Half Changed World

I’m back, still slightly dazed from the long drive home and the return to work today.  So, a short book review, and then off to bed with Harry Potter.

I did read March over the weekend, and I agree with Academic Coach’s comment that you don’t need to have read Little Women recently or to have liked it to like March.  In fact, the author explains at the end that she was in part inspired by a comment that no one is really as goody-good as Marmee. 

Brooks’ March is largely based on the historical character of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s father, and his real life friends Emerson and Thoreau show up in the novel.  She transforms him into a middle-aged abolitionist minister, driven to put his ideals into practice by enlisting as a chaplain in the Union army, and finding those ideals tested by the realities of war. 

While a few of the battle scenes reminded me of Cold Mountain, the overall theme is exactly the opposite.  For the hero of Cold Mountain, all the hardships he faces are but clouds passing across the sky, irrelevant as soon as he is home.  March is about how experiences change a person, and about the impotence of words as tools to share such experiences, and and how unshared experiences can separate people.

I was going to review Freakonomics for my Tuesday book review, but I found I don’t really have much to say about it.  I was underwhelmed by it — it’s so simplified to be "accessible" to people who are scared of numbers that if you’ve read about the book, you’ve learned as much about the contents as you would by reading the book.  Leavitt’s controversial paper about abortion and crime is presented as a simple statement of fact, comparable to the statement that swimming pools are more of a hazard to kids than guns, without enough information for a reader to evaluate Leavitt’s claims and his critics’.   Mostly, reading Freakonomics made me appreciate Malcolm Gladwell’s skills at bringing complex ideas to life by discussing the people who care about them.

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I’ve been on a fiction reading kick lately, in part due to recommendations from around the blogosphere.  (Note the new "blogs about books" section in the sidebar.)

• I really enjoyed The Icarus Girl, although it didn’t quite finish as strongly as it started.  I have a soft spot for books about hyper-literate girls, even if they prefer Beth to Jo.  Several reviews indicate that it’s based on Nigerian mythology — I wish I knew more about that.  I don’t see how the Icarus myth fits in at all.
• Flea recommended Cloud Atlas, which I liked, although not as much as she did.  I really liked some of the individual stories, but found myself wondering whether the structure of the book was too precious and if it actually added anything to my reading.
• Wayne recommended I Sailed With Magellan as "the best collection of short stories that I’ve ever read."  I’m only two stories in, so will hold my judgment. 
• Next in line, I think, is March.  Do you think it will matter that it’s been almost 20 years since I read Little Women?

And, hey, Shannon’s starting a book club!

I’ve been looking forward with cautious optimism to the movie of V for Vendetta.  It’s based on the book by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, the first graphic novel I ever read.  It’s set in a totalitarian near-future England (well, the 1990s were near-future when it was written), and is about freedom and imagination and loss and love and history and hope.  And the hero is a terrorist.  (The WarnerBros website delicately refers to him as a "vigilante.")

Lis at Riba Rambles wonders how the message of the first teaser poster (People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.) is going to go over in the current political climate.  It’s a good question. I’m suddenly realizing that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to handle a movie in which the Houses of Parliament are blown up in the first five minutes. 

The violence in V for Vendetta is pretty much all aimed at agents of the state and at symbolic buildlings.  If innocent bystanders are killed in the process, you don’t see their broken bodies.  I wonder how the movie makers are going to handle this — and I think they’re damned either way.  If they don’t show it, they’re whitewashing terrorism; if they do show it, they’re glorifying it.

Remember, remember the fifth of November / Gunpowder, treason and plot. / I see no reason / Why gunpowder treason / Should ever be forgot.

The movie is being released in November, for the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ plot to blow up Parliament.

Today’s book is Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz.  Coontz’s thesis is that all of the recent phenomena that are often portrayed as signs of "the end of marriage" as a social institution — delayed marriage, increased divorce rates, out-of-wedlock childbearing — are the natural consequences of the transformation of marriage into a relationship grounded in love and intimacy.  Once society stops seeing marriage as simply a mechanism for creating alliances between families, determining the inheritance of property, and controlling both physical and human resources, and starts portraying it as a expression of emotional connection, it becomes hard to argue that people should stay married if they’re no longer in love. In Coontz’s word, marriage has become treasured but "optional."

While focusing mostly on Western Europe, Coontz surveys the huge range of social institutions that we lump together with the label of "marriage" and points out how many of the conditions that we think of as inherent aspects of "traditional marriage" (prohibitions on premarital sex, incest taboos, sexual fidelity, restriction of inheritance to legitimate children, difficulty of divorce) are actually contingent choices, accepted at some historical periods but not at others.

The book covers several thousand years of history and thus is necessarily a quick summary of each period.  Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it a quick read. I didn’t object to the fast pace until the very end, when it felt like Coontz assumed that her audience had already read her previous book, The Way We Never Were. Coontz claims that the specific circumstances of the 60s and 70s — second wave feminism, improved access to birth control, stagnant male wages and growing female earning potention — accelerated the changes, but weren’t necessary for them to occur.

Coontz consistently offers political and economic explanations for why different societies had different moral standards.  I was quite intrigued by her argument that the "separate spheres" story about gender roles developed as a response to the strain that democracy placed on the old assumptions that women were inherently inferior and subordinated.  I was also fascinated by her claim that as early as the beginning of the 19th century, different classes were developing different expectations around the timing of work and marriage — and different moral standards that went with them:

"A shotgun wedding was not a huge problem for people in rural occupations if the young couple had access to the resources needed to set up a new household.  As for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, whose earning power had often peaked by the end of their teens, it could be an advantage to marry and have children early, because after only a short period of dependence, the children could enter the labor force and increase total household income."

"But for middle-class parents, an unexpected marriage was a bigger problem.  To achieve success in the expanding category of middle-class occupations, a man had to have an education or serve a long period of training in his craft or profession…. This made deferred gratification a cherished principle of middle-class family strategy…. Central to this internal moral order was an unprecedented emphasis on female purity and chastity."

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I was quite amused last week to look at the Washington Post Book Review and see that they had given this book to none other than Judith Warner to review.  This review mostly serves to confirm Jennifer Weiner’s claim that reviews are more about the reviewer than the book.  Warner concludes: "Relationships between men and women, she [Coontz] implies, are basically healthy — probably better than they’ve ever been in the past. It’s our society that’s sick." 

Laura at 11D tagged me for a book meme (started by John Cole) about books read as a young adult that are worth re-reading:

"So, what fiction did you read as a teen/young adult that you have re-read as an adult (or would like to)? What pieces of fiction meant something to you? Put up your list, and pass it on to 2-3 people."

I found this a surprisingly hard assignment, in spite of the fact (possibly because of the fact) that like Laura I read pretty much non-stop as a teenager.  Of all the things that I like to do now in my free time — read, cook, run, blog, take photos — reading was the only one that I did as a teen.   And I had a lot more free time then. (On the other hand, I spent a lot of time in high school playing bridge, which I haven’t done in years.)

Part of the problem is that I almost never re-read books anymore.  There are so many books I haven’t gotten to on my "to-read" list that I find it hard to justify re-reading books.  So, I’m thinking of this more along the lines of "books that I read as a teenager/young adult that I’d be thrilled to find on a bookshelf in a rental house when it rained all vacation assuming my kids were suddenly old enough to entertain themselves for a couple of hours."

Looking at Cole’s list, I see both the Narnia books* and A Wrinkle in Time.  I loved these books, and eagerly look forward to reading them with my children, but I’m pretty sure I was still in elementary school or junior high when I read them. 

So, without further ado, here are my 5 books in no particular order:

• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin.  Works as both a story and as a thought experiment.
• Nightfall and Other Stories, by Isaac Asimov.  The title story is, in my opinion, the best thing Asimov ever wrote. (No, I haven’t read all 300+ books that he published. But I think I’ve read all the sci-fi.) And it was his first published story, at age 17.
• And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie.  I’m pretty sure I have read all of Christie’s mysteries.  This one is especially clever, but I’d be happy to find any of them in a rainy cabin. It might even be better to find an obscure one, because I might have forgotten who done it.
• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Yes, I really did read it as a teenager.  But I have a feeling that a lot of it went over my head.  I want to give it another chance.
• My Antonia, by Willa Cather.  I don’t actually remember much of the plot of this, but I remember the feeling of intense, almost erotic, pleasure that I got reading it. 

I’ll also list a few books that aren’t nearly as profound as I thought they were as a teenager:

• Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.  (But if you must read it, read the original version not the unedited "author’s cut".)
• Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
• The Bridge Across Forever, by Richard Bach.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.  Funny as heck, yes.  Worth reading, yes.  But profound?  No.

If you think it would be fun to answer this meme, consider yourself tagged and leave me a trackback.

*Speaking of Narnia, any thoughts about the forthcoming movie of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?  The preview I saw at Revenge of the Sith looked visually impressive, but I’m not sure I want D’s first interaction with the story to be a movie rather than the books.  I’m also a little nervous about how heavy-handed they’re going to be about the Christian allegory, which went right over my head until I was older.

Last week, when I checked my email, I found a message from someone in the publicity department at Random House that began:

Hi Elizabeth, I hope you’re doing well.  Just checking in on Maria Lennon’s debut novel, MAKING IT UP AS I GO ALONG (Shaye Areheart Books, June 14, 2005); Publishers Weekly just called it, “A winning mix of humor and suspense.” It is a is a funny, sophisticated, and refreshingly original story about doing what feels right, versus the “right thing.”  I look forward to hearing from you soon about a possible piece on your site.  I’d love to send you a copy of the novel and get you in touch with Maria.  Please let me know where you would like materials sent. 

I don’t know how they came across my blog — perhaps they noticed that I had promoted The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars — but I was flattered.  The description of the book they offered screamed Mommy Lit at me — but as Jennifer Weiner points out, there are worse things in the world than to be entertaining.  So, I said, sure, send it to me; I’ll give it a read.

Unfortunately, I thought it was pretty bad.  If I hadn’t felt obligated to keep going since they sent me a free book, I probably wouldn’t have gotten past the first page, which includes the following lines:

"There was nothing in my thirty-eight years that had prepared me for the beauty of a sleeping child in the arms of its mother.  It was the face of joy and peace, as though the baby was wrapped in a shroud of faith and its soul was dancing with the angels."

Ack.  I’m also afraid that Ms. Lennon took too literally Anne Lamott’s advice from Bird by Bird that if you’re basing an unpleasant male character on a real person, you should give him a tiny penis so he won’t recognize himself.

But there’s a bigger problem with the book. The Booklist review excerpted at Amazon says that the two halves of the story — one set amid the civil war in Sierra Leone, one among rich SAHMs in Southern California — are "too disjointed to be complete."  I think that’s being kind.  If this is meant to be a frothy book about the excesses of the rich and insecure, then it’s sick to throw in a bit about child mutilations for exotic color.  And if, in the face of the suffering of war, even the main character "could not bear to read about her [friend’s] sleepless nights over the right preschool for Jeremiah or her thoughts on Cheerios as finger food," why should we, the readers, want to read about these for several hundred pages?

(Think I’ll ever get another publisher contacting me to read a new book?)

I’ve mentioned before that I was a Mets fan during the early 80s. I still remember the excitement over Darryl Strawberry and his amazing natural athleticism.  I also remember the days he seemed to call his performance in, causing the stands at Shea to erupt with derisive chants of Daaaaa-ryl, Daaaaa-ryl.

Today’s book is The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, by Michael Sokolove.  It grew out of a NYTimes Magazine article Sokolove wrote about Strawberry, but broadens the focus to look at all the members of the 1979 Crenshaw High School Cougars, possibly the most talented team to ever play high school baseball.  (Chris Brown was also on the team, and several of the players told Sokolove that Strawberry was only the 3rd or 4th best player on the Cougars.)

Sokolove argues that the 1979 team was part of the last cohort of US-born black kids to consider baseball their game.  Their fathers had grown up playing baseball, worshipped the Dodgers as the team that had given Jackie Robinson his chance, and their love of the game was one of the only legacies they had to give their children.  And Crenshaw was lucky enough to have Brooks Hurst as its coach, a former minor-league ballplayer who loved the game and loved the kids who played it, but was tough enough to handle their attitudes.

Sokolove talks about the members of the team, what they were like in 1979, where their baseball paths took them (Strawberry and Brown were the only ones to make it to the majors, but several were drafted and played minor league ball), and what they’re doing today.  Some have achieved middle-class lives through other careers — cooking and plumbing.  Brown, whose baseball career ended after a series of hard to diagnose injuries left him with a reputation as a malingerer, is a crane operator.  Others found stability through military service.  One, Carl Jones, is in prison with a 25 years to life sentence for three non-violent crimes under California’s rigid "three-strikes" law.  Others are drifting along on the economic margins of society.

And then there’s Strawberry, who is pretty much unclassifiable.  His baseball career is finally over, after more second and third chances than most players get, thanks to both his undeniable talent and Steinbrenner’s love of publicity.  He seems to have blown through pretty much all of the millions of dollars that he made playing baseball, some on drugs, more on the entourage of hangers-on he accumulated, but still has his famous name, which opens doors.  He’s been in and out of rehab, and finally wound up serving jail time after breaking the terms of his probation.  The cancer he was treated for is a kind that tends to recur, but so far he’s doing ok.

The book is a quick read, although the attempt to fit so many stories into a 279 page book often left me turning back trying to remember who different people were.  Sokolove provides ample evidence of how poverty and racism limited the players’ opportunities in life, without making excuses for their failures.  And he notes that American literature — from Updike’s Rabbit to Springsteen’s Glory Days — is full of (white working-class) high school athletes for whom everything else in life is downhill.  He argues that given the limited opportunities in life open to a poor inner-city kid, going for the lottery shot of professional sports isn’t an unreasonable proposition.

My favorite line in the book comes after Sokolove has visited Jones’ family, which acted as surrogate parents to many of the Crenshaw players whose own parents were absent or messed up.  While he’s talking to Carl’s sister, Tahitha, her godson, Marvin, is playing nearby. 

" ‘His mom is out there on crack, so I keep him with me most of the time,’ Tahitha says.  ‘I love him like he’s my own.  He’s three, so we’re just starting him on baseball right now.’ "

"The Joneses are their own little social service agency.  Faith-based.  When they see someone in need, they try to give them baseball."

Today’s book is The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan, by Samuel Freedman.  I picked it up after reading a recommendation for it on a blog (sorry, don’t remember who) as a useful attempt to explain the rightward shift in American politics.

The book focuses on three immigrant families — one Irish-American, one Italian-American and one Polish-American — and their shifts over three generations, from loyal Democrats in the 1930s to Republican party activists in the 1980s and 1990s.  (The families were picked by working backwards from the most recent three.)  The book is impressively researched and the stories are interesting.  Some aspects of the story were very familiar to me, but others were totally unknown — machine politics in 1930s Baltimore, blue collar environmentalism in the late 1960s.  I enjoyed the book, although sometimes felt it got bogged down in more detail than necessary.

Freedman’s argument is that the first generation were loyal Democrats due to a combination of party machines, unions, ethnic loyality (think Al Smith) and gratitude for the jobs programs that helped them survive the Great Depression.  By the second generation, the son-in-law of one of the families had made the leap to management at Montgomery Ward, and moved to solidly Republican suburbs, and he adjusted his politics accordingly.  (Freedman notes that the wife in this family remained a liberal Democrat.) 

Another family turned conservative in the face of the civil rights movement and the growing welfare state, feeling that both were coming at the expense of white working-class families.  The third, also still blue-collar, remained Democratic, with one member becoming a leader in the new environmental movement.  However, by the third generation, this family had also moved into the Republican column, driven by the cultural conflicts around the Vietnam war and the scorn displayed by anti-war intellectuals for the working class men who were fighting it.

I found the discussion of the third generation the least persuasive, in part because it was so hard to see the three members as representative of the zeitgeist.  They were college Republicans in the  early 70s, when the counterculture had become mainstream.  Freedman argues that they presaged the Reagan revolution of 1980, and the Contract with America, but I’m unconvinced.  They were all New York Republicans, fiscally conservative (and true believers in Reaganomics and the Laffer curve) but socially moderate.  (One of them became a conservative hero for protesting the American Bar Association’s support of abortion rights, but also argued in favor of gay rights.)  It seems bizarre to tell a story about the rise of Republicanism in recent years in which the Christian right is totally missing.

I also found myself wondering "what about the Jews?"  In the early 20th century, Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US didn’t look that different than the Catholic ethnics that Freedman follows.  (German Jews had been in the US longer and were better off and more assimilated.)  The needle trades were full of both Italians and Jews — members of both groups died in the Triangle Fire — and both groups were key in forming unions.  Why did Jews then take such a different political trajectory, such that they’re still one of the most reliable elements of the Democratic voting bloc?  Freedman’s book doesn’t offer an explanation.

Today’s book is Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo.  The main characters are aid workers and pilots in the Sudan, and it’s a sweeping story of good intentions, unintended consequences, and hubris.  It’s often unclear who is acting out of greed and who out of principle — and the idealists are often the ones who do the most damage.  There are several pairs of unlikely lovers in the story, but the biggest love interest is Africa as a whole.

I picked up the book after reading Michiko Kakutani’s absolute rave in the New York Times.  I didn’t quite like it as much as she did (although I liked it more than Jonathan Yardley did), but I’m glad I read it.  Caputo does a brilliant job of capturing the draw of aid work: how the  hope of making a real difference in people’s lives blends with a desire to live life on a larger scale than most people have the opportunity.  His characters rage against the ordinary as they slide down the slippery slope towards moral decay.

However, if you’re going to read only one book about the Sudan, you should read Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins (soon to be a movie staring Nicole Kidman).  It’s nonfiction, and provides a good overview of the long-lasting civil war as well as an examination of the life of Emma McCune, a British relief worker who married a SPLA warlord.  McCune is clearly the inspiration for one of the main characters in Acts of Faith; I found myself wondering whether Caputo started his book because he was frustrated by Scroggins’ ultimate inability to explain McCune’s choices.

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Nicholas Kristof has a new op-ed in the Times today, urging once again more attention to the horrors still occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan.  He argues "When Americans see suffering abroad on their television screens, as they did after the tsunami, they respond. I wish we had the Magboula Channel, showing her daily struggle to forge ahead through humiliation and hunger, struggling above all to keep her remaining children alive." 

Today’s book is The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes A Good Mother, by Miriam Peskowitz.  Peskowitz’s core argument should be familiar to any reader of this blog:  that there ought to be better ways to combine work and family without running yourself into the ground, to move back and forth between full-time and part-time work and non-paid work without derailing your career, that the media-fanned "mommy wars" only distract us from making common cause.  She portrays herself not as an expert, but as an ordinary mother trying to understand what’s going on, and bringing her readers along on her voyage of discovery.

While there are details that I would quibble with Peskowitz about, I really liked the book as a whole. (My quibbles: I think she overstates the case to which the media portrays SAHDs as having an easier time returning to the workforce than SAHMs; I wish she had talked more about the ways in which domestic responsibilities tend to fall more heavily on the partner who works fewer hours, or even just has more flexibility in scheduling.) 

The emotional core of the book is the final chapter, entitled Playground Revolution, in which Peskowitz introduces us to a variety of groups that are working for change.  Some are fighting for legislation that would provide paid parental leave.  Some are organizing for better neighborhood playgrounds.  Some are organizing nurse-ins at Starbucks.  Some are fighting for welfare recipients’ rights to stay home with their children.

The point is that you don’t have to sign on to try to change everything at once, just the piece of it that moves you the most, that seems within your grasp.  But Peskowitz makes a convincing case that even as we each grapple with a different piece of the puzzle, it’s important for us to recognize that our pieces are part of a whole.  Or, as another generation might have said, think globally, act locally.