Faculty Bibliography

Klass discusses the need for parents to emphasize their role as a parent over their role as a playmate and friend to their children. She examines various behaviors that parents should avoid, such as living in fear of their child's anger, making child activities their passion, and organizing their lives around their children's needs and wants

By Atul Gawande. 269 pp. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2002. $24. ISBN 0-8050-6319-6.

This was not an obvious one, a January trip to Oslo. The last time I was there, I was 18, bumming around Europe with my boyfriend, Larry. We stayed in an Oslo campground, and I thought the city was beautiful. Of course, that was in August. But then recently the chance came up to spend a long winter weekend in Oslo, so Larry could do research on the painter Edvard Munch. And to be honest, I thought it would be fun to see a northern city in its true winter; days without sunlight, I imagined, snow heaped high along the streets. The frozen north. Our room, in the old part of the 252-room hotel, was large and warm and supremely comfortable, with plenty of pillows and comforters. And right outside the door was the center of Oslo, one block away from Karl Johans gate (street), the broad, majestic 19th-century avenue that sweeps from the central station to the royal palace. Oslo was founded (by the proverbial Viking king) a thousand years ago, but it took on its current shape after a fire in 1624, and a subsequent reconstruction by King Christian IV, who ruled over Denmark and Norway. The city is built along the island-filled Oslofjord, with the old castle of Akershus on one side of the harbor and the ultramodern steel and glass Aker Brygge district on the other, built on what had been an old shipyard. So what do you do on a winter weekend in Oslo? We visited the Munch Museum, of course, which was holding a suitably cheerful special exhibition: ''Love-Angst-Death.'' Munch, who lived from 1863 to 1944, moved in the artistic circles of Berlin and Paris, but returned to Norway in 1909 and lived there for the rest of his troubled life. An Expressionist genius, the creator of ''The Scream,'' that famous totem of modern anxiety and hysteria, Munch is considered a giant in modern art. In his own country he stands alone, comparable to Ibsen in drama, although even more troubling and controversial. When Munch got involved with an image, he tended to repeat it over and over in different media and in slightly different forms -- as a painting, a woodcut, a lithograph. At the Munch Museum these different treatments were hung side by side, all of them parts of an extensive compositional series called ''The Frieze of Life.'' In the National Gallery, on the other hand, single Munch images (''The Scream,'' ''The Sick Child'') hang along with other important Norwegian paintings and a small collection of European old masters

Klass, a pediatrician, has encountered justifiably angry parents. However, Klass claims the professional right both to make mistakes and to remind parents that pediatrics isn't a science--it's an art. Klass notes that she handles logical issues more easily. She tries to return evening and weekend messages pretty promptly. Klass suggests that the key to parent-pediatrician relations is openness and honesty

Klass describes how parents can decide whether or not to call a doctor regarding their children's illnesses. Parents should use common sense, follow their instincts, and avoid panicking.

So when I want a memory of Papa as a grandfather, I look at our trip to London, three years ago. My older two children, then 15 and 9, had spring vacation at the same time, but not their father or their younger brother. We came up with the idea of a low-budget trip to London for 10 days, me, my father, and the two kids. We stayed at a student hotel in Bloomsbury, one room for Papa and Orlando, one for [Josephine] and me. Bathroom down the hall. Papa was in good shape; he walked with a cane, but he walked fast. All the way up into the dome at St. Paul's. Always worried about being late, he hustled us through the streets of London to meet up with the start of a walking tour he was afraid we might miss. He straddled the meridian at Greenwich, gesturing with his cane. Papa was a cultural anthropologist, and I was born on a field trip to Trinidad. When I was 5, we went to India for that year, my parents and my younger brother and I. I don't remember Trinidad, or Papa as he was in Trinidad in 1958, but I certainly remember him in India in 1963 and 1964. That is the memory I call up for the relatively young Papa, certainly as young as I recall him, the intense and ambitious professor near the start of his professional career, the father of young children, the academic adventurer off in a small Indian village. It's Papa teaching me how to eat politely with my right hand only, even though he was left-handed himself and struggled much more than I did with this Indian imperative. Papa with his dark-rimmed glasses, leaning forward explaining the importance of the goddess Mother Durga and all her many arms, and the bloodthirstiness of Kali, with her necklace of human heads, and taking us in to see the statues, painted and surrounded by incense, at festival time. Papa sitting with me in the courtyard and going through the flashcards he happened to have brought along -- there are some recurring themes -- as I learned, triumphantly, to read