Half Changed World

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine.  This is one of the two cookbooks that came out last fall with recipes for how to hide vegetable purees in a variety of foods to get a little more nutrition into kids.  (The other one was Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, and there was some discussion over whether she stole the other person’s idea, and got a lot more attention because of who she’s married to.)

I’m not morally opposed to sneaking vegetables into my kids’ food — I’ve been known to put pureed black beans into brownies when I was desperate to get some fiber into D’s diet — but I haven’t actually used the cookbook very much.  The main problem is that both cookbooks (I took the Seinfeld one out of the library at some point to compare) assume that all kids will eat things like macaroni and cheese and tomato sauce, and D won’t.  When you’re talking about a kid who eats his peanut butter without jelly and doesn’t like ketchup, there’s not a whole lot of opportunities to disguise food.  A few weeks ago, I did make sweet potato puree when I was making sweet potatoes for myself, but then I never got around to using it before it got all yucky and moldy in the fridge.

So, this morning, since the boys had off from school and I decided to work from home rather than hazard the ice, D asked if I’d make pancakes.  So I decided to try the chocolate chip pancake recipe, which involves a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and ground almonds.  I made some with chocolate chips, some plain, and some with blueberries.

Both boys loved the chocolate chip ones. Neither would eat the blueberry ones — and N usually adores blueberry pancakes.  They said the plain ones were ok, but not as good as my usual ones.  So, is it worth it to add the chips as a bribe to get them to eat some extra whole grains and protein?  Maybe occasionally, and especially if the alternative is bisquick, which is pretty low in nutritional content.  But Julia’s Oatmeal Buttermilk pancakes have just as much whole grains, and taste a heck of a lot better.

Oh, and having a book called "The Sneaky Chef" isn’t so sneaky once you have a kid who is old enough to read the title and ask what’s the ingredient he’s not supposed to notice.

Last night I was far too distracted to write a book review, but I do want to get back into the habit of writing them.  This week’s book is The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.  As suggested by the title, the book explores what would happen to the Earth if humans simply disappeared one day (whether abducted by aliens, taken in the rapture, or killed by a highly specific virus that left everything else on earth alone).  How long would our creations last?  Would the damage that we’ve done to the environment be healed, or would our chemical and nuclear facilities wreak even more havoc left untended?

Weissman uses these questions as launching points to explore a range of phenomena, from the Korean DMZ as wildlife refuge, to vast underground cities in Turkey, to the dead zone at Chernobyl, to the question of why there are almost no mega-fauna left anyplace on earth but Africa.  (Weissman’s answer is that African megafauna learned early to be wary of humans, while the great animals in other parts of the world were taken by surprise by the dangerousness of these apparently helpless primates.  As I write this, I’m not sure why Asian elephants and tigers are an exception to that rule.)

The wide range of topics in the book are both a strength and a weakness.  Weissman’s conclusion is that almost all traces of humans (except for bronze statues and radioactivity) will be erased, given enough time.  But because he jumps from issue to issue, having read the book, I still don’t have a specific sense of what the world would look like in 5 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years.

It’s hard to read the book, and not be horrified by some of the things that we’re doing to the earth — driving species to extinction, filling the oceans with plastic, changing the very climate.  But it doesn’t point to obvious solutions, and can leave you with a sense that nothing we do at this point can fix things very much.

It’s been a while since I did a Tuesday book review, and I realized that I never commented on the Daring Book for Girls.  It’s a nice book, with a mixture of traditional girls’ activities (double dutch, cats cradle, slumber parties), not so traditional activities (karate, campfires), practical skills (first aid, changing a tire, basic money management) and straight-up feminism (bios of women scientists and spies and a bunch of queens).  If I had a daughter, I’d give it to her with much less reservation than I have in giving my sons the companion Dangerous book.

In fact, I mostly left the Daring book wishing that Miriam and Andi had gotten to do the book for boys as well as for girls.  Fundamentally, if the Daring book is a throwback to the 70s, the Dangerous book is a throwback much further, perhaps to Teddy Roosevelt’s youth.  And it seems a lot more useful for my sons to know how to change a tire or balance a checkbook than to make their own bow and arrows.

I seem to have made an annual tradition of noting which of the Times Notable Books of the Year I’ve read.  It’s an easy post at a busy time of the year. So here goes:

• The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao.  Terrific.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yes, I got it the first weekend it was out.  Not as good as the first one in the series (which I’ve just started reading out loud to D) but far better than the last couple.
• The View from Castle Rock.  I thought this was really interesting, without actually liking it all that much.  There’s one story in it that appears to be the real-life episode that one of the stories in Runaway is based on — someday, I want to read the two stories side by side.
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Loved it.
• The Argument.  Thought provoking, but I’m convinced by Ezra Klein’s criticism of Bai –he claims the Dems are only about politics, not policy, but that’s because he interprets all policy arguments through a political lens.

I also read The Emperor’s Children, Intuition, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and The Places In Between from the previous year’s list.  I got the Lay of the Land out of the library, but couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters.

T and I got a babysitter last night and went out to a preview showing of The Golden Compass last night. I’m a huge fan of the books — I’ve been lending out my copies for years to try to get more people to read them — and have been looking forward to the movie with a combination of excitement and nervousness.  The books are big, complicated, and challenging, and I was afraid that they just wouldn’t survive the translation to the big screen.  But the gorgeously designed website and previews gave me hope that the makers "got" the book.

So, what’s my verdict?  Mixed.  The movie is gorgeous.  They got the vision right — the subtle differences between Lyra’s world and ours, the ways that the children’s daemons flicker from shape to shape, the fierceness of the bears.  Nicole Kidman is close to perfect as Mrs. Coulter, and young Dakota Blue Richards gives a respectable performance as Lyra.  And they avoid the potential trap of making the daemons overly cute.

But the movie is less than two hours long, and this forces a condensation of the story that loses much of its heart.  New characters are introduced so thickly that it’s hard to care much about any of them.  But more importantly, everything seems to fall into place for Lyra, without her doing much.  When she tells Pan that it’s been far harder than they expected, I didn’t really believe her. 

[I also have another complaint about the movie that’s something of a spoiler, so I’ll post it in the comments.]

Much of the attention the movie has gotten has been about the claim that the movie is an attempt to recruit kids to atheism, which Snopes classifies as essentially true.  I think that’s not quite fair — the producers are clearly mostly interested in selling tickets, and the philosophical issues in the book (which are pretty abstract in the first one) are pretty much erased from the movie.  Based on interviews that Pullman has given, it’s clear that he held his tongue about the changes they made to his story, in the hope that a successful movie would attract readers to the books.

The books have been generally labeled young adult fantasy, but I’d say they’re really meant for adults and fairly sophisticated teenagers.  The movie is rated PG-13 for "fantasy violence" and I’d say that it’s probably best for 10-13 year olds.  The violence is actually handled quite subtly — early on, it’s established that when people die, their daemons disappear in a swirl of golden dust, so in the battle scenes you know that each dazzling swirl is a death.  What I think makes it unsuitable for young children is the absolute unreliability of many adults, including parents.

This week’s book is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.  It’s gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews and deservingly so.  It’s funny, smart, educational (the footnotes provide a capsule review of 20th century Dominican history), profane, and tender.   

Ten years ago, my parents gave me as a Hanukkah present Diaz’s first book, Drown, a collection of short stories.  I know that I thought they were good, but I can’t quite remember anything that happened in any of them.  They were New Yorker-type short stories, albeit with a working-class Dominican flavor, full of what Michael Chabon describes in his afterward to Gentlemen of the Road* as "the fates of contemporary short-story characters– disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace."  The Publisher’s Weekly review of Drown quoted on the Amazon page refers to "Diaz’s restrained prose."

Well, Diaz’s prose in Oscar Wao is anything but restrained.  It gleefully jumps from English to Spanish and back in the course of a sentence, nimbly weaving in references to science fiction, comic books, and Oscar Wilde.  And his characters suffer very non-New Yorker-ish fates — torture, imprisonment, a suicide attempt, kidnappings.  And in spite of all that, it’s still a fun read, mostly due to that irrepressible narrative voice.

Is the book perfect?  No.  It doesn’t quite deliver as much as it promises (but it promises more than most).  I would have liked more emphasis on Oscar and his sister, and even their mother in the present day, and a little less on his mother as a young girl.  But I’d definitely recommend it.

* Gentlemen of the Road, on the other hand, was quite the disappointment.  I love the idea of Jews with Swords, but there’s nothing in the book that makes you know that the characters are Jewish other than Chabon’s statement that they are.  By contrast, in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, he really thought through what a mid-twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish culture would look like transplanted to Alaska.

This week we’ve got a guest reviewer for the Tuesday Book Review — my husband.  HarperCollins sent me a copy of Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence to review, but before I could get around to reading it, T. had borrowed it.  So I asked him if he wanted to write the review….

In honor of election day, this week’s book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai. 

Bai is (was?) a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and the book is based largely on his experiences covering the 2004 and 2006 campaigns.  Much of the book was vaguely familiar to me, but Bai provides more details on some topics, such as the origins of the Democracy Alliance (a group of very rich individuals who are making a concerted effort to build a progressive infrastructure).   He provides nice sketches of Markos (whom he describes as a natural entrepreneur who built Daily Kos into the leading Democratic political site almost by accident) and Jerome Armstrong (whom he describes as a jack of all trades who discovered his calling in campaigns).  He’s scathing about the bloggers at Firedoglake, and glowing about Gina Cooper.*  All this is very well written, although there’s so many characters that I started to lose track of them by the end.

But the meat of the book is Bai’s claim that Democrats don’t stand for anything in particular, other than being not-Bush.  And by "Democrats," he doesn’t just mean the presidential candidates, or the Congressional leadership, but the whole left-wing apparatus — bloggers, billionaires, think-tanks, etc.  And from where I sit, that’s just not true. There’s a bunch of organizations laying out progressive agendas. I think EPI is doing the best job of articulating the overall vision in their Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

Bai seems to dismiss all this as "same old New Deal."  As far as I can tell, his litmus test for something being a new vision is that it has to involve substantial change to Social Security.  If you’re not willing to slaughter the sacred cow, you must be trapped in old think. (At the same time, he seems to think that Mark Warner is a visionary, for reasons that are never quite articulated.) But Social Security isn’t really in all that bad shape. Yes, there’s a funding issue, but it could be resolved with relative small increases in the cap on taxes and the retirement age, and decreases in benefits.  (Medicare’s a whole ‘nother story.)  And Democrats and progressives acknowledge that, by and large.

More good discussion at TPMCafe.

*  I had never heard of Gina Cooper — she’s the person who took the lead on organizing the first YearlyKos.  I’m thrilled to hear that she’s getting some recognition, because from Bai’s description, she seems to have taken on the classical female role of doing the critical behind the scenes work while Markos was running around chatting up reporters. 

Based on a few posts that looked interesting from the TPM Cafe bookclub, I requested Daniel Brook’s The Trap.  I got it last week, and spent about an hour skimming it today, but couldn’t really get into it.  The online discussion is far more interesting.

Brook’s overall thesis is that the high cost of living in desirable urban areas, the cost of college and health care, and the very high salaries paid to workers in certain professions (big law, investment banking, management consulting), makes it harder for idealistic college grads to follow their dreams.  I think that’s probably true, but am not sure it’s the major crisis he portrays. 

Two quick points:

1)  As several of the commenters at TPM Cafe pointed out, Brook is wildly overstating the case when he suggests that the only alternatives are selling out and being a "saint" destined for poverty.  And by overstating the case, he actually makes it easier for people to sell out.  In reality, I know plenty of people who have darn good lives on public and nonprofit sector salaries.  By and large, they don’t have second homes and they don’t expect that their kids will make it through college without taking out student loans, but they’re not living on ramen noodles either.

2)  When I wrote about the cost of living last of week, the comments were running pretty strongly against the "just move" idea.  And I agree that you shouldn’t have to move time zones in order to make ends meet.  But I don’t have a lot of sympathy for recent college grads who feel like they’re entitled to live in hip urban neighborhoods and don’t want roommates.

On a related note, my team at work is hiring a Research Assistant.  I’m not sure exactly what they’re offering for salary — probably not enough to live in Dupont Circle, even with a roommate — but the benefits are excellent, they take work-life balance seriously, and it’s a terrific group of people. 

When I wrote about my criteria for keeping or discarding books, I said that one of the reasons that I keep books is to be able to lend them out.  This week’s book is one that I don’t think I’d ever have picked up if my father hadn’t said it was wonderful and then put it in my hands.  The book is Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulkes.  And I wouldn’t have picked it up because it is, as the subtitle says "A Novel of Love and War," and I’m not a huge fan of either romance novels or war stories.

I’m still not sure the book hangs together as a whole — the primary story from World War I is cut together with scenes from the life of the main character’s granddaughter, 60 years later, which exist mostly to let Faulkes make a point about how quickly forgotten the horrors of WWI were.  But the descriptions of trench warfare are both engrossing and horrific.   Faulkes shows soldiers seeing their friends killed, and having to keep doing the exact same things that led to their deaths, and doing it again and again and again for weeks or month on end (often with the rotting bodies still in view).

And, as Faulkes points out, the idea that the world managed to do it all over again just 20 years later is hard to believe.  Reading this book, I had some sympathy for Neville Chamberlain‘s position for the first time.