Word: kingdoms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ludtke's months in the kingdom of the young convinced her of two things. First, children do not remain as they are for very long: some of her subjects have grown visibly since she lived with them (though the ages in the stories have not been changed). Second, something is missing in the lives of many children nowadays. "They are looking for someone -- parents, teachers, ministers -- to set limits and impose discipline," she says. "Without walls to bounce against, children seem lost...
Only sentimentalists have ever considered childhood to be a kingdom of untroubled innocence. Today there is more trouble for children and less time for innocence than in recent generations. The problem is not so much that children have changed. The world has changed. Writes Dr. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist and author who has studied the lives of the young for more than 30 years: "Children have always been, and still are, a mirror to us -- ourselves writ small." Ourselves have changed...
Children are born anarchists. Babies reign in the solitary kingdom of ego, unable to distinguish the "I wanna" of whim from the "I gotta" of need. In an age of instant gratification and infant attention span, the popular arts have played to this childish impulse. Heavy-metal rock beats out its primal demands like a child pulling a high-chair tantrum. TV is the baby-sitter of a spoiled kid's dreams: it promises everything, never says no and lets you change the channel if you don't get what you want. And many movies these days are less adolescent...
...this kid kingdom, Pee-wee Herman is the prince of prepuberty. For almost a decade, Actor-Writer Paul Reubens, 35, has presented himself as Pee-wee, a gawky, geeky child. The spectacle is both corny and hip, retrograde and avant- garde. It turns Pinky Lee, the '50s kids' show host, into a subject for performance art. At first Pee-wee was a coterie favorite of adults, but with his 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure and his Saturday-morning TV show, Reubens has gained a huge peanut gallery. Even for those who found the Pee-wee persona grating, there...
...reproduced in the Western press, Sharansky became, at 30, the most famous of the world's prisoners of conscience, a symbol of hope and defiance in the face of Soviet oppression. Though he was sentenced to 13 years, he had retained what he calls his "spiritual independence against the kingdom of lies...