Bullying: How to Deal With Taunting, Teasing, and Tormenting by Kathleen Winkler

Bullying: How to Deal With Taunting, Teasing, and Tormenting by Kathleen Winkler (Enslow Publishers, 2005)

A book in the Issues in Focus Today series, Kathleen Winkler does a good job in providing a more mature view of bullying in school systems.  Breaking bullying up into simple sections for each chapter allows the reader to choose which aspect of bullying they would like to learn more about as well as provides a logical transition from what is bullying to why bullies bully and finally to what you can do to avoid bullying and what schools are doing about bullying.  The layout of the text with posed pictures allows for visual examples of scenarios.  The book also provides a lengthy list of resources and further reading options as well as side bars on most pages providing bullet pointed suggestions and options.  I personally was interested to see that a whole chapter is devoted to why girls bully because female bullying can be different than male/female or even male/male bullying.  I found this book very informative, but at times condescending.  I can see a tween using this as possible a resource for a chapter, but the likelihood of a tween reading this cover-to-cover is not as high.  I selected this book because of its reviews in School Library Journal and Booklist.

Audience Level: Grade 6 – 10