Half Changed World

Jody at Raising WEG has a couple of great posts up about the decline of the independent bookstore and why this is still a golden age for readers.  She’s 100 percent right that it’s just sloppy reporting by the NY Times to treat the rise of the chain bookstores and Amazon.com as the same phenomenon.

Personally, I almost never go into a bricks and mortar bookstore to look for a specific book anymore.  (Well, except maybe the Harry Potter releases.)  If I know what I’m looking for, I generally start by looking online to see if I can get it from one of my local libraries.  If they don’t have it, I use fetchbook to see where I can get it most cheaply online.  I go to bookstores when I’m browsing to see what’s out there, to get ideas for presents, and to take the kids to story hours.  (And I make up for the sin of buying used books by often buying signed copies at full retail price to give as gifts.)

And I live in an urban area, with access to lots of bookstores.  If I lived in a remote area, internet bookstores would be even more transformative.  And there’s no doubt that the internet has saved the mid-list book, which is less and less likely to be stocked at a physical bookstore.  (And even less likely to be stocked at Walmart, Target or Costco, which account for an astonishingly high proportion of book sales these days.)

I’m not so sure it’s a good time to be an author.  I occasionally read MJ Rose’s blog about the book industry, Buzz, Balls and Hype, which is fascinating and utterly depressing.  The chains overwhelmingly order books based on the computer prediction of what is going to sell, and things that don’t sell fast get sent back to the publishers.  The publishers are desperate for the next big thing, so they’ll throw money at a new author who they think could break out, but god help the second-time author whose first book sold respectably but not spectacularly.  Rose tells stories of authors who invest pretty much their entire advances on hiring independent publicists, because getting a book published doesn’t mean that your publisher will do anything to help your book succeed.  (The combination of publishers providing less and less support to authors and the costs of printing dropping is pushing more authors into self-publishing, but that’s another story.)

One of the things that independent book stores do is sell books that aren’t best sellers, that aren’t getting hyped by the publishing company, but that someone on staff really believes in.  Authors are desperate to find a way to replace those disappearing independent book stores.  That’s why I have an inbox full of emails offering me free books, in the hope that I’ll write about them.

The other thing that good independent book stores do better than the chains is create what Ray Oldenberg calls "third places" — places that are neither fully public nor fully private, that invite conversation and community.  The best portrayal of this that I know of is the ongoing saga of Madwimmin books in Dykes to Watch Out For.   (And Madwimmin has closed; Bechdel says she didn’t want the strip to be frozen in time like the Family Circus.)  While Barnes and Noble is full of people reading, surfing the internet, and drinking coffee, they’re unlikely to talk to people other than the ones that they came with. 

As Jody points out, the internet also fulfills some of that role; I don’t need to hang out in a women’s book store to find people to discuss feminism with.  And again, that’s a lifesaver to those in remote areas, or those who would be too shy to join in the discussion.  But it’s also harder to make a real personal connection.

For my birthday, I asked for, and received, Barack Obama’s new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.  I started reading it right away, but then got started on some other books that were due back to the library, and didn’t pick it up again until the last couple of weeks. 

The book did nothing to change my overall positive impression of Obama.  He comes across as thoughtful, compassionate, well-read, and funny.  He’s clearly been reading many of the same policy briefs that I have, and I can’t name a single policy recommendation that I seriously disagree with.  (I do think some of them are likely to fall well short of solving the problems that they’re aimed at; for example, tying teacher pay to performance is something that I’d be willing to experiment with, but is unlikely to solve all the problems of American schools.)  He’s got the politician’s knack of finding the telling anecdote to bring a problem to life.

But the book itself is a bit of a snoozer.  I found myself carrying it back and forth to work, but choosing to read the newspaper instead of cracking it open.  While the rhetoric soars at times, at other points it reads like a high school textbook, recapping America’s ambivalent relationship to international institutions dating back to the League of Nations.  I’m glad that Obama knows this history — I wish I were more confident that our current president did — but it doesn’t make for a page-turner.  Dreams from my Father is a far more interesting read.

In his 1975 introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, by James Tiptree, Jr.  Robert Silverberg hypothesized about the reclusive author, who was the subject of widespread speculation in the sci-fi world.  In what has become the most famous passage, Silverberg wrote:

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.  I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."

The passage is famous, of course, because behind the name of James Tiptree, Jr., the author was indeed a woman, as became widely known a few years later. 

This week’s book is a biography of that woman: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.  I’m usually not terribly interested in writers’ biographies, which are usually far less interesting than their writing, but this is an exception.  Sheldon’s life was every bit as fascinating as her writing — including a childhood that included safaris to Africa, an elopement with the man who sat next to her at her debut, a stint in the WACs and one in the CIA, a PhD in the psychology of perception — and Phillips does a fine job of taking the reader through it all.

Much to my surprise, I finished the book far more sympathetic to Silverberg’s mistake than I started it.  Phillips argues, convincingly, that Tiptree was far more than a pseudonym to Sheldon, but a full-fledged persona.  She quotes Sheldon as believing that there were two sexes — men and mothers — and she was neither.  As Tiptree she wrote with a confident voice that she couldn’t claim on her own, and she also engaged in long correspondences with other sci-fi writers and fans (including Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ).  When she was finally unmasked, she came somewhat unmoored, and struggled to find her writing voice again.

It is often hard to see clearly how gender roles and constraints affected individual women by reading their biographies.  Most women either lived within the expectations of their times, rarely bumping up against the limits, or were the extraordinary exceptions who don’t seem to have noticed that there were any limits.  What makes Sheldon fascinating is that she seems to have spent her life crossing the limits and then getting cold feet, trying to conform but bursting out.  In an early chapter on her boarding school experience, Phillips writes:

"Alice had the bad luck to be extremely pretty.  If she hadn’t been, she might have given up the popularity contest.  She might have studied harder, prepared for a career, and not cared what people thought.  She and the other awkward, bright girls might have been friends.  Instead she cared about appearances, practiced femininity and flirtation, and got addicted to the reward for being a pretty girl."

This pattern seems to have stayed with her for much of her life.  But forty years later, being Tiptree let her escape all that.

This was one of the Times notable books of the year.  It’s also one of my picks for the best books I read in 2006.

In college, I took a class called Yiddish for German Speakers.  I wasn’t much of a German speaker, but it was a pet project of one of my favorite professors, and I thought I might be a linguistics major.  15 years later, my German is minimal, my Yiddish is even less, but it’s a good memory.

Today’s book, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex, could have been subtitled "The Yiddish That All The German In the World Won’t Help You With."  It’s an exploration of the idioms that don’t make sense even if you can translate every word unless you understand the culture that they’re coming from.  So you learn that the way to say "toilet paper" in Yiddish is "asher yotser papir" or "he who makes-paper" from the morning prayer that praises God for keeping open all the passages that belong open.  Wex also argues that "shmuk" has nothing to do with the standard German "Schmuck" (which means "jewelry"), but comes from "shtok" or "stick" via the Yiddish-Shmiddish construction.

I found the book generally interesting, and laugh out loud funny at times, although it got a little repetitive by the end.  I was also surprised by my reaction to Wex’s relishing explanations of the anti-Christian sentiment buried in some of the idioms. I found myself wondering if it was a mistake to talk about such things "in public."   Or, as another generation might have asked, "is it good for the Jews?"

If I have any substantive complaint about the book, it’s about the lack of any chronological perspective.  The only people who really speak Yiddish now — as opposed to studying it from books — are Orthodox Jews, mostly black hat Hassidim.  I have to think that the language they speak, and the idioms they use, are different from those used by mainstream Yiddish speakers a hundred years ago when there was such a thing as a Yiddish mainstream.

I picked up this week’s book, American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, after hearing that it was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award, for Best Book for Young Adults.  I probably would have liked it better if this hadn’t raised my expectations for it.

Even though there are three different plot lines, each story is relatively straightfoward, so it’s easy to keep everything straight.  The graphics are attractive, but not especially sophisticated — "cartoony" is the word that comes to mind.  The book has a pretty heavy handed, if well-intentioned, message: Be true to yourself; don’t try to be something that you’re not. 

Part of my disappointment with the book is that it felt like a bit of a period piece, set in the 80s or 90s, rather than today.  Will the target audience of today’s teens even get the references to Sixteen Candles?  My guess is not. 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about D and his limited diet.  I still worry that he’s going to develop scurvy or something, but I’ve pretty much come to peace with Ellyn Satter’s division of labor — we decide what food to put in front of him; he decides what he’s going to eat of it.  For Thanksgiving, he had a miniscule taste of the cheese biscuits and pumpkin muffins.  He’s decided that plain spaghetti is acceptable, so I guess we’re making progress.  He’s active, he’s happy, he’s at a higher percentile on the growth curve than I was at his age, so we’re trying not to worry.

As I commented to Phantom Scribbler this week, dealing with kids’ food issues is incredibly frustrating, in part because everyone has really good advice.  Except that, like us, she’s tried almost everything you can think of, and it hasn’t made a difference.  (And Baby Blue isn’t gaining weight, so she’s under a lot more pressure than we are.)

One of the standard pieces of advice that people give is that kids will be more willing to eat different things if they’re involved in cooking them.  That hasn’t worked so well for us.  D loves to cook dinner, but only because it lets him control the menu — so we all wind up eating peanut butter on ritz crackers, with sprinkles.  So tonight, I told him that if he wants to cook dinner, it has to involve a protein and a vegetable, as well as a starch. 

He promptly pulled out Pretend Soup, which a friend gave him quite a while ago and he ignored, and started perusing the recipes.  We didn’t have the ingredients for most of the recipes, but we did have carrots, and he said that he wanted "carrot pennies."  So we sliced up a few carrots — and miracle of miracles — he ate some. 

Last year I reported on which of the NYTimes’ notable books of the year I had read.  The 2006 list is out, so I figured I’d do it again:

• Digging to America, by Anne Tyler.  (Yes, I did eventually get to the top of the holds queue.) I really enjoyed this.  Like most of Tyler’s books, it’s about character not plot.  But the characters weren’t as much hapless misfits as in the typical Tyler book.  A gentle exploration of what it means to be American.
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie.  Stunning and horrifying.  I wrote about it here.  I read her first book, Purple Hibiscus, as well, and liked it, but not as much.
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.  I wrote about it here. 
• The Omnivore’s Dilemna, by Michael Pollan.  I wrote about this one here.  This was a bit of a disappointment for me.  I liked Peter Singer’s take on the topic better.
• Self Made Man, by Norah Vincent.  I thought I had blogged about this, but can’t find it in my archives.  My memory is  that I didn’t think it was very interesting, so maybe I just decided I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it.

So, I’ve read 5 books, out of the 100.  Fewer than last year, although I think I did just as much overall reading.  I also read The Glass Castle (discussed here) and The Year of Magical Thinking, which were on the 2005 list.  Of all of them, The Year of Magical Thinking is probably the only one that I’d say is a must-read.

In 1999, Katherine Newman published No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City.  This book examined the experiences of 300 individuals who had applied for minimum wage jobs at fast food restaurants in Harlem during the early 1990s.  Newman found that competition was fierce for these jobs, with as many as 14 applicants for each position, and high school graduates in their 20s crowding out teens and high school dropouts.  Moving back and forth from generalizations drawn from the broad study to detailed profiles of individual workers, she reported on the fast food workers’ pride in being part of the legitimate economy — even in low-status, low-paid jobs where their friends teased them and they came home stinking of grease.   They valued the semi-independence that paying their own way gave them, even though almost none could afford to live on their own.  Published just after welfare reform, the book was a stinging rebuke to those who said that the poor didn’t want to work.

Seven years later, Newman is back with Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market.  She’s followed a subset of the workers she first met in 1993 and 1994 and is back to tell us how they fared during the boom years of the late 1990s and the recession of 2001-2002.  The book opens with an update on the workers who were most prominently featured in the first book. Jamal is now working at a lumber yard in a small town in Northern California, having followed his new wife back to her family out west.  Kyesha has a union job as a janitor for the NYC Housing Authority.  Carmen is out of work, having been fired from her department store job for a rules violation, but her husband Sal is the manager of the video store.

Newman divides the workers into three groups — "high flyers," "up but not outs" and "low riders."  While many, even most of the workers are still struggling, perhaps the biggest surprise in the study is how many high flyers there are in a group that once seemed so disadvantaged — about 20 percent of those Newman was able to track over time.  (She also uses a national sample for comparison, and estimates that the figure is closer to 10 percent for overall minimum wage workers in retail food industries.  She also argues that this figure is not much lower in economic bad times than in boom years.)   Although Newman doesn’t explicitly make the connection, one of the points I took away was that the "welfare reform success stories" that various governors liked to flaunt were neither as rare as the opponents of welfare reform suggested, nor as much the result of welfare reform as the supporters implied.

Newman concludes the book with a review of suggestions for how to improve the lives of the working poor, and generally I agree with them (expand the EITC, make higher education more affordable, support quality child care).  But the book left me with many unanswered questions about what made some of these workers succeed while others struggled.  By and large, formal education wasn’t the answer — the high flyers were more likely to have succeeded by getting into a unionized position or a skilled trade than by getting a bachelor’s degree.  (Those pursuing advanced degrees may not yet have seen the payoff, since they were usually only able to go to school part-time.)

In addition to the core ethnographic study, Newman pulls in a lot of data and information from related studies.  I’m a policy wonk, and even I found myself glazing over at times.  But the book is well worth reading, mostly for how it will undermine your preconceptions, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative.

***

By the way, I’ve set up an Amazon aStore as a way to display the books that I’ve reviewed by category.  It’s a work in progress, so let me know if you have requests.

Today’s book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, by Robert Frank and Philip Cook, is somewhat dated in the details (it was first published in 1995) and can be repetitive at times, but is nonetheless a must-read for anyone interested in inequality in American society.  Frank and Cook were among the first to note that the biggest driving force in inequality today is not the gap between the very poor and everyone else, but the one between the very rich and everyone else.  Paul Krugman is probably the person who has spent the most time in recent years discussing this fact.  As Krugman noted in the NY Times in February:

"Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint."

Frank and Cook labelled this phenomenon "the winner-take-all society" and argued that a variety of technological, political and economic factors have combined to create highly competitive national or global markets in which relative position is more important than absolute skill, and in which the very few top performers in any given field capture the vast majority of the returns.  The most obvious examples are in sports and the arts — while the superstars get millions in endorsements and appearance fees, no one can name the 100th best tennis player or violinist in world.  Frank and Cook argue that the same thing is going on for doctors, lawyers, authors, and CEOs. 

While I’m not entirely convinced by their explanations for why this happens (for one thing, in most fields it is not possible to rank people’s performance as accurately as in pro golf), I don’t think there’s any doubt that the description of the phenomenon is dead on.  The math is beyond me, but I am assured by people I generally trust that there are a wide variety of occupations in which the earnings distribution can best be explained by assuming that there are a series of "tournaments" in which only the winners proceed into the next rounds, and that small differences in skill thus are magnified into huge differences in earnings.  This probably explains a significant portion of the penalty for part-time work — it handicaps people at early levels of the tournament and makes it unlikely that they’ll get into the "leagues" with the really high payoffs. 

It’s hard to pin Frank and Cook down on a left-right scale.  They are economists, and I think they overstate the role of markets and understate the role of institutional structures in creating the outcomes that they describe. (See this American Prospect article for a good sample of their approach.)  But they believe that there are huge inefficiencies in this distribution — because people don’t take into account the effect of their entry into competition on other people, more people than is economically efficient compete for the few prestigious slots — and thus argue for progressive taxation, especially if tied to consumption.

After I finished this book, I had a really interesting conversation with T. about how the idea of the winner-take-all society interacts with the long tail — the ability for even very small niche products to find their audience using the powers of the internet.  I think our conclusion is that the long tail makes it possible to opt from the tournaments without giving up entirely on being in the game.  T’s example is that while it’s harder and harder to get a book (commercially) published these days, he thinks he makes more money self-publishing his game than he could make if it were picked up by a publisher, even recognizing that they could get it into distribution channels that he can’t reach.  But I think that for most people, the money they are going to make from their piece of the long tail is for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from zero.

Today’s book review is a special two-for-one deal: two books on the crazy world of private elementary school admissions, one non-fiction, one fiction.

The nonfiction book is The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get Into America’s Best Private Schools, by Alan Eisenstock. (Tip of the hat to Jennifer at MamaNoire who recommended it a while back.) Eisenstock was on the board of directors of his kids’ private school, and after years of watching the admissions process, decided to write a book about it. He interviewed a bunch of families across the country, and writes about the experiences of four composite families as they move through the process, from the first tours of the campuses until they receive the admissions letters and decide which schools to attend.

The main message of the book is that the process is nuts. The schools have far fewer slots than applicants. They can rule out some kids who are emotionally or mentally delayed (private schools are not required to accept children with disabilities or other special needs), but that still leaves them with far too many applicants. So, they wind up deciding based on arbitrary factors such as the gender breakdown of the kids who have sibling preference, and the characteristics of the parents. And because the only way to for the parents to justify the high cost of private school and the pain of the applications process is to fall in love with the schools that they’re applying to, they wind up convinced that their kids’ lives (or their own) will be notably diminished if they don’t get in.

Overall, Eisenstock sends a somewhat mixed message about the private schools. On the one hand, he seems to uncritically accept the parents’ claim that they have given their public school options a fair consideration and found them lacking. He even loads the dice by talking about Pastor Sweetie Williams, whose son, Eliezer, was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the state of California for inadequate funding of public schools. (Williams appears for a few pages and then disappears from the book – I’d love to have heard more of his perspective on the applications process.) But then, in the end, Eisenstock suggests that the children who go through this process wind up burnt out and exhausted by the time they finish high school.

As it happened, while I was reading The Kindergarten Wars, I happened to notice The Ivy Chronicles, by Karen Quinn on the book swap shelf in my office. I picked it up, and finished it off in a few days worth of commutes. The heroine of the book, Ivy Ames (like Quinn herself) is a downsized corporate executive who reinvents herself as a private school admissions consultant. The back of the book proudly quotes a review from the New York Post that claims that The Ivy Chronicles "picks up where The Nanny Diaries left off." Well, this book makes the Nanny Chronicles look subtle and deeply characterized. Early in the book, Ivy needs to make herself a crib sheet to keep her clients apart with shorthand tags (the mobster, the lesbian couple with the adopted child in a wheelchair, the wall street mogul) and I found myself flipping back to that page with alarming frequency.

As you’d expect, the Ivy Chronicles ends with everyone getting what they deserve, including Ivy herself finding true love, while her most obnoxious client goes to jail for trying to bribe the FDA to approve a drug in order to influence kindergarten admissions. Over the top? Implausible? Yes. Except that we live in a world where Jack Grubman really did get an analyst at Saloman Smith Barney to change his rating of AT&T to get his kids into preschool. (As a writing teacher once told me, "In a world this strange, who needs fiction?")

In her comment, bj suggested that parents who aren’t going through the process are unlikely to read The Kindergarten Wars. I’m not sure that’s true. One audience for the book is certainly parents of pre-school aged children, who want to learn what to expect. But I also think there’s an audience of people who would never apply to private schools, and read the book so they can shake their heads at those goofy rich people. The scary thing is both audiences will find the Ivy Chronicles fills the purpose almost as well.

As for me, what I took away from the books is that no school is so good as to justify the pressure that some of these parents put on their children. No 5 year old should see that their parents’ happiness and self-esteem depends on how well they perform. I may yet someday apply to private school for my kids, but if I do, it will be knowing that the application process is a crapshoot and largely beyond my control. And that they’ll be just fine whether they get in or not.