'It Takes a Village' deals with solutions, both anecdotally and practically, though it could use a stronger emphasis on reading and books in the lives of children."
San Francisco Review of Books - Walter Mayes
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