Half Changed World

Today’s book is Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie.  As I said last week, it’s excellent but depressing.  It’s a novel set during Biafra’s short lived independence from Nigeria, showing how the members of one family are affected as the country is afflicted by war and starvation.

I have to admit that when I picked up the book (after reading the rave review in the Washington Post), I had only the vaguest idea where Biafra was.  I knew it was in Africa, and knew that the name was associated with pictures of starving children.  I had some idea that it was one of the first places where widespread starvation became a media event.  (And I had heard of Jello Biafra.)

As I said to Phantom Scribbler, the book is sad, even horrifying, but not at all graphic in showing the violence.  Terrible things happen to many people, but almost entirely "off-stage" (as in a classic tragedy).  Adichie focuses in on the details of life, especially food — in the good years, she portrays the servant who won’t eat his family’s plain boiled yams after getting used to eating them with butter; in the bad years, she shows lizards and crickets becoming delicacies.  In describing a child suffering from malnutrition, she shows her dark hair becoming rust colored and falling out in clumps, rather than the standard images of ribs sticking out or bellies protruding.

With the reviews that Adichie is getting, she doesn’t need my recommendation.  But she’s got it.  I’m going to look for her first book — which is supposedly less dark — in the library.

I regularly get offers of books and videos sent to the email address on this blog.  At first, I was so thrilled by the prospect that I said yes to almost everything, but then I felt compelled to actually read them.  So I’ve gotten more picky.  But I was sufficiently intrigued by the email I got a few weeks ago for a book called "Pick Me Up" that I requested a review copy.  The email promised:

Are you ready to pursue knowledge through the coolest graphics and pop culture references around? Then you and your site’s are ready for the reference-book revolution!  From Beethoven to dinosaurs to Bangali facts, PICK ME UP explains the world around us through smart, witty writing and a fun and modern design. This captivating reference book serves more as an unencyclopedia for the internet generation, and teems with fascinating information about history, science, nature, geography, and culture. These cool facts, inspired by pop culture, serve as a serious boredom eliminator, and their arrangement is inspired both by video games and the internet. PICK ME UP appeals speicifically to modern kids and teens, and mirrors the multimedia world in which we live.

The book is certainly visually impressive.  It’s got a 3-D effect cover that creates an amazing illusion of depth, and the individual page layouts are well-designed and convey a significant amount of information, combining graphics and text.  D is well younger than the target age range for the book, but immediately asked me what it was and could he have it.  I think it’s the perfect book to leave in the bathroom, since you can pick it up at any page and read for a few minutes.

But, as a reference book, it’s got some huge holes.  The topics are clearly chosen based on what they had interesting graphics for, with no attempt at comprehensive coverage.  I have no idea how the pages are ordered.  (There will be an index in the published version, although it wasn’t in the uncorrected proof they sent me.)  And the attempt at creating hyperlinks (by listing keywords and the corresponding page numbers in bold) mostly made me wonder why this information should be in a book, rather than online.  For reference and graphics, the internet has a strong comparative advantage over print books.  (For proof, see Phantom Scribbler’s contest of yesterday.)  I have a feeling that this book will be mostly bought by parents and other older relatives for preteens who don’t read very much, and it won’t change that pattern.

By contrast, books are far superior to computers for portability and for ease of reading for long periods.  T is fascinated by the "e-ink" technology in the new Sony Readers, but so far I’ve seen absolutely nothing that makes me inclined to give up my wood pulp books for them.  The only applications I can think of that have any appeal are if I were in school (and all of my textbooks came in etext versions) or for long trips where I don’t want to schlepp a lot of books.

Update: Does anyone reading this own a kindle?

I’d love a review from a real person who has one.

When you read the headlines each day from Iraq, of bombings, elections, and daily life, do you think about what the reporters went through in order to file their stories?  In today’s book, Tell Them I Didn’t Cry: A Young Journalist’s Story of Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq, Jackie Spinner of the Washington Post attempts to describe what it is like to be a reporter in Iraq.

This is war reporting without any bravado.  Where Michael Weisskopf writes in his Time cover story that Iraq was "a dream assignment, a chance to escape Washington and work in exotic environs on a big story," Spinner cheerfully admits that she was terrified almost every minute, even as she argued with her editors to send her to Iraq and let her escape "career death" in the financial section of the Post.  Spinner writes about the constant fear of kidnapping or assault, the frustrations of reporting through a security cordon, the vitriolic emails she got from readers, and her attempts to establish something resembling a normal life under totally abnormal conditions (she cooked dinner for the Post’s Iraq bureau every Friday night, rotating through a variety of world cuisines).

I heard Spinner talk at an event earlier this year, and she spoke about how common it is for war reporters to get post-traumatic stress disorder.  Reading the book, I got the impression that writing it was therapeutic for her, giving her the chance to tell all the stories she couldn’t tell her family while she was overseas, because they would have been too freaked out.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t always make for good writing — Spinner buries the reader in a sea of details, without providing much in the way of perspective or context.

Spinner writes with passion about the role of the Iraqi reporters, translators, drivers and other support staff who make the American reporters’ work possible.  She notes that they were in far more danger than the Americans, risking their life every day they came to work.  She points out that the Iraqi journalists valued their work enough to ask for, and receive, bylines in the Post, even though they made themselves targets in the process.  But in spite of Spinner’s obvious affection for her Iraqi colleagues, she doesn’t make them stand out as individuals, except for one young woman who Spinner is particularly close with.

Until I sat down to write this review, I hadn’t noticed that the subtitle emphasizes that Spinner is a "young" journalist, but not that she is a woman.  In spite of that absence, it’s clearly a big issue in the book. Being a woman in Iraq obviously affected some of the stories that Spinner could report — she was less able to interview Iraqi men than her male colleagues, but more able to interact with women.  But beyond that, it’s hard to imagine a male journalist writing this book, with its free admission of fear and focus on interpersonal relationships.  Even the title — which comes from an episode when Spinner is nearly abducted — is something only a woman, who is stereotypically expected to cry, would feel a need to say.

Today’s book is The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement And How You Can Fight Back, by Jacob Hacker.  Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring — how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker’s answer is that we’re facing more risk than ever before, so even if we’re doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

Specifically, Hacker shows how a range of economic and political forces have combined to increase risk in almost every aspect of our lives:

• Income volatility has increased significantly, and has increased more among the middle- and upper-class than the poor.  (The poor still have higher levels of income volatility.)
• Job loss is more likely to lead to long-term unemployment, and re-employment at significantly lower wages and/or in a different industry.
• Marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
• Education is an excellent investment, but also a risky one — students are borrowing more than ever, and going to college doesn’t guarantee a high income.
• Defined benefit pensions are rapidly disappearing, replaced by 401ks.
• More people are uninsured than ever before, and even people with insurance have a higher probability of being hit by large uncovered bills than in the past.

Hacker’s not the first one to say any of this, but he does a really nice job of pulling it together in one package.  (One of my few complaints about the book is that when Hacker incorporates true-life stories that illustrate his points, the stories are oddly familiar, because he picked most of them them up from the same newspaper articles that I’ve read.)

The most immediately politically salient part of this book is where Hacker takes on the proposals to privatize Social Security and to shift people from standard health insurance into Health Savings Accounts.  Hacker argues that these are part of an ideologically driven "Personal Responsibility Crusade" that is designed to increase risk, even though most people feel like they have too much risk in their lives, thank you very much. 

Hacker also makes some proposals for how to reduce risk from its current levels.  The simplest is probably his proposal for universal 401ks, that could be portable across jobs, and that workers would be automatically enrolled in unless they opted out.  He also proposes that the government would annuitize these accounts when people reach retirement.  He also proposes to open up Medicare for people under 65 and to create a system of Universal Insurance that would cover people against sharp drops in income.  (Neither of these proposals are described in any detail in the book, which attempts to reach a general audience and so tries not to scare people off with too many formulas.)

Like Warren and Tyagi, Hacker also offers some practical advice — build up some savings, sign up for a 401k if you can, buy life insurance, don’t buy a house that you can only afford with a variable rate mortgage, don’t enroll in a college that you can’t afford to stay in until you finish.  He also points out the significance of "loss aversion" — that it’s more painful to give up something that you have than to never have had it in the first place.

If all this isn’t familiar to you, read the book.  And if it is, send it to your Congressman.

So I finally got around to reading Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.  I sort of felt that it was my obligation, given the topics I cover on this blog.  I shouldn’t have bothered.  I’d read most of the essays that were adapted into the book, so there wasn’t much new here.  Moreover, Flanagan seems to have thought better of some of the most over-the-top lines in the essays; while I agree with the substance of the move, it takes away most of the elan in her writing.  And elan and a willingness to make breathtaking leaps are pretty much all that Flanagan ever has going for her.

Most notably, Flanagan now describes her Atlantic essay, "How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement," as "a convoluted and slightly insane cover story on the topic [social security benefits for nannies] for a national magazine."  The most infamous line from that piece — "when a mother works, something is lost" — has migrated into the preface, where Flanagan transforms it into a platitude:

"What few will admit — because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities — is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value."

I also don’t remember reading in the original article Flanagan’s description of summoning her nanny when her son was throwing up.  Flanagan writes that Paloma would

"literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him.  I [Flanagan] would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up — the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me." 

If it had been there, I can’t believe that any of us would have taken Flanagan’s attempt to claim the moral high ground as worthy of anything but snickering.  (I’d love to hear her try to explain why hiring someone to pick nits out of your kid’s hair is "perilously close to having someone… come in and service my husband on nights when I’d rather put on my flannel nightie and watch Dateline NBC" but calling someone to change him out of his pukey PJs is not.)

Overall, the main thing that jumped out at me reading the collection is how much better a writer the late Marjorie Williams was than Flanagan.  Compare these lines:

"The slip of paper [her 11th grade report card] was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems.  I wasn’t anyone’s daughter anymore." [Flanagan]

and

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear." [Williams]

Or compare the "few will admit" passage above to Williams’ tart: "On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

So, go read Sandy’s review of Flanagan, and then go read The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

The NY Times had an article this week (written by a friend of mine, as it happens) on how young children learn from television.  In particular, the article discusses a study that found that the more that children interacted with the television characters — Blue’s Clues is cited as particularly well-designed — the more they learned.

On vacation last week, I heard N shouting as he tried to open the heavy sliding door on our rental house.  It took me a minute to figure out that he was saying "Abre!" just like on Dora the Explorer.  He also loves to make a gate across the entry to our kitchen with his body, and make us do knock knock jokes before he’ll open.  So, yes, I’m sure he’s learning from television.  But I still cringe when we go to the bookstore and he shouts with his enthusiasm about finding books with Dora and Boots.  Why don’t you paint a scarlet "TV" on me while you’re at it, kid?

In spite of the bad rap that TV gets, I’m not convinced it’s bad for small children as long as it doesn’t replace reading.  A report came across my desk today about mother-toddler bookreading in low-income families which confirmed that reading to kids promotes language development.  As the abstract of the study says, "Path analyses show reciprocal and snowballing relations between maternal bookreading and children’s vocabulary."

One minor finding of the study is that moms are more likely to read to their first-born children than to later ones.  That should not come as a surprise to anyone who has more than one child.  I’m sure that younger children are also exposed to more television, and in particular, more non-educational television (e.g. D sure wasn’t watching KimPossible when he was 2).  I wonder if there’s a way to use that fact to improve research on the effects of TV on child development — most current research is flawed because it can’t distinguish between the effects of TV on children and the effects of having parents who allow or don’t allow lots of TV watching.

I’m not worried about N in any case.  We’ve been reading a lot of In the Night Kitchen lately, and he’s been walking around reciting long passages from it.  He particularly likes "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m Mickey!"  Except that sometimes he says it as "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m N—!"   or "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m D—!"  and then he sneaks a peek over at D to wait for his reaction. 

Today’s book is Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids, by Eileen Gale Kugler.  It was recommended to me by a reader of this blog. Kugler is a parent whose children attended Annandale HS in Fairfax, one of the most diverse schools in the country, and she one by one she knocks down the myths that make parents fearful of sending their kids to such schools (e.g. the best schools are those with the highest test scores, diverse schools aren’t safe, etc).

I agree with most of Kugler’s overall points, especially her argument that that many of the people who are the quickest to dismiss diverse schools are the ones who haven’t set foot in them.  But I can’t say that I feel particularly more encouraged about our local elementary school after reading the book.  First, I’m not sure that it counts as diverse by Kulger’s standards, as it’s about 80 percent one race.  Second, Kugler is careful to say that "well-run" diverse schools can provide an excellent education to all students, and I’m not sure that our school qualifies as well-run.  (This isn’t a knock on the new principal, just on the lack of continuity.)

Overall, the major problem with the book is that I’m not sure who the audience for it is.  I have trouble imagining anyone reading it who isn’t already convinced of the value of diversity.  And the chapters on what school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers and parents can do are pretty simplistic.

***

Oh, yes, D did start kindergarten today. We did manage to get out the door on time (and I even made pancakes.)  His teacher is an older man with a ponytail who talks to the children in a very soft voice.   D was annoyed that it was pouring this morning when we walked him over, but was happy to sit down in the classroom and say goodbye to us.  In the afternoon, he didn’t tell us much about what they did today, but didn’t have any complaints.  (When I noticed that he had only eaten one of the two cookies I packed in his lunch box, and asked him why, he explained that by the time he finished his sandwich and the first cookie, it was nap time, but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it.)  In his backpack, we found a stack of forms to fill out and return (and yet another version of the supply list).  So far, so good, I guess.

***

I just read Sandra Tsing-Loh’s interview on the Atlantic online, which includes this wonderful quote illustrating Kugler’s point:

"I found that once we actually got to public school, everything I’d been told about it was wrong. That’s because we’ve gotten to the point now where in my social class—the media class in big cities—not one person I know professionally sends his or her kids to public school. So nobody actually knows what it’s like anymore. So they’re telling each other about a land, like the North Pole, which no one has set foot in."

I’d love to hear anyone in LA’s reaction to her "Scandalously Informal Guide to Los Angeles Schools."

I can’t figure out how to handle my to-read pile at work.  If I leave it in one undifferentiated mass, I never get to the bottom of it, and important things get swallowed up.  If I go ahead and file things, I forget about them because they’re out of sight.  If I file them but make a list of what I want to read, I’m afraid I’ll spend all my time futzing around with the list and never getting anything done.  If I make lots of piles, it works until I get busy with something else, and then the piles run into each other and I’m back where I started.

And then there are all the emails I get with links to reports that I might want to read.  When I click through, and determine that I am interested in something, but it’s not the highest priority thing for me to read right then, what should I do with the email?  I wind up doing this multiple times with the same emails, which I know isn’t efficient.

And this is without even getting into the pile of books next to my bed.

What do you do, dear readers?  Does anyone have a strategy that really works?

Today’s book is The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine.  Levine is a psychologist in Marin county, California, and she writes about how she’s seeing more and more affluent teenagers who are depressed, anxious, anorexic, using drugs, cutting themselves, or otherwise acting in self-destructive manners.  She argues that this isn’t in spite of their privileged backgrounds, but because of them. 

In particular, Levine suggests that affluent communities are characterized by:

• intense pressure to perform, in both grades and extra-curriculars
• materialistic values
• very busy parents who don’t have time for their kids (whether or not they work outside the home).
• isolation and lack of social supports.

She claims that the result is kids who don’t have a real "sense of self."  They know what is expected of them — and depending on their personality, may either conform or do precisely the opposite — but don’t know who they are and what they really value in life.  Or, as the subtitle says, "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

Levine argues that parents need to both take a step back from their kids’ lives — let them make more decisions on their own, and learn to deal with the consequences — and be more connected with them as persons and let them know they love them for themselves, not just their accomplishments.  This rang true to me.  I know that my husband is still dealing with the message that he got from his parents as a teenager that they believed that if he was left to make his own decisions, he’d ruin his life. 

The book also helped me articulate some of my irritation with the Post magazine article on "toxic parents" from a couple of weeks ago.  The article seemed to suggest that the only parenting alternatives were to a) let your kids do whatever they wanted, including buying alcohol for them and letting them have unsupervised parties, and b) to track their whereabouts every minute.  I’m pretty sure that the right choice is c) set clear expectations, provide freedom within reasonable limits, and let there be consequences if the kid screws up.  (Levine admits that in spite of her best efforts, some of her son’s friends snuck alcohol into a party at her house, and she got busted by the police.)

That said, I’m not convinced that the people who read this book will be the ones who need to, or if they do, that they’ll recognize themselves.  I suspect it’s more likely to be read by people who enjoy tssking at other people’s bad parenting, and feeling virtuous by comparison.  (And who wouldn’t feel virtuous compared to the dad who wanted Levine to fix his kid’s drug problem, but wouldn’t give up using himself?)

I really wanted to like today’s book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance, by Charlayne Hunter-Gault.  I’ve always admired Hunter-Gault’s journalism, and her personal story is heroic — she one of the two black students to integrate the University of Georgia.  And I agree with her point that western coverage of Africa is almost always limited to what she calls "the four Ds" — Death, Disaster, Disease, and Despair (plus one C, corruption).

But I found the book slow going (even though it’s only 142 pages).  Hunter-Gault spends a lot of time covering the relatively familiar story of the peaceful transition of South Africa from apartheid to democracy, and moves so quickly through a laundry list of other countries making progress that the details blur together.  Because she has so much ground to cover in a short space, she rarely gets into the details of the human stories that bring her reportage to life.  And she tries so hard to be even-handed that she winds up being almost mealy mouthed in places.  (I sputtered a bit over her statement that donor funding to Zimbabwe has declined "due to what Western agencies regarded as bad governance.")

The book is divided into three sections, based on three lectures that Hunter-Gault gave at Harvard in 2003.  The first section focuses on South Africa and its transformation since the fall of apartheid.  The second discusses the growth of (at least the forms of) democracy across the continent.  I found this the least persuasive section, with Hunter-Gault often having to point to the persistence of opposition movements in the face of brutal crackdowns as a sign of the people’s desire for democracy, rather than being able to point to significant progress.  The third section is where Hunter-Gault hits her stride, writing with passion about the African journalists who persist in the face of limited resources and often government censorship to report the news, both good and bad.

Ultimately, the book disappointed, because I didn’t feel like I knew any more about Africa when I finished than when I started.  Do any of you have suggestions for books to read?  I’ll admit that I took both The End of Poverty and White Man’s Burden out of the library this summer, and only got a few chapters into each of them before they were due.