Those of you with sharp powers of observation may have noticed an addition last week to the landing page of this blog: the announcement of the publication of my new book, Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving.
As detailed on our new website, www.nsfteendriving.com, the book will be released nationally on September 1, 2013. We have timed the release to coincide with back-to-school. Our publisher is the Chicago Review Press, www.chicagoreviewpress.com. CRP is a long-established and highly respected independent publisher, and it is an honor for me to work with them, and with Clarisey Consulting, which designed the website.
It is very important to me that everyone understand that the proceeds of this book will support my son’s memorial fund, the Reid Hollister Memorial Fund, c/o the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, and a variety of national traffic safety causes. Reid’s Fund provides financial assistance, for day care of infants and toddlers, to low income families in the Asylum Hill neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut. The benefiting traffic safety causes will include those sponsored and supported by the National Organizations for Youth Safety, www.noys.org, without whose help this book could not have been published.
Not So Fast, as you might expect, is based in part on what I have posted on this blog over the past three and half years, but it is much more than a compilation. I have pulled together the best of about 75 posts, put them in a logical order, and refined them into a comprehensive list of best practices for parents of teen drivers. I selected the best posts in part on the comments I have received from you readers about the posts, plus a healthy dose of consultation with about a dozen traffic safety and teen driving experts from across the country. Put another way, in Not So Fast, I have tried to help parents of teen drivers by doing their homework for them by making the best tips and advice easily and readily available in one place. Thus, I was honored last week to get our first national review: PublishersWeekly called Not So Fast a “concise, practical, and potentially life-saving book” that should be “required reading for every parent before their teen gets behind the wheel.” (Their assessment made five years of nights and weekends spent on teen driving seem worthwhile….)
The website shows the book’s Table of Contents and the Introduction chapter, which will give you a good sense of the topics covered. I would summarize by saying that my mission, as always, has been to give parents a better understanding of how dangerous teen driving is; a sense of the proper attitude to adopt when parenting a teen driver; and a comprehensive list of how parents can head off the most dangerous teen driving situations by proactively managing and supervising their teens BEFORE they get behind the wheel. As with this blog this book is not about driving a car, but parenting a teen.
As shown on www.nsfteendriving.com, the book can be preordered through Chicago Review Press, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. Starting now, I will provide periodic updates leading up to the September 1 release to bookstores.
For now, let me finish this announcement by demonstrating to you that I am fully invested I this publishing process. Below – my new vanity plate!
