Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for 25 years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager. When a bright, affluent 15-year-old girl, a seemingly unlikely candidate for emotional problems, came into her office with the word 'empty' carved into her left forearm, Levine was shaken. The girl and her cutting seemed to personify a startling pattern Levine had been observing among her teenage patients, all of them bright, affluent, and clearly loved by their parents. Behind a veneer of strength, many of them suffered extreme emotional problems: depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. What was going on?Meticulous research confirmed Levine's worst suspicions. Privileged adolescents nation-wide are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems, more than children from any other socio-economic group, including those in dire poverty. The various strands of this perfect storm - materialism, pressure to achieve, and parental difficulties with attachment and separation - point to a crisis in America's culture of affluence, a culture that is as unmanageable for children as it is for their parents, particularly their mothers. While many privileged kids have the ability to make a 'good' impression, alarming numbers lack the basic foundation of psychological development - the self. They are bland, disinterested, uncreative, and most of all unhappy. And their parents often fail to see that anything is wrong. A controversial look at privileged families, this book disposes of the 'overparenting' paradigm now in vogue, exploding one child-rearing myth after another.

Psychologist Madeline Levine brings together cutting-edge research and thirty years of clinical experience to explode once and for all the myth that good grades, high test scores, and college acceptances should define the parenting endgame.

Parents, educators, and the media wring their hands about the escalating rates of emotional problems and lack of real engagement with learning found so frequently among America's children and teens. Yet there are ways to reverse these disheartening trends. Until we are clearer about our core values and the parenting choices that are most likely to lead to authentic, and not superficial, success, we will continue to raise exhausted, externally driven, and emotionally impaired children who believe they are only as good as their last performance.

Confronting the real issues behind why we push some of our kids to the breaking point while dismissing the talents and interests of many others, Levine shows us how to shift our focus from the excesses of hyperparenting and the unhealthy reliance on our children for status and meaning to a parenting style that concentrates on both enabling academic success and developing a sense of purpose, well-being, and connection in our children's lives.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising is both a work of memory and a work about memory. Miron Bialoszewski, the great avant-garde Polish poet, memorializes the doomed uprising of the Polish population against their Nazi masters, which began on August 1, 1944, and was eventually abandoned on October 2, 1944, with the physical destruction of Warsaw, street by street and house by house, and the slaughter of 200,000 civilians. Yet Bialoszewski begins his memoir not with an invocation of the great historical events about to unfold but with a simple observation: "Tuesday, August 1, 1944, was cloudy, humid, not too warm...and I remember that there were many trolleys, cars, and people and that right after I reached the corner of Zelazna Street, I realized what day it was (the first of August) and I thought to myself, more or less in these words: 'August 1 is Sunflower Day.' " Bialoszewski concentrates on recalling the things he saw, felt, smelled, and heard. Each object is precious. Each possesses its own integrity, which the violence of the Nazis will destroy. In reclaiming these objects, Bialoszewski combats the inner evil of the time he recounts, the thinking of those for whom the individual is meaningless and the moment is a fraud. In dwelling with loving concern on the cobblestones, glass jars, and the casual words people spoke in passing, Bialoszewski sets himself against those for whom history justifies all actions and violence is a substitute for truth. Bialoszewski rescues memory from history. He rescues the moment from the epic sweep of the thousand-year Reich. He observes "the glaring identity of 'now.' " He tells us: "That is why I am writing about this. Because it is all intermeshed. Everything. My neighborhood too. Leszno, Chlodna, and Muranow. Because the majority of my churches were there. Then the Jews. And Kochanowski. And that woman near the pillars." In reclaiming the memory of the anonymous "woman near the pillars," Bialoszewski reaffirms the life-giving power of the imagination, which all the force of the inhuman Nazi machine could not-and cannot-obliterate.

Polish Wilno--now Vilnius, in Lithuania--was the city of Czeslaw Milosz's youth and adolescence. In this collection of essays and reminiscences, written over a span of three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning poet traces an informal autobiography againstthe street map of an extraordinary city--a crossroads of languages, cultures, and beliefs--that lies at the very heart of his internal geography.
"Beginning with My Streets," available for the first time in paperback, gathers portraits of the writers Aleksander Wat, Dwight MacDonald, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the great Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg; an exchange of letters from the 1950s with the novelist and diarist Witold Gombrowicz; and a selection of speeches delivered between 1967 and 1987, including Milosz's Nobel Lecture. These diffuse reckonings, distinguished throughout by the flavor of personality and the aura of place, have a cumulative power--they are quintessential Milosz.