Their Eyes Meeting World CL

by Robert Coles and Margaret Sartor

From the author of the bestselling The Spiritual Life of Children, a unique book about how children use drawings to speak their hearts and minds. Eminent child psychiatrist Robert Coles has... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395611296
• ISBN13: 9780395611296
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 133 Pages
• Weight: 1.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 9.4" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

A deeply touching portal into the hearts of the young...

I can't believe that I'm the first one in thirteen years to review this magnificent book! It's at once a visual delight, a psychological and art-interpretive education, and a deeply touching look into the tender and sincere hearts of the young. It's also a surprisingly potent means of reconnecting to our own largely forgotten early years; I shed more than a few tears on reading the stories of some of these earnest young souls' pictures and lives. The selected images aren't always great art (though many are quite beautiful and even gripping, e.g. the Israeli boy's drawing of God's "power" separating darkness from light). Those that aren't visually sophisticated, though, can be appreciated through Coles' eloquent sensibility as brilliantly effective communicators of meaning. Coles has made for himself a remarkable career, traveling internationally to investigate children under a wide variety of circumstances: children of Eskimos, of the Appalachians, children integrating Southern schools, those entangled with war, illness, or family crisis, as well as those of the affluent. The result is remarkable and profound -- children seen as "budding visionaries, an early version of the essence of what we turn out to be as human beings." Just reading a few of the stories concerning the religious paintings has greatly expanded my empathy for religion (from which I was alienated as a child), and for the delicate inner heart of everyone. I'm going to be reading Coles' three other and apparently more famous books very soon -- The "Moral/Political/Spiritual Life Of Children" series, starting with the last. Also, do read the Product Description of Coles' "Children Of Crisis" (also unreviewed!) -- ISBN 0316151025 -- it is brief but powerful, and comprehensive of the abovementioned books as well.