Synopses & Reviews
The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: Success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs.
But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.
How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of scientists and educators who are radically changing our understanding of how children develop character, how they learn to think, and how they overcome adversity. It tells the personal stories of young people struggling to say on the right side of the line between success and failure. And it argues for a new way of thinking about how best to steer an individual child—or a whole generation of children—toward a successful future.
This provocative and profoundly hopeful book will not only inspire and engage listeners; it will also change our understanding of childhood itself.
Review
"Well-written and bursting with ideas, this will be essential [listening] for anyone who cares about childhood in America." ---Kirkus Starred Review
Review
"Dan John Miller provides an effective reading." —Library Journal Audio Review
Synopsis
Paul Tough, author of
Whatever It Takes, reverses three decades of thinking about what creates successful children, solving the mysteries of why some succeed and others fail—and of how to move individual children toward their full potential for success.
About the Author
Paul Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America. Paul has written extensively about education, child development, poverty, and politics, including cover stories in the New York Times magazine on character education, the achievement gap, and the Harlem Children's Zone. He has worked as an editor at the New York Times magazine and Harper's magazine and as a reporter and producer for the public radio program "This American Life." He was the founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, GQ, Esquire, and Geist, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He lives with his wife and son in New York. Dan John Miller is an American actor and musician. In the Oscar-winning Walk the Line, he starred as Johnny Cash's guitarist and best friend, Luther Perkins, and has also appeared in George Clooney's Leatherheads and My One and Only, with Renee Zellweger. An award-winning audiobook narrator, Dan has garnered multiple Audie Award nominations, winning for The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman; has twice been named a Best Voice by AudioFile magazine; and has received several AudioFile Golden Earphones Awards and a Listen-Up Award from Publishers Weekly. He has narrated books by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth as well as by Pat Conroy, Andre Dubus III, John Green, Nora Roberts, and Dean Koontz. Dan lives in the Detroit, Michigan, area with his wife, Tracee Mae, and their daughter, Frances Rose.