Book Review: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (2010) [*****] In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably tell you right up front that I pretty much think Robin Black hung the moon these days because, after meeting her very briefly in a book signing line at the Free Library where I heard her read from this collection recently, I contacted her (through Twitter, no less -- I have completely drunk the social media kool aid...), and she very, very generously (as though she had nothing else to do while on a busy book tour) put me in touch with the leader of her old writing group, of which I am now a very happy and grateful member. I'm pretty sure, though, that even if I were entirely objective, I would just love this collection of short stories. Black's writing is beautifully unadorned, without flourish; it doesn't show off, and it doesn't need to, because in not getting in the way (as I felt Mary Karr's lush metaphors did a bit in Lit, a memoir I otherwise loved), her language ends up being mesmerizing. It's as easy to get caught up in these stories as in a great novel, which is saying a lot coming from someone who used to hate short stories because I thought of them as "failed novels." I no longer feel that way about short stories in general, but I still think it's a very rare thing for a short story to capture a world as thoroughly, to realize a character as fully, as Black can in ten or twenty pages. She also has an uncanny ability to write about very peculiar characters and circumstances --- a father and his blind, college-aged daughter picking up her first seeing eye dog; a eerie, prim school girl at a hippy Quaker school who was kidnapped for ransom as a young child living in Italy and is now bent on revenge; a woman whose child is almost electrocuted by faulty wiring at almost the same moment that the woman's mentally ill father steps in front of a train -- and yet it all seems completely plausible, quotidian even. I think that is one of the things I like best about these stories, the way they play with the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" -- this is fiction that compellingly and convincingly draws us into the truth of the strangeness of life. What I love most about these stories, though, is the clear-eyed sympathy Black brings to her characters, for the most part unremarkable men and women in middle age or older, experiencing losses or transitions -- there is a lot of death, divorce, infidelity, and illness in the worlds of these stories. In many cases it would have been easy to cast villains or victims -- especially victims -- but Black is both unblinking and kind, and thus creates characters who are nuanced and real. Black helps us know not only them, but ourselves through them. This is the quality I love most in my very favorite writer of all time, George Eliot, and I have often said that if I am to be judged for my own foibles and self-delusions, I hope it will be by someone as clear-eyed and sympathetic as Eliot. I would now gladly add Robin Black to my jury pool.

Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)[*****].  This seems to be the phase of my life when I read a lot of great books I should have read a long time ago.  I've known that Tim O'Brien is a great writer I ought to read, but sort of like my resistance to reading Mary Karr (yesterday's review), reading about Vietnam is just never what's calling me in the moment, and I'm a pretty capricious reader.  Again, Julie was the impetus to read The Things They Carried -- she teaches this book (she got a free classroom set when it was the One Book, One Philadelphia selection a couple of years ago) and recently was invited to hear O'Brien speak.  Her rave review is not overstated -- I too just loved this book.  It's categorized as fiction, and I suppose can best be described as a set of related short stories, but I'm really intrigued by the genre, which is really a blend of memoir and fiction, short story and essay.  Many of the characters in the stories are real people, including the men O'Brien served with, and Tim O'Brien himself.  O'Brien was a recent college graduate with a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard when he was drafted, and he tells in a very moving story about his decision to serve rather than to flee to Canada, which was his first impulse.  He concludes that it was a failure of courage on his part, and simple fear of embarrassment and shame, that drove him to Vietnam rather than Canada.  In the title story, he tells, literally, of the things he and his buddies carried -- first the literal things they carried on their backs, how much they weighed, what they were for, what it felt like to carry them -- and then the more metaphorical things they carried, and what that felt like -- and his writing -- the cadence, the images, the pace -- is just exquisite.  His experiences in Vietnam have clearly marked him so deeply that he has spent the rest of his career writing about them -- the war is pretty much all he writes about, I think -- and this book is as much about Tim O'Brien the writer as it is about the war and Tim O'Brien the soldier..  As a character in the book, Tim O'Brien the writer very explicitly grapples with what it means to tell the truth about war, and whether there even is such a thing as truth when it comes to war, but at the very least, he concludes that to tell the truth, he has to make stuff up.  He tells many compelling stories, and then he retells them, and then he tells you they are true, and then he tells you they are entirely all made up, and then he tells you what really happened, and then he tells you that's all made up too, and then he insists that nonetheless, it's all true.  It reminds me a lot of how thoughtful people read Scripture, and I suppose that's not an accident, though O'Brien does not appear to be a person of faith.  Nonetheless, he seems to be seeking some sort of redemption through his story-telling and his meta-story-telling; and while I suspect he might argue there is no redemption, this gorgeous and provocative book is perhaps as close as it gets.

Book Review: Lit by Mary Karr

Mary Karr, Lit (2009) [*****].  I know I should read Mary Karr's first two memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry, as she has been credited with practically singe-handedly sparking the memoir madness of the past couple decades, but the brutal subject matter -- parental alcoholism and psychosis, childhood abuse and neglect, adolescent promiscuity and drug abuse -- have just never called me at the moment when I am thinking, "What shall I read next?"  Julie, however, has read all of Mary Karr, along with the whole wretched-childhood genre she pioneered -- what we call the "Bastard Out Of" series, after Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (so Liar's Club is Bastard out of Texas, and Push is Bastard Out of Harlem, etc.).  Julie recently read Lit, and insisted that I really had to read it, she loved it so much.  And I'm very glad I did -- it is beautiful and very compelling -- though I didn't love it quite as much as Julie.  Lit is the story of Mary Karr's adulthood, in which she writes poetry, marries a poet, becomes a mother, drinks an astonishing amount of alcohol, attempts suicide, spends some time in a mental hospital, gets sober, divorces her husband, converts to Catholicism, and becomes a successful poet and memoirist.  Her story-telling is funny and thoughtful -- this is a very fast and engaging read.  And I know I should say that it is beautifully written, luminous even, and it is!  But....  I will admit there were times when I grew weary of yet another simile or metaphor.  And don't get me wrong - every one of them was fresh! original! illuminating! But every other sentence, really?  It's not an accident that the first half of the book is more lush with metaphorical language than the second half, which is much more sober.  I get what she's doing, and she's really good -- I'm eager to read her poetry, in fact -- but sometimes it just felt like too much, distracting even.  My only other criticism is that Karr strikes me as a bit falsely modest at times -- it was easy to believe, as she told it, that her career as a poet suffered terribly from her extreme alcoholism, but then when fellowships and book contracts and teaching offers kept falling in her lap, it seemed possibly she had been a bit disingenuous about what a hit her writing had taken. These are minor quibbles, though, in an otherwise fine memoir that does a lot of really hard things well:  Karr convinces us that she really can love and forgive her totally crazy and self-absorbed mother without seeming like a martyr; she tells her side of the story of her pretty unbearable marriage without bitterness and with, what seems to me, a great deal of genuine generosity to her ex-husband; she acknowledges the pain she inflicted on her son with open-eyed clarity, but without narcissistic self-recrimination and self-pity; and the story of her conversion from atheism to Catholicism is moving and convincing and mercifully lacking in evangelism. 

Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)[*****] I've never before read any fiction by Virginia Woolf, though I read and loved A Room of One's Own as a teenager, and I read about VW many years ago in Nigel Nicholson's biography Portrait of a Marriage about his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, in which Virginia Woolf plays a role as one of Vita's many lovers (I loved that book too).  But I'd always been a little afraid of actually reading Virginia Woolf, cliche as that may be.  Recently a friend spoke highly of The Hours by Michael Cunningham, but I thought I should read Mrs. Dalloway first.  I'm so glad I did.  I just loved this book so much.  Mrs. Dalloway takes place in one day, throughout which Big Ben marks the passing hours while Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party.  The narrative is stream-of-consciousness, tracking the interior lives of not just Clarissa, but also of all the people with whom she comes in contact throughout the day.  The point of view is constantly changing, like a baton that gets passed from character to character.  So Mrs. Dalloway is walking through the park, and we are hearing the thoughts in her head about her marriage and her former lover who has just returned from India; she passes a young couple sitting on the park bench, and suddenly we are in their heads. Sometimes it took me half a paragraph to realize that the point-of-view had shifted.  Everything is very interior -- the thoughts, memories, revelations of the various characters, major and minor.  One of the reasons I loved Mrs. Dalloway is that its stream-of-consciousness interiority mirrored very much what it feels like to be inside my head sometimes.  All of the stories woven throughout the day converge at Clarissa's party that evening, a remarkably choreographed scene that is both biting and humorous in its social commentary.  Mrs. Dalloway is about many things -- love, marriage, war, mental illness, social class -- but I think I loved it especially because it is so much about youth and middle age and especially what it means to look back on youth -- ones own and ones children's -- from the vantage point of middle age.  Clarissa; her former lover, the adventurous philanderer Peter Walsh; and her former passionate friend, Sally Seton, are brought together for the first time in years, and are all confronted with the memories of what they imagined their lives would be, and with the choices that have brought them to their lives as they actually are.  I could identify so much with  the sense of confusion they all feel at finding themselves and each with such different lives than they had imagined, but also with the sense of passion and possibility they still feel in their middle age.  I think it is just as well that I am only now finding Virginia Woolf's fiction, because all of that would have been lost on me a couple of decades ago.  Now I am intrigued not only to read more of her fiction, but her letters and diaries as well.  She seems to have lived quite a remarkable life.

Book Review: The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver (2009) (*****). Taking a page out of Gordon’s book, I gave this to Julie so that I could read it. I justlove Barbara Kingsolver’s stories. This one actually took me about one hundred pages to really get hooked – a day on jury duty did the trick (law school and five miserable years practicing law is a high price to pay to never again get chosen for a jury, but it works; on top of that, I actually loved law school, so I guess the get-out-of-jury-duty-free-and-read-a-book-all-day card is really a bonus, not consolation). The Lacuna is structured as a collection of diaries, letters, newspaper articles and congressional testimony, assembled by Violet Brown, the secretary of Harrison Shepherd, a popular writer of romantic adventure novels. Shepherd is the product of an ill-fated marriage between an American government bureaucrat and a Mexican woman who leaves her husband and returns with the twelve-year-old Harrison to Mexico, in the futile search for a wealthy man to marry and keep her. While living on the hacienda of a rich oil man, and without any school to attend, Harrison swims in the ocean, reads adventure stories, learns to cook from the kind Mexican chef, and writes everything down in the little account book he steals from the housekeeper. From the chef he learns a technique for making perfect pan dulce with European white flour, a skill that turns out to be similar to mixing plaster, which lands the young Shepherd a job with the muralist Diego Rivera. Shepherd eventually joins the staff at the Rivera-Kahlo household, first as a cook and later as a typist. When Lev Trotsky, in exile and fleeing Stalin’s assassins, joins the household, Shepherd becomes his typist. I wonder if this section of the novel would have been quite as intriguing if I hadn’t recently read a biography of Freda Kahlo; at any rate, I’ve always suspected I was born in the wrong decade of the twentieth century, and should have been a bohemian communist, not a middle class housewife. At any rate, I loved the quiet, quotidian portraits of these larger-than-life figures, as seen through the eyes of the understated Shepherd (even while I suspect that the portrait of Trotsky might be a bit overly-sympathetic -- I might have to read one of the new biographies of Trotsky soon). When Trotsky is assassinated, a deeply traumatized Shepherd returns to war-time America, settling in Asheville, North Carolina, where lives a largely reclusive life, forever bemused by his own wild success as a popular novelist. That success turns sharply sour when Shepherd is brought under the surreal scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which ruins his life and career on account of his former associations with Rivera, Kahlo and Trotsky. Among the intriguing questions The Lacuna asks is whether and how is it possible to capture a life in words, and how differently it gets captured, depending on ones perspective. The Lacuna is the intriguing story of a life, one lived in the shadow of the epic political drama of the twentieth century. But it is a life filtered through multiple lenses, unintentionally told, in which, as the title suggests, what is left out – the missing pieces – are likely as important as what is left in. The relationship among words, silence, story and truth are intriguing to me.

Book Review: Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia, Julie Powell (2005) [***+] This book has been following me around for awhile. A year and a half ago, when I was looking for decorating inspiration for our newly renovated basement, I found a tiny piece of a robin's egg shell and thought, "This is it!" I set it on a shelf, and when I returned to match paint swatches, I realized the egg shell was exactly the same color as the book it was sitting by -- Julie and Julia. The cover art then inspired the entire decorating scheme of my basement ... but still I didn't read the book, even though Julie (my Julie) had liked it and thought I would too. Then this summer, we saw the movie with our friends Suzanne and Dan, and Suzanne and I were both charmed and inspired. In September we made Beouf Bourguignon for my birthday, and it really is one of the best things I've ever eaten. Suzanne and I have been cooking together monthly ever since. Still, I was not inspired to read the book. A couple of weeks ago, we watched the movie again with Trixie, who loves to cook, and for Christmas Julie (my Julie) got me both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For Christmas dinner Trixie and I made cream puffs and a pear tart. Yum. When we packed for Ohio, Julie tucked Julie and Julia into the book bag, thinking Trixie might like to read it, but Trix was obsessed with her new Kindle. I thought about picking it up, but started reading the new Barbara Kingsolver book instead. Then a few days ago, while on a date at a bookstore with Julie (my Julie), I started reading Julie Powell's new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, and just the first chapter was like watching a train wreck. It was awful, just like a train wreck, and I had to read it, just like a train wreck. But I was restrained, and did not buy the second book in hardcover, and decided instead to read Julie and Julia. Which I did in just a couple of days, and even though I found Julie Powell insufferably self-absorbed and irritating, I have to admit that I laughed out loud often and thoroughly enjoyed myself. You probably know by now that Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell's Julie/Julia Project, in which she cooked her way through the 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days in a tiny apartment kitchen in Long Island City, and also wrote a blog about it. Many of my friends have found her self-deprecating humor and turning-thirty angst charming and spot-on; I did not particularly. Maybe I've become hopelessly middle-aged and humorlessly maternal, but I just wanted to tell her to quit drinking so much and to clean her house. Also, my Julie clearly was remembering the movie rather than the book when she suggested that Trixie might want to read the book: Amy Adams as Julie Powell is pert and sweet and lovable; Julie Powell as Julie Powell is foul-mouthed and obsessed with her friends' sex lives -- apparently because her own is not much to write home about. Which perhaps explains the train-wreck in the new book. And yes, I probably will read it -- but in paper back, and on the beach. Now I'm off to finish Barbara Kingsolver.

Book Review: Becoming Native to this Place by Wes Jackson

Becoming Native to this Place, Wes Jackson (1994)(*****). I read this little book in one day on the beach in Ocean City this past July or August; it’s short (118 pages) but dense, and I felt like I needed to reread it before I could adequately review it. But then I didn’t reread it, and the four or five months between reading and review will only serve to make my review even less adequate, I’m sure. Which is a shame, because I really loved this book a lot. Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, argues that “We are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability in any area unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape.” (Prologue, p. 3) Jackson argues that if we are to become truly sustainable – meaning that we create lifestyles in which the outputs of our consumption do not destroy us and the world – we must make community (i.e. human-scale communities, not institutional/bureaucratic-scale communities) our organizing principle, and we must develop a science of sustainability with nature as the measure. He argues that much of the “prosperity” of the last several centuries has been fueled – literally – by an extractive economy based on fossil fuels that allows us to live far from the sources of our energy, but at devastating cost to our world. He calls, along with Wendell Berry (to whom the book is dedicated) for a resettling of the nation, a “homecoming” of sorts, in sustainable communities. This, he protests, is not “mere nostalgia. To resettle the country-side is a practical necessity for everyone, including people who continue to live in cities. To gather dispersed sunlight in the form of chemical energy in a fossil-free world will require a sufficiency of people spread across our broad landscape.” (Prologue, p. 4) His vision for such a new pioneer movement is unsentimental, politically astute, and – to this country girl, at least – very appealing.

Book Review: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001)[*****].  I heard Andrew Solomon speaking about depression recently on the NPR radio program Speaking of Faith, and he struck me as thoughtful and eloquent, so I got his book.  I was not disappointed.  Broken into twelve chapters -- Depression, Breakdowns, Treatments, Alternatives, Populations, Addiction, Suicide, History, Poverty, Politics, Evolution and Hope -- this book lays out just about everything one could ever want to know about depression.  Each chapter weaves careful research, moving yet unsentimental stories from Solomon's interviews and correspondence with people who suffer from depression, as well as many candid and compelling stories of Solomon's own battles with depression.   I especially appreciated the chapter on poverty, and was easily persuaded that basic, and often highly treatable, depression is both a cause and an effect of poverty, and that any effort to end poverty must include aggressive mental health outreach.  I was also very moved by the many personal stories, in particular in the first three chapters.  I was heartened to learn of pretty effective treatments now available, including several "alternative" treatments that Solomon investigates with exceptional openness.  Some of the science felt a tiny bit above my head, and the history chapter dragged a little bit for me, but overall The Noonday Demon is very nicely written and quite accessible.   Anyone who suffers from depression, or loves someone who does -- which includes most of us -- will find this eye-opening and compelling.

An Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan

In the fall of 2008 I began reading Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish, and was so taken with him that I immediately bought and read his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future of the Right, which I reviewed here.  At the time I also sent Sullivan an email detailing my delight in, and my critique of, the book.  The man receives hundreds if not thousands of emails a day; I'm not at all surprised that I never heard back from him.  But an interesting post and thread of comments over at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog got me thinking about this again, and I dug up my letter and decided to publish it here.  

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Dear Andrew:

I'm a fairly new reader of your blog, and a huge fan.  As a life-long liberal who sometimes questions whether liberalism (at least ideological, Democratic Party style liberalism) accurately describes what I believe, I hoped your book The Conservative Soul would help me understand another perspective better.  I just finished it, and it very much has.  It is smart, beautifully written, and very clear even for someone like me who is not at all well-versed in political philosophy.  As a Christian, I find your explication of fundamentalism especially insightful, and your description of the experience of the Catholic Mass quite moving.  Your lyrical description of the conservative temperament as being rooted in loss struck a chord, describing quite well myself and many other liberals I know (indeed, one of my critiques of your book is that I am not at all convinced a conservative political philosophy as you later describe it necessarily flows from such a temperament).  

The first few pages of the book (which I thought were so lovely, I had to read them out loud to my partner Julie) got me thinking about what is at the core of a liberal temperament.  If conservatism is rooted in loss, I would say liberalism is rooted in abundance, and in a sense of satiety in the face of abundance that leads to an impulse toward hospitality.  It's the satisfied feeling you have when you get home from the market, and the larder is full, and you just want to cook something and have folks over for a meal.  And if conservatism suggests (quite correctly, I think) that we are ultimately all alone and unknowable to one another, then liberalism suggests that in our isolation, we nonetheless have no choice but to reach out to one another. We are unknowable to one another, but we are also unknowable to ourselves without each other.  Being left alone, I would argue, is not all we need to be free.

So, thank you for this lovely and thoughtful book.  Not surprisingly, I have some questions.  I'm not interested necessarily in being convinced or converted, merely in understanding.  I also recognize that you must get scads of emails every day, and the chances of your even reading this one, much less having time to answer my questions, is slim.  Still, it has been a useful exercise for me to write this all down.  Here are my main questions/critiques:

1.  You argue, correctly I believe, that maintaining a monopoly on force and securing the physical safety of its citizens is the first and most fundamental role of government:  "Without such security, it is impossible to have the peace necessary to cultivate virtue, apart from the virtue of courage.  Without security, we are all forced to bludgeon human personality into the uniform mold of physical strength or cunning.  Without security, we cannot even afford the luxury of questioning whether we need security.  We are too busy trying to stay alive and intact."  (pp 232-33)  My experience of working with youth in the ghetto in Philadelphia is that the government is utterly failing in this fundamental role.  In my experience, "law and order" conservatives 1) blame this lawlessness on the criminals and thugs, and 2) push for more cops, more guns, stricter laws, fiercer punishments and more prisons.  Perhaps the greatest insight I gained reading your book was that both of these responses are not conservative ones.  If THE first and most fundamental role of government is to gain an effective monopoly on violence in order to secure the safety of its citizens precisely because some people are bad and will behave badly if left alone -- well then, the fact that some people really are bad and really do behave badly cannot become the excuse for the failure of government to secure the safety of large swaths of our cities. Moreover, to propose more cops, more guns, stricter laws, fiercer punishments and more prisons -- when none of those things is currently working -- seems to me the sort of thing conservatives love to accuse liberals of -- throwing more money at the same failed schemes with no accountability.  

Poverty in this country is not primarily an issue of material lack -- most poor people in this country are not starving, are not freezing, are not without basic material resources.  Materially speaking, most poverty in this country looks like vast wealth to the majority of the world's poor.  Rather, poverty in this country is more a poverty of opportunity, beginning with a fundamental poverty of basic safety and security.  Many of the children I have worked with have decent enough homes, enough to eat, clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet; what they don't have is any sense of being part of civil society, any sense that there is something more powerful than the law of the street, which begins and ends with physical strength, cunning, and courage.  They don't even question whether something else could or should exist -- as you put it, they don't have the luxury of questioning whether they need security, because they are just trying to keep themselves alive according to the rules as they know them.  This lack of security which so circumscribes their lives is not first and foremost a failure of culture or of parenting (although their plight may also stem from those failures), but a massive failure on the part of government to do its most fundamental job in any sort of meaningful way.  It seems to me that a truly conservative response would be to seek any and all possible means of securing the safety of all, strict accountability for those charged with getting the job done, and the jettisoning of all schemes that don't work (starting, I would suggest, with the "war on drugs.")   You say that enduring a dictatorship is "life lived as trauma," (p235), and I would argue that life lived in America's ghettos is likewise life lived as trauma -- that's exactly how these kids experience it.

2.  The necessity of government in securing our physical safety is obvious to me, but I don't understand why securing personal property and wealth ought necessarily to be an end of a limited government.  Your conservative philosophy, as I understand it, does not recognize a God-given or "natural" right to private property.  Indeed, it seems to me that if we accept the government's monopoly on coercive violence, there is no "right" to private property outside of the government's ability to enforce that "right."  The conservative notion that government should "leave us alone" to "do what we want" with our property seems to me to miss the fact that any government with a monopoly on coercive violence is always exerting its power over our property, which is, after all, only "our" property because the government agrees that it is and is willing to enforce it.  But under a limited government which, you argue, should be concerned with few and only the most fundamental of ends, why should protecting your property and wealth necessarily be among them?  Owning property is not intrinsic to being human, and I would argue that after a fairly limited baseline of basic needs is secured, there is no positive correlation whatsoever between owning property and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  So why should the government not redistribute your property as a means to ends which might be more fundamental to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  For example, I would argue that there is a far stronger correlation between life/liberty/the pursuit of happiness and one's health than there is with one's property.  Similarly, I would argue that a life of the mind -- supported by a sound education -- is also more fundamental to those pursuits.  So why shouldn't the government use its power over your property to secure universal and effective health care and education, rather than using its power over your property to secure it merely for your personal use?

3.  Somewhat remarkably, in my estimation, you utterly fail to address our government's most fundamental failure to secure its citizens' freedom to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and then to leave them alone except in the most limited ways absolutely necessary for the common good.  That most fundamental failure is NOT the New Deal, or progressive taxation, or any other liberal scheme; rather, that failure is, of course, slavery and its institutionalized legacy which was, inarguably, actively enforced by our government through its monopoly on coercive violence until just a couple of generations ago.  The failure of conservatism to adequately address slavery and its legacy is so baffling to me precisely because everything about slavery and institutionalized racism is so antithetical to conservatism, at least as you describe it.  I'm very open to the possibility that liberals have not come up with adequate ways of addressing this legacy, even open to the possibility that many liberal policies have been well-meaning but misguided and have done as much harm as good.  But the conservative response -- which, it seems to me, boils down to deep denial masquerading as "color blindness" -- is just, well, baffling.  The conservative philosophy of limited government, the only real ends of which are to secure our freedom and liberty and then leave us alone -- that's lovely, but it does not seem to me to be rooted in any sort of reality for African Americans.  The government not only did not secure the safety, liberty and freedom of African Americans and then leave them alone, but in fact it actively used its monopoly on coercive violence to enslave African Americans for a century, and then after emancipation to effectively enslave them for another century.  As I understand your version of conservatism, this is a profoundly un-conservative history.  But in the face of this reality, to call the modern conservative response -- or rather non-response -- merely naive seems way too charitable.  Do conservatives really believe that every generation we simply wipe the slate clean when it comes to freedom and opportunity?  Do conservatives really believe that it is primarily the arguably misguided efforts of liberals to address this legacy, and not the legacy itself, that is the primary problem when it comes to race in this country?  Again, I am quite willing to put all the liberal policies -- affirmative action, welfare, AFDC, etc. etc. -- on the table in any honest effort to unstitch this legacy from the very fabric of our government and society.  But conservative denial that the legacy of slavery and institutional racism have any relevance today -- I just don't get it.

Take good care, Andrew.  You're a good egg.

Best,

Marta

Book Review: Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer (2006)[****].  Trixie (12 years old, 6th grade) loved this story, and while I don't often read her books, this one seemed kind of fascinating and I was looking for a quick, easy read.  As it turns out, Life As We Knew It was all three.  Through her diary, sixteen year old Miranda tells the story of her family's survival in the aftermath of catastrophic natural disasters when an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it out of its orbit.  That's basically it:  lots of bad things happen to the world, and MIranda matures as she helps her family survive (barely) over the course of a long, cold, hungry winter.  While life gets pretty bleak for awhile, the true violence and depravity that would probably accompany such a catastrophe is toned down enough to make this appropriate for kids. Probably not the sort of book that most of you will put on your must-read list, but if you have avid tween or young teen readers in your life, they might like this.

What Eliot Spitzer and I Have in Common: A Review of George Eliot's Adam Bede

Adam Bede, George Eliot (1859)[*****].  I have been unsuccessfully mulling for several days how to review in one paragraph Adam Bede -- one of my favorite books, and my introduction to George Eliot some twenty-five years ago in Gordon's* Intro to Lit.  Today I took a break in the middle of my day -- a day of feeding my family, pleasant housework, hiking in the woods along a burbling creek, preparing an asparagus bed in the garden, commiserating with a neighbor about "young people these days"  -- to read the feature story in the most recent Newsweek entitled "The Confessions of Eliot Spitzer."  The subtitle is "How Could I?" -- and of course, everyone has a theory, none of them particularly satisfying or believable.  This particular story is supposed to be sympathetic to Spitzer, who is apparently trying to make some sort of a come-back or something, but it doesn't succeed very well.  And then it came to me:  Eliot Spitzer needs George Eliot!  Only she could make us understand "how he could;" only she could unblinkingly yet sympathetically tell us the truth about "how he could," pulling no punches while at the same time refraining from judgement and righteousness.  Her treatment of Arthur Donnithorne was the thing that struck me most deeply the first time I read Adam Bede, and was the only thing I remembered -- the rest (thanks to my sieve-like memory) was all new.  But I feel both certain (and chagrined) that my earnest, feminist, nineteen year-old self was humorless and critical of the misogynist Bartle Massey, who only delighted me this time around (and who is most certainly gay, yes? And in love with Adam, right?) And I don't recall if I adored Mrs. Poyser so much the first time I read Adam Bede -- somehow I think I was probably not nearly as taken with her, and by her tidy home and sparkling, well-run dairy.  I doubt that I appreciated then how much Eliot makes of such a small, quiet world -- how rich and full and satisfying she paints the work and the friendship of the Poysers and the Bedes.  I feel quite certain that twenty-five years ago, I entirely missed the discussion in the Poyser kitchen "on the secrets of good brewing, the folly of stinginess in 'hopping,' and the doubtful economy of a farmer's making his own malt" -- but I had to read it out loud to Julie this time (who, by the way, was in the same Intro to Lit with Gordon, though we barely new each other yet), and we both smiled knowingly.  People often don't understand my life, but reading Adam Bede was like every pleasant, contented thing about it rolled into one gorgeous story.  I will admit, I don't think Eliot does drama as well as she does quotidian -- the thunderstorm raging when Dorothea and Will finally declare their love in Middlemarch inappropriately cracked me up, and a few of the Hetty Sorel scenes in Adam Bede felt a little over-wrought as well.  And the epilogue felt awfully neat, even if it made me cry (and help me forgive Jo Rawlings). But still and all ... big happy sigh.

*Gordon was my professor at Earlham College, and continues to be a mentor and friend.  I write all my reviews first for his email book review group, which he very graciously allowed me to crash about a year and a half ago.

Book Review: 4 Weeks to a Better-Behaved Child

4 Weeks to a Better-Behaved Child, Cristine Chandler, Ph.D. with Laura McGrath (2004)(*****)

For the past several months life with Micah has been extremely difficult. Winter is always hard, for him and for me -- Micah is a boy whose spirit can't be contained very well within four walls, and I suffer at least mild depression most winters. This means that life is generally harder for our family in the winter (Trixie and Julie fare better than me and Micah, but it's not their best season either). But this winter it got completely out of control. Although Micah was doing very well at school and with friends, he had become a monster at home, flying into a rage at the drop of a hat, screaming, hitting, throwing things. Anything at all could provoke a rage: if I gave him the wrong fork at breakfast, or if the shirt he wears every week suddenly felt "arm-pitty," or if I told him to turn off the TV, or do his homework, or get his shoes on. When he wasn't raging, he was whining, whimpering, bargaining -- and if that didn't work, then he would rage.

"No Micah, you can't have chocolate chips for an after school snack; you didn't even eat your lunch!"

"But listen, listen, I have good reasons, LISTEN!" he would demand, as I tried to stick to my guns. "YOU'RE TALKING OVER ME! You have to listen to my reasons!" (Thankyouverymuch, Responsive Classroom....) But when the whining and bargaining didn't change my mind, the rage was inevitable: his eyes would scan the room for something to throw -- my cookbook, a dining room chair, a shoe. I would inevitably explode, running around trying to keep things from being broken, yelling about how sick I am of this behavior, IT HAS TO STOP!

But I didn't know how to make it stop. Everything I know and believe about parenting -- about setting limits, about being cool and calm and consistent -- it all just seemed to escape me. I had successfully pulled myself out of a pretty significant depression last fall, and had established routines and disciplines at home that have made life feel much more calm and satisfying, but I was still at my wits' end with Micah. Micah has a fine-tuned social and emotional intelligence, so he can read a situation extremely well, and play it to best effect. Against my better judgment and all my best theories of parenting, I was letting him play me -- or, as we've come to describe it, I was feeding the Micah Monster. However you want to look at it, Micah was totally running the show, and our family life was becoming pretty unbearable, fraught as it was at every moment with the specter of one of his violent and destructive outbursts.

Now I know it might sound like I'm blaming Micah, but I'm not. He was doing what is perfectly reasonable for a kid with his particular sensitivities, temperament and intelligence to do to get attention and to get his way. The blame lies entirely with me (well, with me and Julie -- we are very much co-parents and a team, but I can only tell you my story, not hers). I was not only letting this happen, but I was actually feeding his behavior: I was nagging, yelling, giving multiple warnings and threats that I would not follow through on. I was getting angry and engaging in his tantrums out of anger, and then feeling remorseful and comforting Micah with affection and attention. I was coming up with systems of earning privileges and consequences for misbehavior that I could not keep track of and therefore wasn't being consistent with.

And the thing is, Micah was miserable too. Often his rages were cool and deliberate, but sometimes he seemed hysterical and even frightened by himself.  Micah didn't like his rages any better than the rest of us, but like me, he just didn't know how to get on top of them.  He was often remorseful afterward, and would apologize without being asked.

At some point I realized that if the little boy Micah is raging against me now, then the grown-up Micah is likely going to rage against other women later. I really felt that I had to help Micah get his rages under control not just for our family, now, but for his own family that he will create some day, with some other woman, when he is grown.  I needed to do something for my daughter-in-law as much as for myself.

Which brings me to 4 WEeks to a Better-Behaved Child. Let me tell you first, that I never thought I would be reading another parenting book, especially not one with such a cheesy title. On the whole, I hate parenting books -- everyone has an opinion, and they all contradict each other, just feeding the useless, stupid, idiotic mommy-wars: 

"Your child will suffer life-long sleep issues if you don't train him how to comfort himself to sleep by the time he's three months!" 

"No, no, your child will suffer life-long attachment issues if you don't co-sleep and nurse on demand until he naturally weans, even if that's five years old!" 

"Sticker charts! Time out! Carrot and stick!" 

"No, no, permissiveness isn't the problem, it's just the fear of permissiveness. If you just talk to your kids like people, they'll be fine!"

Blah blah blah. I've watched for over ten years now while all these so-called experts fan the flames of righteousness on the one hand (and there's nothing like the righteousness of a new mom, let me tell you, and yes, I do speak from experience), while paradoxically totally undermining confidence (because there's also nothing like the vulnerability of a new mom ... I sometimes think that righteousness and vulnerability are the two most potent new-mom hormones, and that they have some weird multiplying effect on each other). As a result, I'm suspect of parenting books in general, and I'm especially suspect of books with titles like 4 Weeks to a Better-Behaved Child, falling, as I do, more on the attachment parenting/gentle discipline end of the parenting philosophy spectrum.

So I never would have thought to read this book if my beloved and trusted therapist hadn't recommended it to me. Lisa has been my therapist, on and off, for over ten years. She's a lesbian, a mom, a person of faith, and for over ten years, when I'm anxious or depressed because I'm miserable in a job, or having multiple miscarriages, or if I'm perimenopausal, or my church is falling apart around me, or or or ... then I call Lisa, and even though her message says she's not taking new clients, she's always willing to seem e.  And she patiently tells me things that I pretty much already know, but still need to hear periodically from a dispassionate yet trusted person outside the circle of the rest of my life: take naps; be kind to yourself; let yourself cry; get exercise; breath; pray; be a big girl and ask for what you need. She's always right, and I almost always love her for that. Sometimes in the moment I hate her, because while she's always gentle and kind, she never pulls any punches. Last fall, when I started seeing her again, she was insisting that I need to do a better job of self-care, and was helping me brainstorm some systems to get me into better self-care habits. I was resisting, not my need for better self-care, but my ability to actually follow through: "But Lisa, I'm great at setting up these systems, but I'm just terrible at following through. I just don't know if I can do it consistently." She looked at me like a mother might look at a whining teenager (she's not old enough to be my mother, but she is enough older than I am to pull off that look) and asked, quite bluntly, and with just a tiny bit of pique in her voice, "How do you get your kids to school every morning?" I felt a bit peevish at that moment, but of course she was right.

Last time I went to see Lisa, about a month ago, I decided to talk about Micah.  While everything else in my life had fallen into a pretty nice place, Micah's behavior seemed like the one thing I just couldn't get on top of.  I described Micah at length, all the wonderful things, all the hard things.  I explained to Lisa what was going on, answered her thoughtful questions, and shared the one thing I felt I was doing right, the one thing that I thought was helping:  "I've told Micah that when he's in the middle of a rage, and he feels like throwing something, he can come and ask for a hug instead.  That seems to really help him calm down.  Sometimes it's hard for me to give him the hug, because I'm often feeling really angry or upset by his raging, but it's the one thing that seems to help cut the rage short."  

Lisa startled me with her response:  "That's exactly wrong.  Micah needs to learn how to control himself before he starts to rage.  That's something only he can do himself, you can't do that for him.  By hugging him in the middle of the rage, you're rewarding his lack of control in the first place."  This was one of those moments that I hated Lisa.  How can hugging your child be wrong?  That was the one thing I felt like I was doing right!  

"And you shouldn't give him a hug if you don't feel like hugging him.  If you are angry and upset, especially with all your own tactile sensitivity issues, you need to take care of yourself, and he needs to respect that," she continued.

"But sometimes he seems so frantic, he really needs me!"  

But Lisa would not back down.  "It's always hard to move on to the next stage of independence."  Now I really hated her.  I speculated (silently of course) that her boys were probably really easy, like Trixie, and that parents with easy kids like Trixie can afford to be smug (like I used to be, I'll admit).  Hmmph.  But after more than a decade of Lisa's kind but firm truth-telling, I suspected that she was probably telling me the truth once again.  

As we neared the end of our session, Lisa recommended Cristine Chandler's book, which I found on Amazon.  Chandler was a family therapist who practiced in Philadelphia for many years, and she and Lisa knew each other, whether as colleagues or friends or both, I'm not sure.  Lisa used Chandler's methods with her own now-grown boys (you know, the ones who would not last a moment, I'm sure, in a temperamental smack-down with my Micah!)  As Lisa described a little bit some of Chandler's techniques, I was dubious.  I shared with her, quite earnestly, that I'm not a big fan of behavioral modification methods of discipline, because it seems to me that children need to learn the intrinsic rewards of good behavior.  It is clearly a sign of Lisa's consummate professionalism that she listened to me say this with a straight face, and refrained from asking, "So, how's that working out for you?" Instead she pointed out that many things we need children to do -- getting their shoes on in the morning, for example, so that we're not late for school -- do not really have intrinsic rewards for the children, and that there is nothing wrong with children earning privileges and learning good habits at the same time.  In my middle age, I'm actually coming to believe that much of life's happiness stems from basic good habits, and that good habits really can be learned, so Lisa's explanation made good enough sense to me.  I promptly ordered and read the book.

One of the many things I like about this book is that it is short, straight-forward, easy-to-read, yet still lays a theoretical foundation for the techniques that follow (I always like a little theory, sort of like a three year old who is always asking "WHY?").  That foundation begins with a discussion of anger, which Chandler calls "one of the most common pitfalls of parenting."(p. 11)  (check!)  According the Chandler, "The most serious negative outcome of anger is that it undermines a most critical lesson that parents must teach their children: how to manage their own emotions."  (pp. 11-12)  She outlines the four effects of anger:  1) Anger begets anger; 2) Anger impairs the ability to process information and think logically; 3) Parents' anger gives attention to children for misbehaving; and 4) Anger makes parents feel bad.  (p. 17) (check! check! check! check!)  So the first order of business is establishing a system of discipline that a parent can manage without anger.  So far, this made perfect sense to me: I was doing all the angry things she described, with all the bad results she predicted.  And I hated feeling so angry all the time, and so out of control.  

The next chapter discusses consequences as the foundation for discipline:

• "If-then thinking provides children with the rational basis for understanding the consequences of their actions...."  a parents' "first goal is to help children understand the connection between their own behavior and the consequences that result from it." (pp 24-25)
• "Consistent, clear, contingent consequences ... provide the framework for behaving with intention." (p. 24)
• "In disciplining children, the most powerful consequence parents can use to influence their children's behavior is the way in which the parents give or withdraw their attention." (p. 39)

All of this also made sense.  I've always believed in natural or logical consequences (as opposed to arbitrary punishment), although being clear and consistent has often been my downfall, especially when my own life is feeling out of control (as it did last fall, and for much of the previous year and a half).  I also understand that my kids seek my attention above just about anything else, and that negative attention is better than no attention at all.  I can see that so clearly in the endless cycles of anger and rage with Micah, and even in the less fraught cycles of nagging and frustration with Trixie.

The next chapter is basically Behaviorism 101.  And I'll admit that this is where I got the most nervous, because the very very little that I admittedly know about behaviorism makes me feel like it's more suited to training a dog than nurturing a child.  I'm supposed to be all hippy and crunchy, right? Unconditional parenting and all that, right?  So before I launched into this chapter, I meditated for awhile on two of my daughter's best friends, a brother and sister, whom I've known since they were born.  Their mother, one of my best friends and absolutely my mentor and role-model as a mother and homemaker, is hands down one of the most devoted and loving mothers on the planet.  She is also, hands down, the most consistently -- unrelentingly! -- strict mother I know, and her kids' lives have included, at various times, sticker charts and rewards and time-outs and other behavioral sorts of techniques.  And they are two of the most intrinsically kind, polite, thoughtful, well-behaved, helpful, healthy, happy, and mature kids I know.  Hands down.  So I meditated on them for awhile, always a pleasant thing to do, and then I launched into Behaviorism 101:

The four fundamental ways to modify a behavior are:

 1) positive reinforcement -- encouraging "the repetition of a desirable behavior by following it with a reward, either tangible or social." (p 47) 

2) negative reinforcement -- reinforcing a behavior by following it with the removal of something unpleasant (p. 49) 

3) extinction -- the opposite of reinforcement, extinction decreases the frequency of a behavior by providing no response to it at all (p. 51 and 52); and 

4) punishment -- "following a behavior with a negative consequence" (p. 55)

Chandler than suggests several discipline techniques that help to apply some of these methods of modifying behavior.   The first two methods use positive reinforcement combined with clear, consistent, contingent consequences.  One of these she calls "Praise for the Expected" (p. 61), which is basically catching your kids being good, and letting them know you noticed with praise and affection.  I know some people object that we shouldn't have to praise our kids for being good, they should just do that because it's the right thing to do.  But I know that I like it when folks notice the good things I do, even when I'm just doing my job, and my kids are no different.  It's easy to just take our kids' good behavior for granted -- I do this all too frequently -- and only give them attention (albeit negative attention) when they are bad.  In behavioral theory, though, this extinguishes the good behavior (by ignoring it) and reinforces the bad behavior (by giving it attention).  Makes sense to me, so I'm working hard at quietly but consistently praising both Micah and Trixie for their good behavior, large and small.  Micah's sheepish, shoulder shrugging grin, and Trixie's redoubled efforts to be kind and helpful, suggest, at the very least, that this is not hurting.

The second of the methods combining positive reinforcement with clear, consistent, contingent consequences is a "Learned Reward System" using a marble jar, a system "designed to help children learn new tasks or encourage them to become more consistent and independent in performing chores they already know how to do." (p. 65)  Now I'm the queen of systems, but as previously noted, I often have trouble following through with them, largely because they are too complicated.  Several months ago I created and laminated charts for earning privileges and allowance through chores and good behavior that were so complicated, we had to abandon them after just a few days!  The marble jar system is not that different from what I was trying to devise myself, except that it has the obvious advantage of being simple and easy to administer.  

In a nutshell, the kids each have four "jobs" that they are working on perfecting at any given time.  Each of the jobs, and precisely what it means, is agreed upon ahead of time.  For each job that is performed according to specifications, they earn 15 minutes of TV or computer time each day (double on the weekends, because I do looooovvvvveeee to muck simple things up and make them complicated!).  (This amount can vary family to family, depending on your own screen-time rules and habits, and she does have some suggestions for folks with no TV/computer.)  Once they have made a habit of those jobs, they must continue doing them, but we will switch to new jobs for which they can earn marbles.

So, for example, Micah's jobs:

• sleep through the night without waking the mamas
• get dressed (I lay out clothes), including socks and shoes, brush teeth, wash face, and get to breakfast by 7:30 with no more than two warnings about the time;
• after school, put shoes on the shoe rack, hang coat, and put lunch box in the kitchen
• do homework

Trixie's jobs:

• feed cat and scoop cat box daily
• practice piano daily
• after school, put shoes on the shoe rack, hang coat, and put lunch box in the kitchen
• get one hour of exercise daily (most days she gets this walking to and from school)

Why TV and computer time?  Because it's something kids like (at least mine do), but it has very little redeeming value, so there's no harm done if they fail to earn marbles.  Story time, or play time with friends, or bike/scooter/playground/legos -- that's all valuable, and should not need to be earned.  Now, I'll admit, an hour a day of TV/computer time is a lot to me, more than we've normally allowed.  On the other hand, in the past Julie and I have been really inconsistent -- unfairly so -- about how much and when we let the kids watch -- we set up strict rules and then start making exceptions left and right, mostly for our own convenience.  So in the end, I bet they are not watching all that much more TV under this system.  And truth be told, in the good weather, they often would rather be outside playing with friends, and sometimes don't even cash in all their marbles.

So, is it working?  Well, Trixie is a fanatic about accumulating marbles, even if she can't possibly use them all, and now she sets her alarm early enough to practice piano every morning, and NEVER forgets to care for her cat.  That's the kind of kid she is, a little bit of a hoarder (she does the same thing with her allowance -- squirrels it away, rarely spends it and then only on books).  But she's also dreamy and absent-minded, and often forgot to take care of chores.  So I would say, with Trixie, so far so good.  Micah has taken a little longer to get with the program (we've been doing this about two weeks now) -- he still asks for a marble for everything he does.  

"I cleared my plate, can I have a marble?"  

"I was nice to my cousin, can I have a marble?"  

"Micah, what are your four jobs?" And we go through them.  Now he stops me with a knowing "Yeah, yeah, I know."  

And mostly he's working his program (because that boy does love him some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles):  I haven't been woken at night in over a week; he is now perfectly in the habit of putting away his stuff after school; and mornings and homework are not perfect, but soooooo much less fraught, it's like night and day.  I even allow them to use marbles in the morning (they each can earn two before breakfast), as long as they are completely ready to walk out the door the minute I say it's time to go.  This morning they were ready to go and started a movie half an hour before it was time.  I sat on the couch sipping coffee, feeling calm and quiet and amazed.

Praise for the Expected and Learned Rewards are techniques "designed to increase the repetition of desirable behaviors" (p. 101).  In contrast, the second set of discipline techniques Chandler offers, No Reply and Cool Down, are "focused on eliminating unwanted behaviors."  (p. 101).  No Reply basically extinguishes undesirable behaviors such as whining, begging and bargaining by simply ignoring them.  To your whining child, you say something very simple like this: "As long as you keep whining, I will not pay any attention to you." And then you mean it.  This is a technique I use already quite a bit, and as long as I am firm and consistent, it often works well.  It only works, of course, for behaviors that can be ignored, which do not include violence, aggression, or defiance.  For these sorts of behaviors, Chandler offers a modified version of Time Out, which she calls Cool Down (we still call it Time Out, but follow her model pretty strictly).

Chandler devotes a lengthy discussion to Cool Down and how it contrasts with the way many folks use Time Out, but in a nutshell, Cool Down is pretty straight-forward.  It is important to explain all of this to the child before you begin using the technique, so the child knows precisely what to expect:

1.  You give your child a command, either to do something or to stop doing something.

2.  If the child does not respond, within thirty seconds you give the child a warning in a firm but not angry voice:  "This is your warning.  If you do not [do, or stop doing, X], you will be in Cool Down."  If the child's misbehavior involves violence or destruction (or anything else you consider that serious), you skip over this warning step.

3.  If the child does not comply within another 30 seconds, you direct the child to his Cool Down spot -- the most boring place you can find (half way down the basement stairs is ours), and set a timer for ten minutes.  During these ten minutes, you do not interact with or respond to the child in any way, except if he leaves his spot.  Then you say, again firmly but without anger, "You left your Cool Down spot, so I am going to add five minutes to the timer." And then you do, and continue to ignore the child.

4.  The child may leave the Cool Down spot when the timer goes off if he has been calm for at least 30 seconds prior to the timer going off.  If he is not calm, you add five more minutes.  (p. 111)

"Using the Cool Down technique has two goals.  The first is to change the child's initial defiant behavior for which he was reprimanded.  The second and more important goal is to end the spiraling angry interchanges that often follow reprimands."  (p. 105)  From a behavioral perspective, Cool Down uses three of the four methods of changing a behavior:  punishment (the negative consequence of ten minutes in Cool Down after bad behavior); extinction (not responding to the child's bad behavior, both prior to and while in Cool Down); and negative reinforcement (removing the negative consequence of Cool Down once the child gets himself under control for at least 30 seconds before the timer goes off).  (pp 106-107).

When we introduced Cool Down (we still call it Time Out) to Micah, I had some trepidation about whether it would work.  Would he go to the Time Out spot? Would he stay?  Would I be able to keep my cool?  Would I be able to ignore him?  Chandler addresses all of these FAQs and more in her Cool Down chapter, but still I was dubious ... but willing to give it a try.  The way I explained it to Micah was that it felt like there were two Micahs:  one, the real Micah, that his teachers and his friends always get to see.  This is the nice and kind and funny Micah, the one who is polite, and does what he is supposed to.  Then there is the Monster Micah, the one we see so often at home, who is mean, and ugly, and violent.  I told him none of us liked living with the Monster Micah, not me, not Julie, not Trixie, and not even the real Micah -- and he agreed.  I also told him that I had been trying to help him put the Monster Micah in the cave where he should live, rather than in our house, but I had finally realized that the real Micah was the only one who could put the Monster Micah in the cave.  I can't do it for him, I can only give him some space and some tools to do it himself.  This seemed to make a lot of sense to Micah, and the overwhelming sense I got from him was one of relief.

Which is not to say that suddenly Monster Micah is permanently cave-bound!  But let me tell you, life around here is so much better these days -- and we're only two weeks in.  I don't feel angry and out of control almost ever -- having a simple script that keeps me disengaged has really helped me keep my anger in check.  Micah, of course, still disobeys, he still has fits, he still even throws things occasionally -- but it's so much less frequently, and so much less ugly, and it feels very much like his best self is continuing to emerge.  We're all feeling hopeful and relieved -- and no one more so than Micah, I think.

So I give 4 Weeks to a Better-Behaved Child five stars, and would definitely recommend it if you are open to this sort of model of discipline.  I know it's not for everyone, but it definitely seems to be what we needed.  Truth be told, though, the only key that was really missing before was my ability to be consistent.  And the only reason I can do that now is because I've got my own life under control, and I'm taking good care of myself.  So moms and dads, remember to put your own oxygen mask on first, but then if you still need some help (like I did!), this book might be a useful tool in your box.  

Biting the Moon by Martha Grimes

Biting the Moon, Martha Grimes (1999)[****]. I love mysteries, but have a whole different standard for evaluating them; so, for example, four stars for this mystery and four stars for Mansfield Park does not mean that Martha Grimes is in a league with Jane Austen. It just means that, as mysteries go, this is a pretty engaging and readable one. The premise is a tiny bit implausible, but I was able to accept it, and the rest of the story pulled me along. Andi is a teenager who wakes up one morning in a bed and breakfast in Santa Fe, with no idea who she is, why she is there, or anything else about herself. The one thing she is sure of is that "daddy," as described by the hostess of the B&B, is bad news, and Andi decides not to wait around for him to return from his errands. She hitches a ride to the Sandia mountains, where she lives for many months in an abandoned cabin, rescuing coyotes from leg hold traps. On a trip to town for supplies, she is befriended by fourteen year old Mary, who just happens to be an orphan being raised by a housekeeper who just happens to be going away on vacation, leaving Mary pretty much alone, with only a flakey neighbor to check in on her. With just the barest of clues, Andi and Mary embark on a road trip to find "daddy" and, they hope, learn who Andi is, and what happened to her. Along the way they also wage their own personal crusade against animal cruelty, and discover some of the seamier sides of human baseness, in the form of dog fights and "canned" big game hunts. There is some nice nature writing, and interesting, fully-drawn minor characters. Julie is reading the sequel, called Dakota; I don't think I'll jump right into that, but I think I will try Grimes's British Richard Jury mysteries, a few of which I think I've read, but don't remember.

The Omnivor's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan (2006)[*****]. I've read a number of books about food and agriculture, and have reviewed a few of them here (Gene Logsdon's essays, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), but this is the best in the genre that I've read by far. Pollan combines a ton of compelling information (some of it worthy of a Stephen King horror story) with really nice personal narrative and interesting, well-drawn characters. Four meals give the book its structure. The first, in the section entitled "Industrial: Corn," is a fast food meal from McDonalds, eaten in the car at 60 miles per hour. In this section, Pollan looks at the way that corn has quite literally taken over our food chain and our bodies. Because of the way that corn photosynthesizes carbon in the atmosphere differently than most other plants, it is possible to trace the carbon in our bodies back to corn, no matter how its been processed in between (through a cow, for example, or as xanthan gum, and most of the rest of the items in the second half of the list of ingredients in processed food). The average North American is now apparently one quarter corn -- more than people, such as Mexicans, who have a traditional corn-based diet. The ubiquity of corn is the direct result of two connected forces: first, the Nixon administration's desire to keep both farmers and housewives happy, and the desire of industrial capitalism for ever-expanding food markets, despite the fact that we can only consume so many calories each day. Earl Butz, Nixon's agriculture secretary, launched a cheap-food policy by pushing farmers into producing rivers of corn, so much corn that the bottom fell out of the market (corn fetches less at market than it costs to produce). That problem was solved with subsidies to farmers, and the rest of us are kept happy with cheap food, a good deal of which starts as corn. The problems with the subsequent industrialization of agriculture and food are legion: monoculture is ecologically devastating; much of the resulting industrial food-like substances -- convenience food! super sized food! lunchables and uncrustables and big gulps! -- lack nutritional value, are making us fat, and can barely be called food at all; animals become viewed merely as protein production units, and thus lead short, miserably tortured lives so that we can have bland, cheap, and morally indefensible meat, eggs and dairy; and the whole catastrophe is premised on cheap, plentiful, toxic petroleum -- to put some semblance of fertility back in the soil, to kill the pests and weeds, to move the industrial food around. Pretty grim stuff. The second two meals, set in the middle section entitled "Pastoral: Grass," are "organic," but that's about all they have in common. The first, purchased at Whole Foods, is mostly "industrial organic," a movement whose ecological and nutritional benefits Pollan weighs and finds at best a marginal improvement over conventional industrial food. The second is a meal produced almost entirely at Polyface Farm, an ingenious 550 acre farm -- 100 acres of grass, 450 of forest -- where the cantankerous, Christian libertarian farmer produces an unbelievable amount of "happy meat" with almost no inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, feed, etc) and absolutely no waste. (My dad is the socialist atheist version of this farmer, so I sort of feel like I know him. He reminds me also of the contrary, cranky Gene Logsdon.) The final meal, in the section entitled "Personal: The Forrest" features wild boar hunted by Pollan himself, foraged wild mushrooms, and even bread risen with wild yeast. When I first started reading this section I thought it was overkill (pun not originally intended, but there it is!), and wondered if the book wouldn't be better and tighter without another 100 pages. As it turns out, this was perhaps the most fascinating section of the book, with a masterful argument against the animal liberation movement and in favor of eating meat; as well as thoughtful, funny, and compelling reflections on ourselves as predators that called to mind how much I loved Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and made me understand the appeal of hunting as sport for the first time. All in all, this is a compelling and entertaining read, and if nothing else, will make you think hard about the food you eat. I highly recommend it.

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (2008)[*****]. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note right up front that Matthew Goodman is the husband of one of my best friends and Earlham roommate, Cassie. Having said that, I fear no prejudice from the connection, because this book is fabulous all on its own. It is the intertwined stories of the rise of the tabloid press in New York City in the 1830's, and a marvelous hoax perpetuated by John Adams Locke, the editor of the first and most successful penny paper, The Sun. This hoax convinced most of New York, and eventually the rest of the country and Europe as well, that the noted astronomer John Herschel had invented a "hydro-oxygen telescope" which allowed him to view the moon up close, and that he had found remarkable creatures, including biped beavers that lived in houses, and intelligent -- and apparently immodest -- man-bats. Both of these stories are interesting in and of themselves, and well-told, but Goodman's real genius is to place these stories in various social, religious, scientific and political contexts that both animate them and give them tremendous relevance today. These contexts include the abolitionist movement, and the vicious racism of most of New York and its press; the role of the press and in particular the newspaper in society; the tension between religious faith and scientific inquiry; the quest for intelligent life in the universe; and the thirst most of us share for sensationalism and the bizarre (and our willingness to fork over a lot of money to have that thirst quenched). Woven through this story are several intriguing supporting characters, including Edgar Allen Poe, who was certain Locke had plagiarized his own moon story Hans Phaal (which was itself in large part plagiarized); and P.T. Barnum, who was touring at the time with a slave woman whom he claimed to be the 160 year old nurse-maid of George Washington. The Sun and the Moon is a story meticulously well-researched, imaginatively and entertainingly told, very nicely written, and well-worth reading.

2007 and 2008 Book Reviews

A year ago, at my 20th college reunion, we visited with a beloved English professor (now retired), who told us that while he loved teaching for 40 years, he loves reading even more, and is thus enjoying his retirement very much, thank you. He started an email book review group, consisting mostly of his family, into which I promptly insinuated myself, and I have been writing reviews of everything I read ever since. Below are all of my reviews from 2007 and 2008.

Persuasion (Reviewed December 2008)

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)[*****]. The list of things I will miss about 2008 is short, but near the top is having all of Jane Austen before me, unread. I'm sure there will be years of enjoyment in re-reading these books, but never again will I read with such bated breath. Of course, by this, my last JA, the formula was pretty clear (Of course Wentworth is not in love with Louisa, otherwise how could he finally overcome all of the obstacles and misunderstandings to dramatically profess his love to Anne in a letter in the final pages? Of course Cousin Elliot is not the gentleman he at first appears, but is actually a calculating fortune-seeker! Of course he and the equally calculating Mrs. Clay will make off together in the end! Of course Sir and Miss Elliot will never overcome their cold shallowness! Etc. etc.) Even so, JA kept me as glued to the page with Persuasion as she did a year ago with Sense and Sensibility, and everything in between.

In this assessment of Mr. Elliot, Anne is a woman after my own heart: "Mr. Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, -- but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection.... She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped."

The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future of the Right (Reviewed December 2008)

The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future of the Right, Andrew Sullivan (2006)[****]. Obama's election has renewed my long-held (perhaps somewhat pollyanna) dream that conservatives and liberals could really talk to one another (rather than just shouting in each others' direction), a dream which stems from a Quakerly sense that both conservatives and liberals probably speak some kernel of truth. The problem is that when I speak to conservatives, it often feels like we are speaking different languages. So I was pretty excited when I stumbled across Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish , because he strikes me as very much a conservative I could actually sit down and talk to. He's super smart, kind of sweet and earnest, and despises George W. He's also gay, Catholic, British and kind of cute. So I gave his book a try, and mostly was not disappointed. It is well-written, thoughtful, and only a few times made me laugh out loud at the absurdity of its assumptions. I loved Sullivan's description of conservatism as being rooted in loss and regret, in our resistance to the interruptions in the narrative of our lives. (I was less convinced that such a temperament, which I and many liberals I know share, necessarily leads to political conservatism.) His dissection of fundamentalist religion and how it is destroying democracy and freedom (from within and without) is spot-on, and his description of his own religious experience echoed my own very much: "Trying to get an abstract meaning of the Mass misses the point. The point is the activity, not the idea ... Eventually, even the words are acts." His explanation of why government should be limited, and his skepticism of grand governmental schemes to remake the world, all made sense. His insistence that government's first and most fundamental role is to secure the safety of its citizens, and that to do so we must grant the government a monopoly on force, especially made sense, because it strikes me that this failure on the part of government in the ghetto is profound and a major reason for the entrenchment of a poverty of opportunity for kids living there -- a failure that cannot be blamed on anything but the government's own failed policies (i.e. the "war on drugs," the militarization of the police, etc.). I was much less convinced that among the roles of a limited government should be protecting private property, and that government should not be in the business of redistributing wealth. Short a "natural" or God-given right to property ownership (which Sullivan denies -- he denies that any rights or laws are "natural" or God-given), why should government to use its monopoly on force to protect an individual's ownership rather than to redistribute it? The biggest failure of the book -- and of conservatism in general -- is Sullivan's failure to account for the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. As Sullivan depicts conservatism -- limited government concerned primarily with liberty and freedom -- slavery and institutionalized racism are our government's greatest failure, yet there's not a word about its legacy or what role government should have in the face of that legacy. All in all, though, this was a great introduction to a reasonable and thoughtful conservative philosophy that has really helped me better understand my own political philosophy.

Middlemarch (Conversations from September/October 2008)

Middlemarch, George Eliot (18??)[*****] No formal review, but my end of an on-line conversation as I read this with some friends:

I am still woefully behind you in my reading of Middlemarch, and today I should be making great progress, as Trixie is home with a cold which means I am not volunteering at Obama HQ as scheduled. Unfortunately, I find myself obsessively checking the Huff Post and Americablog to learn the latest details in the drama unfolding in DC and Mississippi ... in much the same way, it occurs to me, that I used to check People.com daily to read up on the Brittany Spears trainwreck. The McCain drama feels about that dignified.

I really do plan to share some thoughts in the next few days. In the meantime, "ardent" may be Victorian code for sexually passionate, but "her blooming, full-pulsed youth" seems less oblique, and the following description of Dorothea caught my eye as needing little decoding at all:

"She was glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow; there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with the tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the cyrstalline purity of the out-door snow." (beginning of Chapter 28)

*****

I am a little more than half way through now. This is an awesomely long book! Especially for an inveterate page-counter like me.

I just love love love the Garths. That is the sort of family I aspire to be -- simple, honest, loving, content. Caleb Garth reminds me very much of my own father in some ways, although my dad is much more learned and intellectual than Caleb is. Still, he's never as happy as when he's working on the land. Just like Caleb he has no head for finance, but it doesn't matter because his needs are so simple (I like to say that my dad the born-again atheist lives the most Christ-like life of any Christian I know).

I have to admit that so far, I just don't really like Lydgate so much. I think he's kind of stupid about relationships, and what Gordon has called his idealism looks more like ambition to me. Give me an idealist like Dorothea any day, who has a kind heart. Of course it's wrong that Dorothea can't do the sorts of "great things" men can do simply because she's a woman, but at the end of the day, I'm not so sure that men's "great things" are what make the world a better place -- or at least they are no more important than the small things all of us can do, with great love. Dorothea is certainly not limited in that regard, and as I consider "doing small things with great love" (I think Mother Theresa said that, and probably others as well) every bit as important as "assuming a position of responsibility in society" (as Gordon put it), I can't really pity Dorothea. Of course she should have a wide range of choice (and I suppose it's easy for me to say this, given that I have had such choices), but in the end, if she chose the "limited" path of smaller kindnesses that is in fact open to her, I for one would not criticize that choice (having made it myself!) I think she -- and the Garths too for that matter -- have every bit the opportunity to be part of transforming society for the better as Lydgate does.

I agree that Lygate may infantalize Rosamond, but I find her so unlikable that it's hard to care. I will admit to being impatient with both of them right now.

What I have always remembered and loved most about Eliot is how she is unblinking yet kind, unrelenting yet sympathetic, in pulling apart her characters' self-delusions. (I am sure she is kinder and more patient with them than I am!) I see this especially with Fred, whom I actually really like -- much more than Lydgate. As Gordon points out, he at least has the good sense to love a good woman for the right reasons. The chapters in which Fred attempts -- with increasing anxiety, desperation and self-delusion -- to figure out a way to make good his debt that Caleb Garth has vouched for were *painful* to read. Being the most risk-averse person you've ever met, gambling and bad debt is not something I can relate to (and I just wanted to leap into the pages and shake Fred hard: "Give Caleb the hundred pounds NOW; it will be better than nothing!"). But I can very much relate to that tendency nearly all of Eliot's characters have to convince themselves that their hoped-for version of their world is reality, and to keep convincing themselves of that even against ever-mounting evidence to the contrary, until reality finally pushes through and refuses to be denied.

It seems that for Eliot, being kind is of supreme importance, but in order to be happy, one must first be clear-sighted -- about one's self and others -- and then somehow manage to still be kind. Eliot illustrates this not only through her characters, but also in her own treatment of them. If I am to be judged for my many foibles and self-delusions, I hope it will be by someone as kind and sympathetic as Eliot.

GT says that Mary Garth is perhaps a self-portrait, but I also see in Mrs. Garth an Eliotesque treatment of characters such as Fred, and even her own husband -- supremely kind, but unsentimental, not lacking a certain critical edge and sense of irony. If I had to pick a character to emulate in Middlemarch, I think it would be Mrs. Garth.

*****

I've just finished The Dead Hand and started The Widow and The Wife. Three hundred pages to go. Whew! but this is a long book! A few more thoughts:

1. Is this the very best book that has ever been written, or what? I love it so much.

2. If I am being honest with myself (and if Eliot asks anything of us, it is that), I have to confess that I am impatient with Lydgate because he reminds me of myself too much. Like him, my mind easily goes to big, idealistic schemes; like him, I can quite easily see the way to achieving those goals and am willing to work hard to do it; and like him, I am often quite tone-deaf to and therefore stymied by the inter-personal and community politics required to get there. Julie charitably says that I don't suffer fools gladly, but really what that means is I'm just frustrated a lot. Fortunately, unlike Lydgate, I am not also tone-deaf when it comes to my family. Also unlike Lygate (I suspect, I'm not done), focusing on the narrower world of my family and immediate community, rather than the big schemes my mind likes to run to, feels like a gift, not a failure.

3. The enduring nature of pettiness and corruption in politics seems to be timely theme, yes?

4. One of my very favorite professors in law school, Jane Baron, taught classes that are traditionally deadly dry and boring: Property, Trusts and Estates, Land Use Planning. She was so good I took them all, often quite literally on the edge of my seat. In Trusts and Estates one of the major themes was the corrosive effects of a testator's dead hand reaching back into the world of the living and continuing to manipulate things. Case after case saw families torn apart because of mean-spirited testators and/or family members who thought they were somehow owed something fighting over what the testator actually intended. I plan to write Jane and recommend she read Middlemarch, if she hasn't already!

*****

I finished Middlemarch yesterday and it's left me feeling a little wistful and melancholy. A lot of nice things happen, but there's an awful lot of sadness too. Life, huh? Despite all my page-counting, I'm also a little sad it's done, although I'm committed to re-reading it before another 20+ years go by.

The last paragraph ... is what I was fairly inartfully trying to say in my first post about the possibilities for Dorothea to make her mark on the world.

What did you think of the scene where Will and Dorothea finally express their love for one another, and figure out that they can in fact be married? With the storm outside and the lightning and thunder?

Two themes that had not stood out for me so much when I read this at Earlham (not for a class, but just because I fell in love with GE when we read Adam Bede in Intro to Lit) were 1) the role of Christianity in these people's lives and 2) the role of money. And in Bulstrode and Farebrother, the intersection of the two. Bulstrode is a cautionary tale of how Christianity can be twisted to serve our self-delusion and greed; Farebrother's story is the flip-side: how escaping poverty can free us to live the best of our faith even more fully. I was just so struck by what a destructive force money is in this book -- having too much of it, having not enough of it, loving it too much. Everyone who is happy in Middlemarch has enough money to take care of their basic needs and some comforts as well, but not too much more than that, and they are clear that material comforts must serve relationships, not the other way around. So, as I see it, to be happy according to GE, one must:

1. Be clear-eyed about one's self and others;
2. Be as kind as one possibly can be in that clarity;
3. Be free enough from "money-craving" to "escape from sordidness";
4. But care less for money and things than for human relationships; and
5. Practice a faith that is not abstract, but rooted in relationship ("There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.") and that is open-hearted and inclusive ("I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest -- I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.")

Now that's a philosophy I can subscribe to!

On the political front, a couple of points:

1. Substitute John McCain for Mr Brooke and Rick Davis for Will Ladislaw:
"This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will Ladislaw much trouble."

Tee hee hee!

2. I don't know if you check the polls as obsessively as I do, but I was cheered by this one.

The most noteworthy result for Obama is in Indiana, where PPP has him two points ahead. One noteworthy feature of Indiana is that it has had rather low turnout in recent elections, perhaps because neither party has really bothered to campaign there. As such, likely voter models which are rooted in past voting history may be unreliable. And according to Tom Jensen, Obama has a 68-24 lead among voters who did not cast a ballot in 2004. These are the sorts of statistics that the Obama campaign is looking at, and they're why they remain very engaged in the Hoosier State.