The Case For Make Believe

In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only countercultural—it threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child’s play is—and what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist’s office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling’s death, expressing feelings they can’t express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.

Looks at the way corporations and advertisers target children as a profitable demographic, as well as their methods for getting past parental safeguards to make products of all kinds appeal directly to even the youngest children.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that adage is put to its test in Molly Make-Believe, a charming romance novel from Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. When up-and-coming businessman Carl Stanton falls ill and is prescribed weeks of bed rest, his fiancee Cornelia decides to go ahead with her plans to visit relatives in the South. A flurry of love letters follow -- but their true provenance leads the ailing Carl down an unexpected path.

Marcus offers this animated history of the visionaries--editors, illustrators, and others--whose books have transformed American childhood and American culture.

High quality cloth book with touch-and-feel tabs on each page.

Poetry. "Hi. You probably don't know me, but this blurb is that moment when you're scanning the back of a book, looking for a hook that will lead you inside to something you really need. But then you realize the person who's written the blurb--me--isn't someone you've ever heard of, or they're not the literary flavor of the week, or maybe you genuinely don't like their work. Maybe you genuinely don't like them...Well, this is that moment, and we've both been here before. It's a little uncomfortable, but often that's the case with things that are true. What I'm saying is...I really need you to read this book, because it is in fact something you really need to read. Really. Please..."--Matt Hart "Imagine, if you will, a robot, a little language machine programmed to process hurt--your exact grief--by naming it, until it has no sting. Imagine an elegy for Phillip Seymour Hoffman delivered from the persona of Phil Parma, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character in Magnolia, over Phillip Seymour Hoffman's body, like a treatise on hearing and healing another human. If you can imagine the antic mix of Ultra-Talk and artifice, a spiral notebook's wide-open ardor, and POV script filled to the brim with 'lust and shame / and real beauty and the feverish, / trembling trust you get from puppies / or babies, anybody truly new,' you need this book more than you think. Simultaneously searing and sensitively tuned, McKee's fourth collection, META META MAKE-BELIEF is both diagnosis and remedy for 'your despair which is always becoming / another version of itself / or bulging into an altogether / altogether else.'"--Marcus Wicker "We live in a world of illusions selling us further illusions. We grow dizzy and sick with it. This book is a tonic and an art and a hair of the dog, making itself true and truly felt."--Kate Nuernberger

A non-fiction book full of fascinating facts about sharks.