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Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media. Edited by Alexander N. Howell and Wynn Yarbrough. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media is the product of an interdisciplinary conference of the same name held at the University of the District of Columbia in September 2008. The conference, which included the screening of films from all over the world and a keynote address by Linda Simensky, Vice President of PBSKIDS, addressed the many ways in which children are portrayed in and influenced by various media forms. As editors Alexander Howell and Wynn Yarbrough write in their introduction, the essays presented here address "how children are represented, recycled, transformed, used, and misused by adults in both media targeted at children and media that represents children for a broader (i.e., adult) audience" (2). The book is divided into three sections: "Rites of Passage and Impasse," "Childhood as Text," and "Disney and Its Progeny." Eschewing a historical approach, the editors have chosen ten essays tied to themes, issues, and theories of importance in childhood studies today. Given the academic interest in film, movie analyses predominate, but the book's range of topics is varied, covering playgrounds, self-help books, and, especially, literature. This is not meant to be an overview of the topic of children and media; rather, it is a collection of specialized essays that showcases intriguing approaches and texts, providing a useful departure point for the study of children's images in media in the twenty-first century.
The three essays in the first section explore cinematic images of children who are...