Half Changed World

Welcome to the "I read it, so you don’t have to" edition of the Tuesday Book Review.  Yup, I’m discussing Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which is her somewhat expanded version of the American Prospect article that caused all the fuss last winter.

The tone of the book irritated me immensely.  Hirshman is so in love with her self-image as the lone prophet in the wilderness that she attacks her possible allies .  For example, she writes scornfully about "stay-at-home dads who contend that their decisions mean there is no such thing as a gender ideology about who should care for home and familiy."  Err, actually, SAHDs encounter gender ideology up close and personal every day.  And she quotes long passages from bloggers and others without attribution, which strikes me as intellectually dishonest.  (Bitch, PhD is one of the few bloggers who she cites by name.  Phantom Scribbler is also mentioned in the endnotes.)   Finally, she plays sleazy rhetorical tricks, such as painting all of her critics with the brush of a few of them (e.g. anti-feminist conservative wingnuts hated her article, so if you disagre with her, you must be an anti-feminist wingnut.)

I’m going to try not to repeat what I previously wrote in response to the original article, but most of my complaints at the time still hold.  In particular, Hirshman still doesn’t get that the problem isn’t just that gender ideology affects which of the available choices people pick, but also that the choices are far too limited.  So, what’s new in the book?

First, Hirshman expands somewhat on her advice to young women who want to have equal power in their relationships — get a practical degree, take work seriously, lower your standards for household cleanliness, have only one kid.  The only part of this that I thought was particularly interesting was her acknowledgment that having a job that you’re passionate about can increase your bargaining position as well as making a lot of money, as long as it doesn’t pay so little that you’d starve on your own.  But if you’re interested in understanding marital bargaining, reading Kidding Ourselves, not Get to Work.  (Hirshman does credit Mahony for much of this section.)  Ironically, this section reminded me a lot of Sylvia Hewlett’s writing — both of them are determined to save young women from the mistakes they don’t know they’re making.

Second, Hirshman does acknowledge that feminism would be smaller under her definition, but she argues that a smaller, more focused movement would be more effective.  In particular, she argues for a policy goal of removing the tax penalty on second earners.  (Interestingly, this is also the "marriage penalty" that the religious conservatives whom Hirshman reviles also oppose.)

I’ve been reading Charlotte’s Web to D at bedtime, a chapter most nights.  I insisted on reading it, in spite of his only moderate interest, because when we saw Cars a month or so ago, I saw the preview for the new movie of Charlotte’s Web coming out this fall.  I really wanted his first experience of the story to be the book, not a movie.  It’s not as much of a hit with him as Captain Underpants, but he’s willing to listen, especially since it gets me sitting in his room reading for much longer than our usual picture books. 

Today we reached the penultimate chapter of the book, Last Day.  I should have realized in advance that I wouldn’t be able to make it through the last paragraph without crying.  I’m hopeless that way.

"She never moved again.  Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died.  The Fair Grounds were soon deserted.  The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn.  The infield was littered with bottles and trash.  Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all.  No one was with her when she died."

Both boys were pretty perplexed by my crying.  N (who I don’t think has really been following the story, although he likes to look at the drawings) didn’t get it even when I explained that I was sad that Charlotte died, because she was a good friend to Wilbur.  Daniel started crying a few minutes later.

Here’s some of the fun stuff I’ve been reading lately:

• Lost and Found, by Carolyn Parkhurst.  Not as wonderful as her first novel, The Dogs of Babel, but a quick read.  It’s set in the middle of an Amazing Race type reality show, which makes for some pointless absurdities (the characters spend much of the book carrying around a single ski pole and a parrot) as well as an excess of characters, but I liked the way the relationship between the mom and daughter evolved.
• The Necessary Beggar, by Susan Palwick.  This is more of a fable than a novel, with many of the characters being more roles than people.  But I liked the idea of illegal aliens who were truly aliens, and I thought the portrayal of the pressures on the oldest daughter rang true.
• His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik.  Dragons and sailing ships in the Napoleonic wars.  A bit weak on character development, but who cares?
• An Innocent, A Broad, by Ann Leary.  What may be the most flattering book ever written about Britain’s National Health Service.  A memoir of how Leary went into preterm labor while in London, and her experiences dealing with bedrest and the NICU far from home. 

I’m #283 in the holds queue for Anne Tyler’s Digging to America.

Today’s book is a strange and compelling book, In The Little World (A True Story of Dwarfs, Love, and Trouble), by John Richardson.  Andrea mentioned it in passing on her blog a while back, and so when I noticed it in the buck a book racks at the Strand, I picked it up.  The book tells three overlapping stories:

• Richardson’s visit to the Little People of America conference, the highly controversial and offensive article he wrote for Esquire about it, and the repercussions it had for the couple who were prominently featured in it.
• Richardson’s on-again, off-again friendship with a dwarf woman he met at the conference, and how she forces him to reconsider his preconceptions about normality and abnormality.
• How the mother of a young woman from Australia who needed a life saving operation raised the money for the operation, developed a strong support network over the internet, and tore her marriage apart.

Richardson is a very strong writer and the book is a page turner.  He absolutely refuses to be maudlin, and admits that he’s far more interested in people who are struggling with the world than the ones who are conventional successes.  And his analysis of the odd dynamics of the LPA convention, like a full year of high school poured into a week, seems perceptive to me.  Some participants find it the only time in the year where they get to be "normal," but for others, it’s shocking to be confronted with the reminder of how they look from the outside. 

Richardson is often unlikable, but he knows it, and is as harsh on himself as he is on any of his subjects.  And, while the first pages are a shocker, with references to "the classic pushed-in dwarfy look" and "big butts and big boobs," by the end of the book, if anyone is portrayed as a freak, it’s the average-sized mother of the woman from Australia.   

***

As it happens, this weekend, we ran into a friend of mine (J) who has osteogenesis imperfecta.  After we had chatted for a while, D asked me why she is "short and fat."  I took a deep breath, and explained that she has a disease that makes her bones weak, and that’s why she looks that way.  He sort of shook off my explanation and asked his real question — is she an adult?  Yes, I said.   His reaction: "Awesome."  It clearly impressed him that she’s an adult even though she’s his height, maybe smaller. 

I mentioned this to J later, and she laughed.  She told me that the other day a kid at the swimming pool asked if he could ask a question, and when she said yes, he asked whether she looked that way because she ate too much candy.  She said no, she wished it was that simple, but he should eat healthy foods anyway.  His mother was mortified, of course. 

It’s hard to know how to respond to these sorts of questions.  J doesn’t mind direct questions, but I know some people with visible differences tire of them.    But awkward whispers and "I’ll talk about it later" seems even worse.

Today’s book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.  It has a great deal in common with Peter Singer’s book, The Way We Eat, which I discussed last month.  Where Singer looked at the diets of three families — a conventional American diet, full of processed meat, a diet where the family attempts to eat organic and humanely raised meat, and a vegan diet — Pollan looks at four meals that he eats — a McDonald’s burger, an organic meal from large producers, a meal from Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, and a meal largely of foods that he hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (morels) himself.

Pollan begins by discussing how the vast majority of the American diet comes from corn in one form or another — either directly processed, or fed to animals.  He visits a corn farm to see how it’s grown, but then points out that corn is a commodity — you can’t connect that corn to any particular cow, or any particular cow to a piece of meet.  Organic food from large companies is produced in a more sustainable manner, with less chemicals, but is equally a commodity.  By contrast, Polyface is a self-contained ecosystem.  Salatin isn’t officially "organic," but invites any of his customers to see what he’s doing.

Ironically, I found Pollan’s writing more preachy than Singer’s, even though Singer is the professional ethicist.  Singer tells you what he thinks you should do, and he tells you why.  He tells you what he thinks the ideal is (not eating meat at all), and what’s a good fallback position (not eating industrial farmed meat, unless there’s an overriding reason to do so).  Pollan doesn’t ever explicitly say "you should do this" but gives the impression that he thinks he’s more enlightened than you.

In the section on the meal that he hunted and gathered (which Pollan admits freely is interesting only as a one-shot exercise, not as a lifestyle), Pollan writes about the connection he felt to the food.  But I was left with the impression that the true gift he received was the relationships he developed with the people who took him hunting, who taught him to find mushrooms, and who shared the meal with him.  Conventionally farmed food, cooked and shared with love, can be pretty magical too.

In a creative writing class I took long ago, the teacher lectured us about "beer truck endings."  A beer truck ending is when the author doesn’t know how to end a story or a book, so writes something like "And then X was crossing the street and got hit by a beer truck and killed.  The end."   You can’t get away with writing a story like that, with an ending that isn’t related to what’s come before.  But, of course, in the real world, people sometimes do get hit by trucks for no good reason.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel’s exploration of her strained relationship with her father, who died after being hit by a Sunshine Bread truck, shortly after she had come out to her parents as a 20 year old college student.  Or rather, it’s her exploration of the various narratives that she tells about his life and death.  Was it a suicide in response to her announcement?  Or is that just a story she tells to convince herself that she was more significant in his life than he showed?  Did he time his death to match his life to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s?  Or was it just a freak accident?  At times she wishes that he had died of AIDS instead, because the death of a closeted gay man of AIDS in the early 1980s would have made a narrative sense in way that the death of a closeted gay man by being hit by a truck doesn’t.  The book is full of literary references, as Bechdel’s father was a high school English teacher (and funeral home director) and literature was one of the few ways that they connected. (I found myself wishing I had read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) 

If Fun Home were fiction, it would be called a graphic novel.  It’s a memoir, so I’m not sure there’s a word for what it is.  The art style is very similar to Dykes to Watch Out For, the comic strip that Bechdel’s been drawing for 20+ years, and a few of the DTWOF characters make cameo appearances as Alison’s fellow members of the gay student union.  Photographs are reproduced as realistic drawings, and one haunting panel shows the carefully rendered negatives of the images we’ve just seen.

Fun Home is more than a bit painful to read.  Bechdel complains that her father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture.  The acknowledgements thank her mother and brothers "for not trying to stop me from writing this book."  In a conversation with fellow cartoonist Craig Thompson, she explains that the only way she was able to write the book was that she didn’t expect anyone to see it.  (DTOWF mostly runs in gay and lesbian newspapers, and has never achieved mainstream success.  Fun Home has gotten rave reviews and Bechdel is clearly struggling a little with her newfound fame.)  And there’s no redemptive payoff at the end.  But if you read it, the story and images will stay with you.

Today’s book is Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash, by Liz Perle.   Perle’s personal story is a zinger — she quit her job and moved to Singapore with her four-year-old son, only to be told by her husband that he wanted a divorce.  She writes about her learning, the hard way, that marrying wealth doesn’t really buy you security, and the freedom she found in learning that she could survive her worst nightmare.  When she remarries, and her new husband asks if it’s a problem for her that he isn’t financially secure, she has the insight to answer that she likes to feel taken care of, and that she’s spent a long time associating that with money.  That’s a nice, hard won, distinction.

Unfortunately, only a small part of Money, A Memoir, is actualy a memoir.  Mostly it’s a mushy pop-psychology book about how women are still looking for Prince Charming to rescue them from having to make tough financial choices.  There are some nice lines — I liked Chelle Campbell’s definition of the "emotional middle class" as "somebody who feels she still needs to strive to make ends meet but who has a lot of nice things so she feels she can’t really complain too much" — but not much substance. 

Perle is also oddly judgmental in some places.  When she hears that a former slow-track father of her acquaintance has taken an editor in chief position, where he travels a lot, she is "crestfallen," rather than glad that he’s had the opportunity to focus on his family and now is trying something else.   At the same time, she is highly critical of an artist who was reluctant to take a regular job when he and his wife had a baby, accepting at face value his wife’s complaint that he was "irresponsible" for the same characteristics she had previously valued.

Perle writes well, and the book is a quick read.  But it left me unsatisfied.  I’d rather have heard more about Perle’s own story — even if she didn’t open her check register, as Sandra Tsing Loh suggests.

Today’s book is How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, by Franklin Foer.  I picked it up at the store as it seemed like an appropriate book to read while travelling in Europe during the World Cup.  It turned out to be a perfect book for travelling — a quick read, divided into self-contained chapters, interesting without being particularly challenging.

Unlike Stephen Jay Gould’s erudite essays about baseball, Foer’s essays aren’t really about the game of soccer.  You don’t really need to know anything about the game to enjoy them.  Foer writes about soccer fans, players, and owners, often focusing on the dark side of the sport — ethnic hatreds, corruption, violence.  He’s particularly fascinated by the persistence of local and national identitites in the face of globalization, and whether that’s inherently a bad thing.

I enjoyed the book, but am not sure how seriously to take Foer’s analysis.  One chapter is about soccer in the United States, in particular why some people are so vehemently oppposed to it.  Foer argues that they are, in their own way, anti-globalization activitists, objecting to the idea that Americans should like soccer just because the rest of the world does.  That seemed reasonable to me, but then he suggests that they’re defensive because baseball, the quintessentially American game, has failed in the global marketplace.  That argument doesn’t ring true — baseball is certainly struggling, but the games that it’s losing to (in the US) are US football (which is even more of an international flop) and basketball (which is increasingly an international game itself).  The gaps in the one chapter where I actually know something make me wonder whether there are similar holes in the rest of the book.

***

Via BitchPhD, some World Cup blogging.

Today’s book is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.  I requested it from the library after reading the interview with Singer that I discussed last month.  It’s an exploration of the ethics of food, focusing mostly on reducing unnecessary animal suffering and environmental impacts.  Singer and Mason organize their discussion around the diets of three American families: one that shops at Walmart and eats whatever is cheap, convenient and tastes good, one that shops at places like Trader Joes and Whole Foods and tries to make generally ethical choices around food even if it means paying more, and one that follows a vegan diet.

The basic argument behind The Way We Eat is that mass-produced food, especially meat, milk and eggs, is incredibly cheap because the price doesn’t reflect the real costs, both in animal welfare, and in environmental damage.  Singer and Mason don’t think it’s inherently wrong to kill an animal for food, but say that if we have to pay 10 cents an egg more in order to allow the chickens to have the room to turn around and access to grass, we ought to be willing to pay that price.  (More formally, they argue that it is "speciesist" to refuse to take animal quality of life and suffering seriously.)

Overall, I found the book interesting and readable.  (I was a little nervous, since I’ve tried reading one of Singer’s other books and found it inpenetrable.)  Singer’s much less of a moral absolutist in this book than I was expecting. He makes a strong case for avoiding the products of factory farms, but recognizes that it may be more important in a specific case to eat your grandmother’s cooking than to maintain a purist stance.  He doesn’t think that the benefits of genetically modified foods are worth the risks in developed countries, but notes that the calculus may be different in places where starvation is a real threat.  (Although he fails to acknowledge the political problems in trying to explain why GM food is good enough for Africans if it’s not good enough for Europeans.) 

Singer and Mason are also willing to zing some of their allies.  They suggest that it would be a good thing if we could grow cloned meat in vats, since it presumably wouldn’t have any ability to suffer, a suggestion that I think would give most environmentalists the queasies.  As noted in the Salon interview, Singer’s not a big fan of the Eat Local movement, arguing that it may be more sustainable to buy food from far away that is transported by ship and rail than local food that is trucked to market.  And they note that improved taste may be a good thing, but it is not an ethical requirement.

So, has reading this book changed my eating habits?  The sections that made the most impact on me were the discussion of mass poultry production. (I was already more or less aware of the issues in beef slaughterhouses, from Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, and I don’t eat pork for other reasons.)  Right after reading that section, I walked through the meat aisle at Shopper’s Food Warehouse and found it hard to pick up my usual pack of boneless chicken breasts.  So I left with mushrooms and bok choy, but no meat for the moo shu chicken I was thinking of making.

Later in the week, I made it over to Whole Foods (for the first time in the several months since it opened near me) and started looking at the prices.  I couldn’t bring myself to pay over $4 a pound for chicken that we wouldn’t be able to taste very much of over the sauce, so instead I bought a small package of beef.  I think the beef was slightly more per pound than the chicken, but it wasn’t as proportionately more expensive than I’m used to paying for beef, if that makes sense.  If I were to commit to buying only non-factory farmed meat, I definitely think the costs would help push me toward using less of it.  Which Singer and Mason would approve of, of course.

Today’s book is It’s A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, edited by Andrea Buchanan.  I’m one of the last stops on this month’s blog book tour.

At the MotherTalk event I attended, Andi read her essay from this book, "Learning to Write," which is about how her daughter used writing to express her anger with — and her separation from — Andi.  I asked her why she included it, since it’s not obviously about gender, and she said that it was because she found the issue of enmeshment and separation was a running theme in the essays about mothering daughters, while it was not in the ones about mothering sons.  As she explains in her response to Meredith at Boston Mommy, Andi found that mothers couldn’t help identifying with their daughters, and revisiting "the ghosts of their girlhoods."  (Do fathers of sons go through the same struggles?)

***

I am the mother of two sons.   I adore them to pieces, but I do sometimes feel a pang for the daughter that I’m never going to have.   These books  (I wrote about It’s A Boy back in November) made me think about what it is that I think would be different with a daughter.  It’s not the traditionally girly stuff that I’m sad about missing (although I’ll admit to coveting the little girls’ dresses in the stores).

I think maybe I’m wistful about not getting to teach a girl that she can do anything she dreams of.  Oh, I’ll certainly teach my boys that they can do anything they dream of, but it’s not the same.  I guess, like many of the writers in the collection, I had thoughts of raising a daughter without the hangups and insecurities I have.  (Also, I think society today is by far harsher on boys who aren’t conventionally masculine than it is on girls who aren’t conventionally feminine, so I’ll worry about my sons even as I encourage them to follow their hearts.)

This sounds silly, but I’m also getting a sinking feeling that my boys may not be willing to sit still for all the books that I’ve dreamed of reading to them.  I know, they’re young yet, but… D is pretty much uninterested in any chapter books that don’t involve pirates or rocketships.  I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed if I don’t get to read Charlotte’s Web, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Little House books to my kids.  Do boys read Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret? Based on what I’m hearing in the blogosphere, my odds would be better if I had girls.