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Love Builds BrainsLove Builds Brains, lays out the early years' journey of attachment, self regulation, connection, resilience and well being, with scientific explanations that are measured out in understandable doses. We hear the author's voice throughout the chapters as she tells clinical and personal stories to amplify her points and perspective. She speaks from a population perspective, berating the poor world rankings of Canada on various OECD reports and then
Love Builds Brains, lays out the early years' journey of attachment, self-regulation, connection, resilience and well-being, with scientific explanations that are measured out in understandable doses. We hear the author's voice throughout the chapters as she tells clinical and personal stories to amplify her points and perspective. She speaks from a population perspective, berating the poor world rankings of Canada on various OECD reports and then speaks to the individual level of our involvement with children suggesting prevention and management strategies. In the book, there's a strong and appropriate emphasis on early years' development, but there's also attention to the adolescent brain. This book is full of scientifically-based wisdom in a conversational style.
The book addresses and offers approaches to understand and respond to issues of anxiety, stress, behavour, attachment, resilience and recovery. As a child psychatrist, Dr. Clinton provides ample brain research information to undergird her suggestions for parents, teachers and others who work with children. The final chapter on our digital world points to some ways to manage how children use media time.
Dr. Clinton works very hard to advocate for children and youth and to translate the sciences that have uncovered more about the workings of the brain and mind. She sees her role as a Knowledge Translator, bringing insights to groups of people by making research and knowledge accessible.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Tall Pine Press
Published: 06/29/2020
ISBN: 9780981014968
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.59d
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4.6 ★★★★★
Based on 215 reviews
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Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
Format: Hardcover
They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Reading Rachel Maddow's Prequel, that old adage lands with uncomfortable, clarifying force. The America of the 1930s had Senator Huey Long — loud, brash, barnstorming, and brimming with populist promises — and the resonance with our own era of bombastic political theater is impossible to dismiss. Maddow doesn't make that parallel clumsily. She doesn't need to. The evidence, laid out with the precision of a seasoned researcher and historian, speaks for itself.
Prequel tells the story of a far-right authoritarian impulse that has run through the veins of American political life for nearly a hundred years. In the 1930s, coinciding with Hitler's rise in Europe, a coordinated movement pushed hard for fascism here at home. Groups stockpiled weapons and explosives in preparation for an insurrection. Government officials worked in coordination with foreign actors. A fascist-sympathetic narrative was amplified through official and unofficial channels alike. This was not fringe paranoia — it was organized, resourced, and frighteningly close to succeeding.
What is remarkable — and what gives this book its most urgent energy — is the story of who stopped it. Not always the institutions we might hope to rely on. Where the American legal system faltered, journalists and activists filled the breach. Investigators, reporters, and citizens took up the banner of democracy through dogged, unglamorous work.
This is where Maddow's particular genius comes into its own. She is a master of the long connective thread — drawing bright lines between the events of the past and the present without letting the comparison become reductive or cheap. Prequel teaches us what was learned the last time democracy faced this kind of pressure: where the weaknesses are, what held, and — critically — what it will take to hold again. She identifies the strongholds. She maps the vulnerabilities. She makes a history lesson feel like a field guide.
The book is also, simply, a pleasure to read. Maddow brings to the page the same qualities that made her a formidable broadcaster: the ability to take deeply complex, document-heavy material and render it not just comprehensible but genuinely gripping. Her research is formidable. Her journalistic integrity is evident on every page. And her storytelling instincts transform what might otherwise be a dry historical account into something that reads with the momentum of a thriller. The result is a text that is at once a celebration — democracy was fought for and, in that moment, successfully defended — and a warning.
This book is well researched, well documented, and well written. Maddow is a master storyteller handing us a guide for the fight ahead of us. The impulse toward authoritarianism did not dissolve with the defeat of fascism abroad; it went quiet, regrouped, and waited. Democracy is once again under attack from the inside, and Prequel makes the case — calmly, rigorously, without hysteria — that this is not unprecedented, that it has been faced before, and that it can be faced again.
Don't give up the fight. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
(Upgraded from 4.5 stars)
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Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2026
★★★★★ 5
American history without the gold-plated bias
Format: Hardcover
Ms. Maddow is an amazing historian and journalist! She describes events in history in a rational, no-nonsense manner, with clarity and insight. We have been taught a white-washed version of history from 1st through 12th grade, and I literally mean white-washed. Humanity has always made mistakes and should be recorded in history. Ms. Maddow does an exceptional job of removing the "sugar-coating" from documented events and revealing the greed, corruption, and manipulation hiding beneath. I dearly hope that she will write a biography on this present president, which I believe would be as close to the truth as humanly possible. I will certainly buy a copy!
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Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2026
★★★★★ 5
A must-read - hair-raising, deeply alarming, and shudder-producing
Format: Kindle
What I liked:
- Deeply researched - amazing depth, particularly of a wide range of characters (a few of whom are true heroes) and many more miscreants - Rachel must have had a spectacular research team to work with! She mentions that "there were millions of words written about the rise of (and fight against) fascism as it was happening in pre-World War II America" - but I bet that most Americans haven't been exposed to them.
- Starts off mildly with George Sylvester Viereck (a ridiculous author, but just wait!) but then shifts gears progressively as the story builds and adds in a raft of odious characters
- Not afraid to name names - some of the politicians ultimately come in for some serious whacking (see Sens. Wheeler and Langer especially). Also surprising were the back stories of names I recognize (architect Philip Johnson, for example) without knowing of their nazi sympathies and antisemitism.
- Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh are waaay more complicated than our stereotypes of the heroic but opaque pilot and his saintly wife (she is one scary piece of work!) - stuff I simply didn't know, and what was presented was alarming to the extent of making skin crawl
- I had never heard of the sedition trials of 1943 and 1944 and prosecutor John Rogge at all before - just one example of new (and stunning) information from our history - absolute bedlam!
- As the history advances and the book nears its end, there are several BIG events that may push you back in your reading chair several times - again, no spoilers, but hoo-eee!
- The epilogue was a treat to read - again, I won't reveal any spoilers
A minor criticism - the book is derived (I believe) from Rachel's podcasts, and thus the writing has her inimitable voice (pointed asides, etc.), but as a result may lack some polish and smoothness in the prose. Some may love it, some may carp, some may not even notice it. Whatever.
If material about this period is of interest to the reader, be certain to seek out "Hitler in Los Angeles" by Steven J. Ross - its focus is a little narrower, dealing with Jewish undercover work to foil Nazi plotting in Los Angeles, but Leon Lewis, a true mensch and hero, is in Maddow's book as well.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2024
★★★★★ 4
Fascinating details from the past but not really a “prequel”
Format: Hardcover
Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” recounts the efforts of pro-fascists in the United States, aided and manipulated by Nazi Germany, to keep America from actively opposing Hitler as well as to plot ways to turn America into a fascist country. The struggle to defeat those forces began in the early 1930s led by private citizens who, on their own, went undercover to join fascist groups and try to alert various government agencies about what was happening. A relatively small number of fascists gathered weapons to prepare for an insurrection. In the last chapters of the book, Maddow describes a 1944 trial in which the Justice Department brought sedition charges against some 30 defendants, most of whose activities she covered in previous chapters. The trial was chaotic, interrupted by frequent outbursts from the defendants and their lawyers. When the judge suddenly died one night of heart attack and a mistrial was declared, the Justice Department did not seek a new trial. The war against Hitler was nearing an end, so there was no push to revisit the past to pronounce judgment on those whose activities on the home front ultimately did not affect our victory over the Nazis.
Since the ending is rather anticlimactic, Maddow, at times, may try a little too hard to make things sound more dire than they really were. Although elsewhere she has described Westbrook Pegler as an “extreme” right wing columnist and “pseudo-fascist,” she quotes him at the end of her chapter on Huey Long as averring that, in Louisiana, Long was “gradually copying the Hitler state.” Long was certainly a corrupt, authoritarian politician, but his populist politics had their origins in his upbringing in Winn Parish, where the Socialist Party carried the day in the 1912 election. Had he lived and had he run for president in 1936, he might have drawn enough votes from FDR to give the election to a Republican candidate, but he had no use for Nazism. (I live in Louisiana where, until 1973, we observed Huey’s birthday as a state holiday.)
Maddow seems to imply that there was something nefarious about the death in 1940 of Senator Ernest Lundeen in a passenger airplane crash that occurred during a thunderstorm. Lundeen, who had close ties to a top Nazi spy, may have been under investigation, but nothing indicates that his presence on the flight had anything to do with the crash. The cause was never determined, but, based on the way the plane headed forcibly into the ground, a likely explanation is that it was caught in the kind of thunderstorm microbursts that we now know has caused similar crashes.
Though, for me, the book seems to promise a bit more than it actually delivers, I did learn a lot about the ties of right wing politics to Nazism during that era.
I was aware that Henry Ford was a fanatical antisemite, but, until I read Maddow’s book, I did not know that his efforts extended to publishing a ninety-two part series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that appeared in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that he owned, with copies distributed to every Ford dealership. It was published in book form as “The International Jew” and widely circulated in Germany. Hitler praised Ford in “Mein Kampf” and, according to one account, had a portrait of Ford displayed on the wall in his office when he was visited by an American reporter.
I was aware that the Nazis studied segregation in the American South for guidance in drafting their own race laws, but I didn’t know that Nazi Germany dispatched an attorney to the University of Arkansas School of Law to acquire first-hand knowledge.
I was aware that Father Coughlin was a demagogic opponent of FDR, but I was not aware of the ferocity of his antisemitism or his ties to various pro-Nazi fascists.
However, I was really totally unaware of the way actual Nazi agents in league with pro-Nazi Americans were able to get congressmen and senators to distribute Nazi propaganda, typically inserted into the Congressional Record and then sent to millions of Americans for free using the congressional franking privilege. On the other hand, I doubt that propaganda delivered in that manner was very effective. Pages from the Congressional Record could not compete with the message delivered by the 1939 Warner Brothers film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” the first anti-Nazi movie produced by Hollywood, based on actual events that Maddow describes.
Nothing pro-fascists did in the United States affected our entry into the war against Germany. We went to war when Hitler himself declared war on us four days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany certainly posed a military threat, but there wasn’t much danger that fascist politics would actually prevail in the United States.
The political situation is very different today and, though I, like Maddow, admire the “smart, brave, determined, resourceful, self-sacrificing [anti-fascist] Americans who went before us,” I think the political challenges we face today are much more dire.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2023
★★★★★ 5
The History of American fascism
Format: Hardcover
Quality and fierce journalism. Reviving and honoring adherence to a true history and context of American fascism
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Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2026