Most Popular Books by Robert Coles

In this book, Coles explores the concept of idealism and why it necessary to the individual and society.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The question is more relevant now than ever before: what makes someone a moral person? Child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles has dedicated much of his life to exemplifying, teaching, and writing about the moral life. Here, Coles illuminates the ways in which children become moral or not so moral adults, drawing on case studies, talks with parents, visits to nurseries and classrooms, and interviews with children. No subject could be more important and more timely—for all Americans, but especially for parents. In the tradition of such bestsellers as Cultural Literacy and Emotional Intelligence, The Moral Intelligence of Children identifies a new type of intelligence essential for success and fulfillment in life. It will be used by parents and teachers for years to come as the authoritative guide to children''s moral development.

Originally published in 1969, the documentary evidence of poverty and malnutrition in the American South showcased in Still Hungry in America still resonates today. The work was created to complement a July 1967 U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty hearings on hunger in America. At those hearings, witnesses documented examples of deprivation afflicting hundreds of thousands of American families. The most powerful testimonies came from the authors of this profoundly disturbing and important book. Al Clayton’s sensitive camerawork enabled the subcommittee members to see the agonizing results of insufficient food and improper diet, rendered graphically in stunted, weakened and fractured bones, dry, shrunken, and ulcerated skin, wasting muscles, and bloated legs and abdomens. Physician and child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who had worked with these populations for many years, described with fierce clarity the medical and psychological effects of hunger. Coles’s powerful narrative, reinforced by heartbreaking interviews with impoverished people and accompanied by 101 photographs taken by Clayton in Appalachia, rural Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, convey the plight of the millions of hungry citizens in the most affluent nation on earth. A new foreword by historian Thomas J. Ward Jr. analyzes food insecurity among today’s rural and urban poor and frames the current crisis in the American diet not as a scarcity of food but as an overabundance of empty calories leading to obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

In the 1950s Robert Coles began studying, living among, and, above all, listening to American children. The results of his efforts -- revealed in five volumes published between 1967 and 1977 -- constitute one of the most searching and vigorous social studies ever undertaken by one person in the United States. Here, heard often in their own voices, are America''s "children of crisis": African American children caught in the throes of the South''s racial integration; The children of impoverished migrant workers in Appalachia; Children whose families were transformed by the migration from South to North, from rural to urban communities; Latino, Native American, and Eskimo children in the poorest communities of the American West; The children of America''s wealthiest families confronting the burden of their own privilege. This volume restores to print a masterwork of psychological and sociological inquiry -- a book that, in its focus on how children learn and develop in the face of rapid change and social upheaval, speaks directly and pointedly to our own times.

Essays, 1987-1992 -- That red wheelbarrow -- Times of surrender.

A groundbreaking study of the impact of current events on the lives and minds of children from the Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist. Most parents teach their children the lessons and skills they need to function in the world while trying to shield them from the harsher realities of life. But long before children are considered ready to face the complications of the real world, they are learning truths and perspectives most adults imagine are beyond them. Child psychiatrist and author of The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles traveled the globe for more than a decade, from Northern Ireland to Nicaragua, South Africa to Southeast Asia, across the United States and beyond, conducting in-depth interviews with children about their cultures, ideologies, national pride, and political knowledge. He learned that the greater challenges, traumas, conflicts, and issues of the world around them find their way into children''s impressionable minds and play a crucial role in their development. Robert Coles'' unique and groundbreaking research sheds much-needed light on the psychology of childhood, revolutionizing both professional and personal understanding of humans'' formative years. "Robert Coles is to the stories that children have to tell what Homer was to the tale of the Trojan War." — The New York Times Book Review

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist''s sensibilities. ""Of course everything I come up with,"" he says, ""novelists have known beforehand.""These twenty-three interviews selected from hundreds that Coles has given disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in pediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless. In focusing on a man known mainly as an eminent psychiatrist and author of The Spiritual Life of Children and more than fifty other books, this collection is a departure from the other books in the Literary Conversations Series. By no means is Coles best known as a writer of belles lettres, as are other figures in this series. Yet his varied critical insights and the critical authority with which he approaches literary subjects have enriched American literature. Here through the prism of his medical and literary training Coles''s conversations reveal his imposing moral vision. As he ranges with penetrating wisdom over many subjects--children, literature, teaching, psychiatry, family--he explores the cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of our lives.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis, a profound examination of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery. As a professor emeritus at Harvard University, a renowned child psychiatrist, and the author of more than forty books, including The Moral Intelligence of Children, Robert Coles knows better than anyone the transformative power of learning and literature on young minds. In this "persuasive" book ( The New York Times Book Review), Coles convenes a virtual symposium of college, law, and medical school students to explore the phenomenon of storytelling as a source of values and character. Here are transcriptions of classroom conversations in which Coles and his students discuss the impact of particular works of literature on their moral development. Here also are Coles''s intimate personal reflections on his experiences in the civil rights movement, his child psychiatry practice, and his interactions with his own literary mentors including William Carlos Williams and L.E. Sissman. The life lessons learned from these stories are of special resonance to doctors and teachers looking to apply them in classroom and clinical environments. The rare public intellectual to be honored with a MacArthur Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a National Humanities Medal, Robert Coles is a true national treasure, and The Call of Stories is, in the words of National Book Award winner Walker Percy, "Coles at his wisest and best."

Examines the lives of 5 women, including Lorna, an Eskimo woman from a coastal village in Alaska.

For 30 years Robert Coles has been talking and listening to children all over the world and recording their responses to crises, to hardship and sorrow and to moral and political pressure. In this one of eight volumes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Children of Crisis, he speaks to and for the religious and spiritual lives of children, conveying their views of salvation and righteousness, their experience of God and their ways of understanding the ultimate meaning of their own lives.

No writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of faith in the lives of ordinary Americans as Robert Coles. Though not religious in the conventional sense, Coles is unparalleled in his astute understanding and respect for the relationship between secular life and sacredness, which cuts across his large body of work. Drawing inspiration from figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, Coles’s extensive writings explore the tug of war between faith and doubt. As Coles himself admits, the “back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.” These thirty-one thought-provoking essays are drawn from Coles’s weekly column in the Catholic publication America. In them, he turns his inquisitive lens on a range of subjects and issues, from writers and painters to his recent reading and film viewing, contemporary events and lingering controversies, recollections of past and present mentors, events of his own daily life, and ordinary encounters with students, patients, neighbors, and friends. Addressing moral questions openly and honestly with a rare combination of rectitude and authorial modesty, these essays position Coles as a preeminent, durable, and trusted voice in the continuing national conversation over religion, civic life, and moral purpose.

Poems deal with the world''s ambiguities, randomness, luck, fate, and the accidental.

In this rich and illuminating book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author Robert Coles creates a portrait of moral leadership--what it is, and how it is achieved--through stories of people who have led and inspired him: Robert Kennedy, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Erik Erikson, a Boston bus driver, teachers in college, medical school, and elementary school, among others. Coles tells how to be a moral leader and shows how the intervention of one person can change the course of history, as well as influence the day-to-day quality of life in our homes, schools, communities, and nation. We need to "hand one another along" in life, says Coles, quoting his friend Walker Percy, and in Lives of Moral Leadership he explores how each of us can be engaged in a continual and mutual life-giving process of personal and national leadership development. Coles discusses how the actions of the American president affect the way people feel about themselves and the country, and-citing the influence of Shakespeare''s Henry V on Robert Kennedy, and of Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina on his own mother--explains how reading literature can motivate action and growth. The way in which moral leaders emerge today, and for all time, comes vividly to light in this brilliant book by one of America''s finest teachers and writers.

A dramatic portrayal of the helplessness of migrant farm workers'' children an an appeal for legislative action and social concern.

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

An American undercover special on HBO - Cover.Incluedes index.

For three decades, Robert Coles has followed Eliot''s invitation. He has studied and reflected upon Simone Weil - as writer, social critic, radical, and mystic - and upon the enigmas of her strange, brief life.