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2 Works 124 Membros 7 Reviews

About the Author

Susan Gregory Thomas is an investigative journalist and broadcaster. Formerly a senior editor at U.S. News World Report and cohost of public TV's Digital Duo, she has written for Time, the Washington Post, Glamour, and other publications. She has three children.

Obras de Susan Gregory Thomas

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
female

Membros

Resenhas

This slender volume tackles a couple of the most insidious examples of marketing to children: "educational" products that lack any educational research supporting them, cartoon branding of products and the involvement of very young children in marketing. Thomas interviews industry insiders to understand and explain how decisions about children's TV, children's books, children's characters and even preschool curricula are influenced by money making decisions. Some of her research is truly eye-opening - for instance that young children can recognize characters but not truly follow plot or context and this makes them extremely vulnerable to branding.

However, for such a small volume, I would hope it were crammed to the brim with commentary on marketing to children. Instead, she gets side tracked with the topic of screened media (important in its own right, but not central), and feels the need to repeat several points throughout the book. I also wish she would have spoken a little bit about the Gen-Y parent. She seems to think that all of the current parents are Gen-Xers. I personally missed Gen-X by a handful of years and was still well into my 20's when this book came out. Surely Gen-Y parents warranted at least a sentence?
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Marcado
settingshadow | outras 4 resenhas | Aug 19, 2023 |
A fabulous book about the consequences of growing up as part of Generation X. Susan Gregory Thomas has a gift of transforming the personal into the universal.
 
Marcado
AngelaLam | 1 outra resenha | Feb 8, 2022 |
In Spite of Everything: A Memoir
Susan Thomas Gregory
Not even sure what made be add this book to my Goodreads TBR list. However during the great TBR purge of 2012, I ended up keeping it on the list and finding it in a local library. I can’t remember what drew me to add this book to the list in way back on July 31, 2011 as I am neither a Gen X’er nor a child for divorce, but I gave it go anyway.
Susan Thomas Gregory rights a memoir about the scars that divorce has left on the children of Generation X and how she fought hard not to repeat the same sins of her parents. We learn about her childhood growing up with an alcoholic father and a sometimes absent mother; their cross country move and her subsequent struggle when her dad moved out on the family. Later we see her troubled adolescent and college years until she settles into a horrible job after graduating college. The book continues on and focuses on her meeting and eventually marrying her husband and snippets of their life together as it falls apart. Throughout each chapter there are lots of references to Greek Mythology and Eminem ( the rapper) as well as social commentary and research about a variety of things including starter marriages, children’s’ response to divorce, helicopter parents and the housing market. Mortgage crisis as it relates to generation X. The most interesting part is her commentary and “research” on how sons raised by single mothers are often times victims of emotional incest, from having to be the man of the house. This part was mostly completed by her own personal stories of 2-3 men who fall into this category, but I still found the analogy interesting nonetheless.

When I finished the book, my first thought was that I really wanted to read/know her husband’s version of the story because hers literally left me so lost. In the beginning, it sounded like a mutual decision, but as she gave more detailed toward the end of the book, it seemed to be all on her husband. HE came off looking like an ass, but with a much more detailed story behind it. I guess that’s what ends up happening in a divorce memoir.

Part divorce memoir, part generation X study I felt this book didn’t really have a firm idea of what it was and because I belonged to neither of those groups ( knock on wood), I struggled to find how she, according to the description, was stunned to find her marriage coming to an end or how she vowed to never let her kids know divorce. I’m sure hindsight is 20/20 but she never really focused on how she did those too aside from making a promise to herself and trying to go for some marriage counseling. I did enjoy her social commentary, but I just wasn’t able to relate to her childhood or her subsequent divorce.
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sunshine608 | 1 outra resenha | Feb 2, 2021 |
A reasonably in-depth presentation of recent research into marketing to children. One of the main points the author circles back to is the effects of television on developing brains--that TV, even in the background, disrupts children's ability to focus and entertain themselves, and the recent hypotheses that the rise of autism and ADD is at least in part due to the hypnotic TV preventing them from making the neural connections they need. (There's also the hypothesis that babies aren't so much entranced by TV as being put into low-grade focal seizures, but the author is at least good about distinguishing scientific research vs. theories.)

One could argue that the book could go into more depth on other forms of marketing, but really, TV and licensing agreements are about the long and short of it. There's even a chapter on books, bookstores, and libraries, and how characters--Barney, Dora, Thomas, etc--have infiltrated them, because the prevalent culture and attitude is "at least they're reading." (The author did have nice things to say about libraries, particularly that we continue to buy real books and recommend those, and we're not beholden to publishers and licensing agreements.)

We all know, without reading this book, that anyone marketing directly to toddlers is sleazy, and the whole defense of "it's not marketing! it's just brand awareness!" doesn't hold water. But the author presents the research fairly, without a sense of "be outraged!" that could easily color the work. Obviously she has an agenda, but it's not crammed down the throat. No major assertions, no [b:call to arms|772890|Call to Arms (The Corps #2)|W.E.B. Griffin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178222760s/772890.jpg|758942], but a decent presentation of a subject worth further exploration.
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Marcado
librarybrandy | outras 4 resenhas | Mar 29, 2013 |

Estatísticas

Obras
2
Membros
124
Popularidade
#161,165
Avaliação
3.9
Resenhas
7
ISBNs
6

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