Half Changed World

Book Review: The Magicians

I just finished Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  Wow, this one was depressing.  The content was depressing, but I was also depressed because I kept on waiting for the payoff for slogging through this, and it never came.  I had heard a rave review of it on NPR, and at least one blogger I read loved it.  (Sorry, can't find the link -- feel free to speak up to defend it.)

Cory Doctorow liked it, and says that it's a book of wonder without awe or sentimentality.  I guess that's right.  It's a scathing revisionist take on both Harry Potter and the Narnia books, (with some random references to The Once and Future King, and Dungeons and Dragons) imaging a magical school that is tedious and incomprehensible, and a journey through fantasy where people react realistically to being under attack for no obvious reason.   Oh, and the characters drink and curse and have sex.  The main character is miserable in his pre-magic live, miserable at school, and miserable when he gets to live out his fantasy.  The epigram to the book is Prospero breaking his wand, but it should have been Hamlet's "there is nothing either good or  bad, but thinking makes it so."  I wanted to give him a kick in the pants for much of the book.

There were also major plot holes that irritated me.  Why have the two main characters randomly promoted a year at  school other than that the author had decided to make school last 5 years rather than 4, but were too lazy to come up with material to fill another year?  Why spend a huge chunk of time telling how the main character survived naked in Antartica, and then have the characters obsess about whether to bring their parkas to Narnia/Fillory?

back from vacation

Hey, I'm back from vacation, so semi-regular posting may resume soon.  (I still have a business trip coming up, and a generally hectic schedule at work, so I'm not promising regular.  I know I still owe you all another health care reform post.)

We had a nice trip, which included visits to both sets of grandparents, my high school reunion, and visits to some friends.  The weather was absolutely awful for a while in the middle which led us to a sudden trip to Toys R Us for more board games, but then was nice on either end.  Did you know Monopoly now comes with an extra die that speeds things up?  It still is a long game, but doesn't take forever the way it used to.

Vacation for me means reading.  I read Blood Lure, by Nevada Barr, the Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, by Maggie O'Farrell, and Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.  Blood Lure was mindless fun.  Esme Lennox was a choice of my sister-in-law's book club, which she passed on to me. It's the intertwining stories of a girl growing up in colonial India and Scotland and her great-niece today.  I liked it, although it left me somewhat unsatisfied, with the contemporary story being much weaker than the historical one.  Netherland was a disappointment, given the great reviews it's received.  It reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I found similarly frustrating -- lovely writing, but I didn't give a darn about any of the characters.

Dadiaries

This week I'm looking at two of the recent series of books about parenting from a father's perspective.  If the female version of these are "momoirs," does that make these "dadiaries?"

Of the two, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis, is the more recent and the more hyped.  Lewis is the author of one of the better books I've ever read (Liar's Poker, about the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s) and so I had high hopes for this book. And it has some really funny moments.  But basically, it reads like the slapped together collection of Slate columns that it is.  In it we learn that parenting can be absurd, exhausting and messy, but that "If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work.  it's only in caring for a thing that you become attached it." 

I'd actually be interested in reading a book by Lewis in which he uses his journalistic talents to look at the contested territory of parenting in the 21st century, because he does nail some issues: "For now, there's an unsettling absence of universal, or even local, standards of behavior.  Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it.  But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both breadwinner and domestic dervish -- doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting.  The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace.  At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure."

Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table by Cameron Stracher doesn't try to describe modern fatherhood in general.  Rather, it's the story of one man who decided to be home for dinner, 5 nights a week, for one school year, and how it changed his life.  And yes, it looks like it started out as a blog. 

In order to do this, Stracher started working from home a few days a week, and eventually wound up quitting one of his two jobs, and thus having more time to coach his kid's teams, and generally be part of their lives.  Stracher acknowledges that everything he does would be unremarkable almost anywhere but in the suburbs of New York City, but he also doesn't downplay the difficulty in changing patterns of behavior when he works a two-hour train ride from home, he's expected to travel regularly for work, and all of the kid-focused activities are scheduled for at-home-parents. 

The other major theme of the book is Stracher's desire to cook "real" (e.g. grown up) food for his family, and his frustration when his kids turn up their nose at it again and again.  He writes with passion about the pleasure of feeding people you love, and how easy it is to put undue weight on it.  (I know that one of the reasons I make waffles and muffins so often is they're pretty much the only things I can make that the kids will appreciate the effort.)  He's not the elegant writer that Lewis is, but I think I enjoyed this book more.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

I've been reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to N at bedtime.  I hadn't read it since I was in 2nd grade, and am pleased that it's almost as good as I remember (although the mother is pretty annoying).  But I had realized how much it would be a guide to the changes in parenting practice since it was written (1972).

• Peter (age 9) gets to go to Central Park without an adult, as long as he's with another kid. 
• But not because it's safer than today -- Peter says his friend has been mugged three times, and he assumes he'll get mugged someday too.
• Three fourth graders are left alone in charge of a 2 1/2 year old.
• The reason Mrs. Hatcher goes back to the apartment is that she realizes that she forgot to turn the oven ON. 
• At Fudge's 3rd birthday party, the other kids are all dropped off and their parents leave -- even though one kid is a known biter and another is terrified.

It looks like all of the Judy Blume books are still in print.  I remember reading a few years ago that she had updated Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret to update the references to sanitary napkins with belts (which were dated when I read it 30 years ago).  I don't know if she made changes to any of the other books.

What children's book of the past decade do you think our kids will be reading to their kids 37 years from now?  And what in them will seem most dated?

TBR: One Big Happy Family

With Mother's Day approaching, I realized that I never posted a book review for One Big Happy Family.  Yes, it's another anthology of essays about families, this one with the twist that all of the families are nontraditional in some way -- the subtitle is "18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love."  I'll admit that when they emailed me to ask if I wanted a review copy, my first thought was "Househusbandry makes the cut?  I'm not hopelessly uncool and traditional?"

Anthologies are always somewhat of a mixed bag, and this one -- with the members chosen for their breaking the norrm in some way -- is probably more of one than most.  Some of the voices were ones I've read before -- Dan Savage reports on his son's mommy, and how he copes with her erratic communications, Dawn Friedman writes about Penny, Madison, and open adoption, Amy and Marc Vachon make their usual pitch for Equally Shared Parenting.  Some were new to me.  Overall, I enjoyed most of the essays, although a lot of them were a shade too didactic for my taste.

That said, the one essay that I truly disliked is the one by Neil Pollack, which is the one that I think is supposed to be about "househusbandry."  For one thing, Pollack explicitly says he's not a househusband and his wife isn't a housewife -- they both work from home, and neither of them seems to do much housework.  And they both come across as incredibly passive aggressive and annoying.  If Marc and Amy make sharing things down the middle seem impossibly perfect and easy, Pollack makes it seem like chewing broken glass would be far preferable.  I think the last time I read an essay by Pollack that was causing a shitstorm on the blogosphere, the conclusion was that it was supposed to be satire.  I truly hope this essay was satire, although it wasn't funny.  Because if it's just true, it's sad.

WBR: Intelligence and How to Get It

As promised, here's a review of Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.  it's the book that Nicholas Kristof's column a couple of weeks ago was based on.  The book jacket describes this book as "the authoritative anti-Bell Curve" and indeed, much of the book is  a full-out attack on the claim that intelligence is primarily determined by genetics and that any attempts to improve outcomes for members of disadvantaged groups are doomed.

To be honest, the "how to get it" part was the least interesting part of the book for me, because it covered ground that I already know about -- Perry Preschool, KIPP, Carol Dweck's work on the "mindset" that effort matters more than inherent ability.  That said, Nisbett does a good job of writing about these issues in a non-technical manner, and I'm hopeful that he will influence public opinion.

The "intelligence" part of the book was far more interesting, because Nisbett is implicitly arguing with both the strong hereditarians who believe that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetic and that environment (including parenting) doesn't matter much, and with the liberals who aren't sure exactly what is meant by "intelligence," and are pretty skeptical that intelligence tests are picking up underlying ability rather than leaning.  The first two chapters (and a more technical appendix) are aimed squarely at these issues, and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to talk about intelligence.

Nisbett argues that the high estimates for the genetic component of intelligence are overwhelmingly based on twin studies, and especially adoptive studies, and these don't haver nearly as much variation in environments as there exists between families overall.  He also notes that overall IQ levels have risen steadily over time, far too quickly to be accounted for by natural selection (if you look at the raw scores, rather than the normed ones which are forced to have a constant mean of 100).  Addressing the question of racial differences in IQ specifically, he points out that the black-white gap has also decreased significantly in the past decades, and that African-Americans with a higher percentage of European genes do not have higher IQs than African-Americans with fewer European genes.

I'm going to end this review where Nisbett begins the book, on the question of what is intelligence.  Even after reading the book, I find it hard to define.  Nisbett is clear that he believes that schooling does increase intelligence, and that scores on even the most abstract and supposedly culture-free components of the IQ test (such as the Raven progressive matrices*) improve markedly with practice.  So he doesn't agree with the opening quote from Cyril Burt that intelligence is "inborn, all-around intellectual ability.. inherited, not due to teaching or training... uninfluenced by industry or zeal."  But he also thinks it's a real characteristic, distinct from specific knowledge of a subject.  In some ways, he almost seems to define intelligence as that which is measured by IQ tests, which is a strong predictor of academic and career sucess although not the only factor in either (with effort, emotional skills, self-discipline, and motivation being the strongest non-intelligence factors in these).

* For what it's worth, I would have chosen a different answer than the "correct" one on the sample problem given in the book, and still think that my answer is equally plausible.

ebooks, audiobooks, book books

As I mentioned in the comments last week, I was somewhat tempted by the Kindle version of Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It, because it was backordered at Amazon (now back in stock), the library had not yet ordered it, and I was going away for a business trip and so would have several hours to read on the plane.

I put in an online request for the library to order it, and received a form response saying "check back in a few weeks to see if we've ordered your suggestion, but please remember that our budget adds up to about $3.22 per customer, so we can't afford to buy everything that people ask for.  And here's our Amazon wish list."  A bit more poking around revealed that the book was in fact still available at the Borders near my house, so I decided to fork out the extra money for a real book that I could donate to the library when I'm done reading it.  (Check back tomorrow for my review.)

I did, however, decide to load up my iPod with an extra book in case something went horribly wrong with one of my flights and I finished everything I had with me.  Since I find reading on the iPod a not terribly appealing experience, I decided to try out an audiobook instead. 

I downloaded one, and it's a mixed experience. I like listening to it, and I can do it walking down the street, or on a super-crowded metro train, when books aren't quite practical.  But when I get distracted, it's hard to figure out where I lost my place. I'm not sure I get more distracted listening than I do reading on paper, but books are ideal for figuring out where you were, and going back over the past few paragraphs if needed.  There's not an easy way to do that with the iPod.

I guess the same thing happens listening to podcasts or the radio, but in that case, I generally just accept that I've missed a section and keep going.  I'm not as willing to do that with a novel.

Harry Potter

I've been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to N as his bedtime story for the past several weeks, with D usually coming in to listen as well.  (I read it to him when he was about N's age.)  We finished it over the weekend, and tonight N asked if I'd start another chapter book.

I said, sure, how about Harry Potter?  This was a devious move on my part, because I tried reading it to D last year, and during the letter delivery sequence, he decided it was too scary and refused to go any further.  But N is much less freaked out by "scary" books and movies (remember, he's the one who came to see Coraline, even though he's almost 3 years younger than D), and he said ok, mostly because he could see that it was a big fat book that would get him my attention for a long time.

So I read the first half chapter to both boys, and then D asked if I'd read the rest of the chapter as his bedtime story.  Gee, I guess you can twist my arm.  So we finished the first chapter, and then D asked if he could keep going on his own.  I said yes, overruling N's pout, and D made it to Diagon Alley before I made him turn out the light.

I'm feeling pleased as punch, both because I think he'll enjoy it, and also because D has been resistant to reading chapter books on his own, in spite of the fact that he's quite capable of doing so.  He reads lots of manga, and has read some of the kids' novelizations set in the star wars universe, but that's about it.  And while I'm willing to concede that Harry Potter isn't great literature, it's a heck of a lot better than those star wars novels. 

Fundamentally, I think I've been feeling a bit left out of D's interests.  I'm not fascinated by Pokemon, and I can't fake it.  I'm not a big fan of manga.  I'm really bad at Lego Star Wars.  So I'm excited to have him interested in something that I like too.

TBR: The Instinct Diet

This January, I got back from vacation and hopped on the scale, and was horrified to see a number that I had previously only seen when pregnant -- yes, I really did weigh more than I did immediately postpartum.  It shouldn't have surprised me -- all my pants were too tight.  Somewhere along the way, I had added an extra 10 pounds to the usual "I could really stand to lose 10 pounds."  So I started looking around for a diet plan that I could follow.  I'm pretty skeptical of diets, but I also know that all of these "lifestyle" approaches that claim that you can lose weight effortlessly by making simple substitutions don't work for me, because I already drink skim milk, don't drink soda, rarely have chips, etc.

Over at US Food Policy, Parke spoke highly of The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep It Off, by Susan Roberts, so I decided to give it a try.  Eight weeks later, I've lost the "extra" 10 pounds, and am finding it painless enough that I'm going to keep going and try to get rid of the "could stand to lose" weight.

Roberts goes through a whole explanation of the different "instincts" that make us overeat, but fundamentally, the diet is about eating a nutritionally balanced diet, restricting calories, and using a bunch of "tricks" so that you don't feel deprived and hungry along the way.  So, you eat lots of soup and salad, because they're high volume.  You put the most fattening flavorful things on the outside (chocolate on strawberries, dressing on salad) so you maximize the taste punch.  You eat mostly whole grain or high fiber carbs so they digest slowly and make you feel full.  You eat a wide variety of veggies, but rotate through a limited set of main dishes, and have a choice of a starch with dinner or dessert, but not both.

The book includes both recipes and suggestions for how to follow the diet using mostly packaged foods.  In general, the recipes are quite good -- the thai peanut dressing for salad is amazing, and all the soups have been good enough that I'd make them even when I wasn't trying to watch my weight.  However, the "pizza" base was all but inedible -- possibly because I couldn't find the white wheat bran she recommended anywhere, either online or looking at health stores.  But the no-cook alternative is to use a low-carb pita bread, which worked out ok for me.  I thought the "I-diet bread" was awful the first time I had it, but it's grown on me over time.  (And one of Roberts' instincts is indeed familiarity.)

So, I don't think the diet is perfect, but it's working for me.  And the Amazon reviews are overwhelmingly positive.  This may be the best diet book you've never heard of.

Sorry, this post is attracting too much spam.  I'm going to close it to comments.

TBR: Outliers

This week's book is Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.  It's his attempt to look at the environmental and cultural factors that affect why some people succeed and others fail, and to blow apart the idea that individual genius is responsible for success.

It's a quick read (probably took me less than 3 hours front to back) and each section is reasonably entertaining, but it doesn't quite hold together as an overall book or argument.

In particular, the middle section, where he argues that Korean airlines have a terrible safety record because of the cultural pressures for subordinates to defer to their supervisors, seems to have little connection to the rest of the book.  And while it's possible that Gladwell is correct in his claim that the reason that Asian cultures respect hard work is that rice is more work to grow than wheat or corn, he sure doesn't present enough evidence to convince me.

Gladwell is correct that Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun) and Bill Gates were extraordinarily lucky in having the opportunity to program a lot when very few people had access to computers at all.  And there's no doubt that practice is necessary (if not sufficient) for being good at programming.  On the other hand, the reason that Gates is one of the richest men in the world has very little to do with his coding skills. (He didn't write the code for DOS, after all.)

I thought the discussion of the relationship (or lack thereof) between extreme intelligence* and success** was the best part of the book.  In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an early 20th century researcher who identified 1470 highly gifted California elementary school students, and was shocked to learn that only a small fraction of them were particularly successful later in life.  Moreover, there was a huge correlation between economic class and success (not exactly shocking to me, but still sad).  Gladwell cites Lareau and argues that the upper class kids know how to manipulate systems to their advantage, but I'm not convinced --I'm pretty sure that "concerted cultivation" wasn't around in the 1920s.

In the last part of the book, Gladwell returns to the question of education and class, and argues that the intensive school setting of KIPP lets poor kids spend enough time learning to catch up with their middle class peers.   Among other things, he cites the data that shows that much of the growth in the gap between poor and upper class kids during elementary school is not about what happens during the school year, but that the wealthier kids continue to gain over the summer, while the poor kids stagnate, or even slip backwards. I've heard that before, but had never seen the underlying data before -- what struck me the most is that for the upper class kids, they gained about half as much over the 3 month summer vacation as they did over the 9 month school year.  In other words, per month, the upper class kids learned more during vacation than during school. 

*When I initially wrote this post, I omitted the word "extreme" which significantly fails to represent Gladwell's argument.  He cites Arthur Jenson (whom he calls an "IQ fundamentalist") as saying that the four cutoffs that matter for IQ are 50, 75, 105, and 115 -- and that for real world applications, the difference between having an IQ of 115 and 150 or between 150 and 180 is less important.

**Jennifer asked what constituted success.  Here's what Gladwell writes "But few of his [Terman's] geniuses were nationally known figures.  They tended to earn good incomes -- but not that good.  The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a suprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures.  Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.  His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary school students who went on to be Nobel laureates -- William Shockley and Luis Alvarez -- and rejected them both.  Their IQs weren't high enough... if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same family backgrounds as the Termites -- and dispensed with IQ altogether -- we would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses."

ebooks

I downloaded the Kindle software for my iPod touch.  I picked the Origin of Species as a free book to try.  My initial reaction is that the Kindle software slightly inferior as a reader to eReader, which is also a free download.  eReader allows for landscape orientation, and overall the text is somewhat easier to read.  (They've chosen an off-white background, which is a bit easier on the eyes, but I also just think that the font or something is slightly better.)  Kindle seems to have a better bookmark feature.

Of course, the big advantage that the Kindle has is Amazon.  There are far more books out for the Kindle than in eReader format, and the books that are available on both seem to generally be cheaper in Kindle format, sometimes significantly so.  eReader sells recent books for almost as much as the hardcover costs, and that seems like a losing proposition to me.  (Some of that may be because of what the publishers are demanding -- my understanding is that Amazon actually loses money on most bestsellers, because they pay the publishers more than they make.)  Plus, Amazon is just a far superior user interface than the eReader store.  (Barnes and Noble actually just bought Fictionwise, which in turn owns eReader, but they plan to continue to operate the sites separately.)

I still have no plans to buy a Kindle until I can borrow library books to read on one.  But I might see if I can borrow one from a friend the next time I have a long trip coming up.

TBR: Elsewhere, USA

Today's book (and possibly this year's winner for longest subtitle) is Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety,  by Dalton Conley.

This book looks at such modern phenomena as the blurring of work and leisure, savings and consumption.  To take the growth of "weisure" (Conley loves making up compound words like that) for example, he remarks on the generally recognized growth of people working from home (and the history of the tax deduction for home offices was one of the few bits of the book that surprised me) and shopping at work, but also argues that "networking" forces people to turn their social interactions into an extension of work.

I picked up the book mostly because I was interested in hearing what he had to say about parental anxiety (he twice cites the same study that found that higher income mothers reported more time pressure than low-income mothers, even when they worked the exact same hours).  He argues that women's higher earning potential is the main source of stress, as women who aren't working feel the opportunity cost.  I think that's part of the story, but misses out on the degree to which working mothers also feel a high opportunity cost to their time.

Conley is a "real" sociologist, in the sense that he's a professor at NYU, but this isn't an academic book.  The only original research is what Conley conducted by looking at the dual-income families around him.  And Conley challenges the reader to evaluate the book by looking around him or herself and seeing if it resonates.

By that measure, I think this book would have done a lot better if it had come out a year or two ago.  The argument that granite countertops are a form of investment, not consumption, seems very 2006, as does the claim that no one resents the rich because we all depend on them for our jobs.  Conley's an interesting thinker, although not as profound as he thinks he is, but if there's ever a book that should have been a blog, it's this one.

TBR: Outwitting History

I'm just back from a quick vacation (a weekend with my family and then an overnight at Great Wolf Lodge*), and facing about a million unread emails, so here's a short book review post.

This week's book is the autobiographical Outwitting History: The Story of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky.  Like Three Cups of Tea, this is the story of a man who found his life's mission pretty much by accident.  In Lansky's case, his mission was the rescuing of Yiddish books that were going to be thrown out, and the founding of the National Yiddish Book Center.

I picked it up because of TC's recommendation and she's right, it's neither preachy nor pedantic.  Lansky's got a good comic storytelling voice, and turns a potentially dry topic (oh look, we found some more books) into a pretty funny one, full of love for both the books and the people who gave them to him.  (And the discovery that Meir Kahane was Arlo Guthrie's Hebrew teacher nearly gave me a heart attack.)

Yiddish is, of course, an all-but-dead language, and the reason there were so many books for Lansky to rescue is that all the people who actually read Yiddish have been busily dying off and their children had no interest in the books.  Some Orthodox Jews still speak Yiddish, but they have little interest in the mostly secular books that Lansky collected.  Mixed in with his funny stories about rescuing books in the rain, being fed by every donor, and giving a talk at a resort in the Catskills, Lansky tries to make a serious case for why people should still care about Yiddish.

That said, I'm not sure he succeeds.  And I say this as someone who took a course in Yiddish in college, much to my parents' bemusement.  (I took it mostly because my favorite professor was teaching it, and I would have taken almost anything he taught.  But it's also a fascinating mongrel of a language, with a Hebrew alphabet, a mostly Germanic vocabulary, but a primarily Slavic grammar.

So, I enjoyed the book (although it could have been a bit shorter without losing much).  But I think I might send you to read an actually Yiddish story instead.

* Fairfax schools were closed Monday and Tuesday. Tying this to the main topic of the post, I was struck by the number of Orthodox women at the waterpark, getting totally soaked in black dresses and hair coverings.  They seemed to be having a good time -- more power to them for figuring out a way to enjoy a park while maintaining their version of acceptable dress.

Which Side Are You On?

I was thrilled to read earlier this week that Tom Geoghegan is running for Congress, for the seat that Rahm Emmanuel is vacating.  It's a special election, which usually means really low turnout, and there's about 10 people running for it, so goodness knows whether he's got a shot, but I'm excited enough about him that I squeezed out a contribution for him.  Thomas Frank called him an "unrepentant New Dealer" and that's probably fair enough.  He's a lifelong labor lawyer, a supporter of single payer health insurance.

But the main reason that I'm supporting him is that he wrote a book that changed my life.  It's called Which Side Are You On?  Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back.  It begins:

   "Organized labor." Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause. But too old, too arthritic, to be a cause.

    It was a cause, back in the thirties. Now it is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing, crawling off to Bal Harbour to die. How did it outlive George Meany? Sometimes, as a mental exercise, I try to think of the AFL-CIO in the year 2001. But I cannot do it. The whole idea is too perverse.

    U.S. manufactunng has gone down the drain, and with it, it seems, the entire labor movement.

The book is sad, funny, and poetic.  And it convinced me that tilting at windmills is a perfectly reasonable way to spend your life.  The next thing I knew, I was taking  David Montgomery's classes and a few years later I was in public policy grad school. 

My copy of the book is still on my shelf, and I just picked it up.  I had forgotten that Geoghegan had signed it for me.  It's dated November 1994, a few weeks after the election that brought us Newt Gingrich and the Contract with (or on) America, and I must have been pretty discouraged when I talked to him, because what he wrote is "For some good it may do -- Read Coles!  Then just put it all aside, and do it all with as much style as you can."

Anyway, I'm not the only person who Geoghegan has impressed.  Here's Kathy G writing about canvassing for him, and Katha Pollitt and David Sirota and James Fallows and Rick Perlstein (author of Nixonland) even Mickey Kaus

Oh, and if you're having trouble spelling his name, you can also find his website at www.tom09.com

TBR: People of the Book

On vacation with my in-laws, I did manage to read a few books for fun. One of them was Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book.  It's fiction, but based on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a rare illuminated Jewish manuscript, which was protected from the Nazis by a Muslim cleric and also survived the bombings of Sarajevo during the wars of the 1990s.

The title of the book is both a play on the traditional notion that Jews are "the people of the Book" (e.g. the Torah) and a description of the contents, as it follows the stories of the different people who were involved with the creation, use, and protection of the manuscript over the centuries.  Brooks uses the story to highlight stories of multi-cultural friendship in a part of the world known for its ethnic feuds. The story unfolds backwards, with each story tied to a piece of physical evidence found in the Haggadah, and at times reminded me of a highbrow version of a James Michener concept.  But Brooks writes very well, and I enjoyed the story as it unfolded.

By coincidence or serendipity, my in-laws gave me a reproduction of the real Sarajevo Haggadah for the holidays -- purchased long before I showed up with the novel.  I certainly appreciated the gift more for knowing the story that went with it.

In writing this review, I remembered that I blogged about another Brooks book, March, a few years back.  I think I liked that one a bit more.

TBR: World War Z

For Hanukkah, T gave me an audiobook of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  I must have looked at him skeptically (I was pretty skeptical), and he said, "It's like This American Life, but with zombies!"

That's actually a pretty good description of the book.  It's a series of "interviews" with different people -- politicians, doctors, soldiers, civil servants -- about their experiences in combating a massive global epidemic of the living dead.  It's published as a regular book as well, but it's perfect for an audiobook, with different actors playing each of the characters.  (Alan Alda was immediately recognizable, but I missed Mark Hamill, and all of the actors playing non-American characters were unfamiliar to me.)

We drove to Florida and back for the holidays, and this was about the perfect thing to listen to driving down I-95 at 3 am with the boys sleeping.  (I also listened to parts of it with the boys watching videos with headphones on -- the content of this is definitely not appropriate for small children -- it's about zombies for pity's sake.)

Apparently there's a movie being made of it.  It will be interesting to see whether they manage to keep the sly political commentary, or if it just becomes a shoot 'em up (or rather, slug them in the head with something heavy and pointy) movie.  The audiobook doesn't have a hero or a plot in the conventional sense, and I'm pretty sure that they will feel compelled to have one in a movie.  And two of the narrators are wildly unreliable, and I'm not sure how that works in a movie.  (Although it seems that Waltz with Bashir makes a go at it.)

The other audiobook that I brought down with me is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm clearly going to get my chick license revoked, because I hated it so much that I didn't get through the first disk.  I found Gilbert whiny and self-obsessed.  And I'm fundamentally not impressed by traveling around the world to find yourself -- I'm far more interested in people who stay home and build buildings or wipe snotty noses and still manage to find themselves.

Beggars in Spain

What does it say about me (or modern life) that when I read Judith Warner's column last week about the use of brain-enhancing drugs my first reaction was to wonder how one goes about getting some Provigil?  (It's an anti-narcolepsy drug, which apparently allows one to maintain brain functionality in spite of sleep deprivation.  And for the record, the only drug I'm actually taking is claritin.)

I'm not a scientist, and I don't know what the side effects of these drugs are.  But a few months ago, after being up most of the night with one of the boys, I went to work, and was pretty fuzzy around the edges.  And then I realized that I had spent a good two years or more in that kind of a fog every single day.  And if someone had offered me a drug to make it go away (other than caffeine), I'm pretty sure I'd have jumped for it.

If asprin were invented today, it would probably require a prescription -- between its blood thinning action and the potential for Reye's syndrome, it's easy to make the case that it's too dangerous to be available without control.  Caffeine is ubiquitous, but I could argue that it's as much of a mind-altering substance as Provigil or Ritalin.  I think the editorial in Nature arguing for legalizing these drugs for people who aren't "ill" is pretty convincing.

*If you're wondering about the title, it's a reference to Nancy Kress' excellent sci-fi novel Beggars in Spain, where she explores what happens if some people are genetically engineered not to need sleep, and thus have an advantage over the rest of us.  Pills are certainly more egalitarian than genetic modification.

TBR: Whatever It Takes

On the plane last week, I finally had the chance to read Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.  Tough is a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and this is his expanded coverage of the Harlem Children's Zone, which he's reported on over the years.  Obama has said he wants to create 20 Promise Neighborhoods, modeled after the HCZ, so I thought it was important to read the book.

HCZ is an attempt to change the odds for kids in a poor neighborhood by providing an extensive range of services, everything from parenting classes to preschool to charter schools to summer programs.  What makes it different from most other attempts is:

• it tries to cover kids from birth through college, on the assumption that no program lasting just a few years is going to keep kids on the right track in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  This is in many ways an implicit rebuke to the extravagant claims sometimes made for  Head Start or  home visiting  programs.
• it tries to reach enough kids -- ideally it would be at a scale to reach every kid in the target neighborhood -- to change the culture of the neighborhood for the better.  Canada explicitly argues that the well regarded KIPP charter schools encourage students to separate themselves from the community as a whole

Tough doesn't hide that he's a believer in the HCZ approach.  In general, the book is overwhelmingly positive about Canada and the HCZ, although a long section is devoted to the struggles at the charter middle school they operate, and the choice to give up on the first class of students after two years of disappointing results. 

I think HCZ is a fascinating experiment, but Whatever It Takes isn't quite a fascinating book.  It's a solid book, well-reported, with a decent popular summary of the academic literature behind the theory.  But, fundamentally, the story of HCZ is really only in its first chapter, with no one knowing how it will turn out.  Geoffrey Canada's personal story is quite intriguing, but Canada himself has already written that book.

If you like to listen to the radio, I might suggest the coverage of this book on This American Life or Talk of the Nation instead.

DTWOF, SATC, WTF

The New York Times gave a heck of a review to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I love Bechdel's reaction. Dang is right.

I'm watching the movie of Sex and the City while I write this.  It's truly awful, and I say this as someone who was a fan of the series.  (I'm still watching it because I've got a pile of laundry to sort.)

I wonder who else falls into the intersection of people who read DTWOF and watch SATC.  While the characters are at close to polar opposites of the cultural spectrum (crunchy politically obsessed anti-materialist lesbians in Minnesota vs. fashion obsessed consumerist heterosexuals in search of true love in New York), the stories actually have a lot in common.  Both are soap operas, and both portray worlds where friendships between women endure over time in spite of relationships, jobs, kids, and everything else that life throws at you.  And, in spite of name of the show, most of the time SATC passes the Mo Movie Test -- women talk to each other about things other than men (usually shoes, but I still think that counts).

This year's books

I've developed a standing pattern of reporting each year on which books I've read from the NY Times list of notable books.

This year, I've read:

• A Most Wanted Man
  
• Unaccustomed Earth (don't seem to have blogged about this one, but I liked it a lot)
• Predictably Irrational (having read even more books about behavioral economics, this one stands out as particularly good)
• Trillion Dollar Meltdown (an important book, but not the most readable one)

I started reading The Lazarus Project, but couldn't get into it and so have given up on it.  I'm also still in the middle of Nixonland.

This year, from the 2007 list I read The Abstinence Teacher and The Maytrees.

So many books, so little time.

TBR: A Most Wanted Man

Today's book is A Most Wanted Man, by John LeCarre.  I'm not going to give away the ending, but I don't think it's possible to talk about the book without spoiling it a little bit, so if  that's going to make you crazy, stop reading now.

Like all of LeCarre's books, this is a spy novel, although only one of the main characters is a spy master in the sense of LeCarre's cold war novels.  A young man half-Russian, half-Chechen with a history of imprisonment in Russian and Turkish jails finds his way to Hamburg.  Is he a terrorist?  A humanitarian refuge?  Just an ordinary illegal immigrant?  The novel never shows his point of view, so the reader is as much at a loss as the people who move in his orbit -- an idealistic young lawyer, a pragmatic spymaster, a middle aged banker who is not as jaded as he thinks he is.

The characters were interesting, but never quite fully developed.  (The banker is the most fleshed out, and I think is LeCarre's stand-in in the novel.)  What interests LeCarre is the situation, and the philosophical questions: is the leader of a charitable organization where 5 percent of the money is diverted to terrorists entirely bad, or 95 percent good?  Does it matter?  (See today's headlines.)  Does old-fashioned spycraft still have a role to play in world of electronic eavesdropping and bombs on public transportation?

The ending approaches what a teacher of mine used to call a "beer truck ending" -- an ending that comes out of nowhere, without connection to what has come before.  But it's not a matter of laziness on LeCarre's part.  He's making a very specific point about the fact that we live in a world where people can get run over by beer trucks in spite of their best laid plans.

TBR: Mother on Fire

This week's book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf#%&ing Story about Parenting, by Sandra Tsing Loh.  I had high hopes for this book, as I generally enjoy Loh's essays in The Atlantic, in particular those about how she sent her kids to public school in Los Angeles and the world didn't collapse. 

Unfortunately, Loh's decision to send her kids to public school is the conclusion of this book, not the beginning.  Most of the book is an extended meditation on how terribly unfair it is that two artists don't earn enough to send their kids to fancy private schools.   I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic.

The book is based on her one-woman show, and it does have some funny moments.  My favorite was her discussion of how she suddenly became famous when she was fired from public radio for cursing on the air.  But it's not a good sign when, of the four humorous quotes on the back of the jacket, three of them show up in the first chapter.  And making fun of the pretentiousness of ultra-expensive liberal private schools is shooting fish in a barrel. 

TBR: The Host, Edgar Sawtelle

Because of the vagaries of school schedules, it happened that my kids both had school today, and I had the day off from work.  Since it was my birthday as well, when T. headed out to take N to preschool, I got back in bed and finished reading Stephenie Meyer's The Host.

I got The Host out of the library after reading Flea's review.  The only thing that I feel compelled to add is that I didn't think the premise was all that original, having read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series.  But it was well done, and kept me turning the pages.

The other novel I've read recently is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski.  This has been getting all sorts of rave reviews, but I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by it.   I could tell from the beginning that it was loosely based on Hamlet (characters named Trudy and Claude sort of give it away), but when the ghost of Edgar's father appeared, much of my willing suspension of disbelief went away.  Oh yeah, and the Ophelia character is a dog.

a strange tomorrow

D was speculating on what it would be like to have a personal robot, so I took my parental prerogative to insist on reading some of I, Robot to him.  I had forgotten how old the stories were.  The copy we have was Tony's mother's -- it's the first Signet paperback printing, dated 1956, with the cover reading "Man-like machines rule the world! Fascinating tales of a strange tomorrow."  The collection as a whole is copyright 1950, with the first story (Robbie) originally published in 1940 (and supposedly taking place in 1998).

The stories remain quite readable, although the vocabulary is a bit hard going for a 7 year old, even with me reading to him.   Seeing where, and how, Asimov's predictions were off is fascinating.  While the "primative" nursemaid robot of Robbie remains far out of reach, the "talking robot" that can answer factual questions is well within our capacity.

Even beyond the robots, there's a whole bunch of technologies that he assumed we'd have which we don't -- jet cars and space travel.  But at the same time that he's predicting these things, the concept of a miniature audio recorder seems to have escaped him: "I was taking it down verbatum on my pocket-recorder, trying not to show the knuckle-motions of my hand.  If you practice a bit, you can get to the point were you can record accurately without taking the little gadget out of your pocket."

SBR: Trillion Dollar Meltdown

Since I think I'll be a bit distracted on Tuesday night, I'm posting this week's book review tonight.  The book is The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, Charles R. Morris.

Morris wins a huge amount of credit for having written this book last winter, before everyone and her brother was talking about credit derivative swaps.  That said, his crystal ball wasn't perfect -- he spends a fair amount of time worrying about what will happen if other countries decide not to invest in the dollar anymore, while what seems to have happened is that everyone seems to have decided that the US Treasury is the one safe place to put your money in a world gone mad.

I definitely learned some useful things reading this book.  Nothing else I've read on the current economic collapse points out that there was a previous crash of collaterized mortgage obligations crash in 1994 when the Fed raised rate by 1/2 a percent.  But even more interesting than reading what Morris thought in February would happen in September would be to find out what he now thinks will be happening next March.

In the rush to get a full-length book out in a matter of months, the editing also suffered a bit.  Morris has some great lines: "That is the Greenspan Put: No matter what goes wrong, the Fed will rescue you by creating enough cheap money to buy you out of your troubles."  But at other times, he falls into a bit of jargon: "Similarly, the notional value of a derivative refers not to the derivative but to the size of the portfolio it is referencing."

Planet Money remains my pick for translating economist-speak into English. 

TBR: Paul Robeson

I usually don't do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we've been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I'd make a plug for Martin Duberman's wonderful biography of Robeson.  It's a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren't really communists, but Robeson wasn't in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there's no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn't shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn't listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It's an eclectic album that doesn't quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol' Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

what I'm reading

I've been slowly working my way through Nixonland, and I'm reading Whatever It Takes for work, but you want to know what I'm really reading? (other than about a hundred blogs, but those don't count, do they?)

• Down River, by John Hart.  This was my book group's pick, and since I was making it to book group for the first time in about six months, I figured I should read it.  I enjoyed it, and stayed up later than I should have in order to finish it, but can't say that it was a particularly memorable book.  The plot kept moving nicely and the writing stayed out of the way.

• Heart Shaped Box, by Joe Hill.  This is a book that I'd never have bought, since I'm not particularly a fan of horror stories.  But it showed up in the box of books that I got from Books4Barack and I started reading it, and got hooked.  Again, it's not great literature.  But it was a good read, and not too scary.  I was actually somewhat reminded of Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian stories.

I guess I needed some downtime.  That's ok.

TBR: Three Cups of Tea

This week's book is Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  It's the story of how Mortenson's failed attempt to climb K2 led to his receiving hospitality from the residents of a small village in Pakistan and to a promise to build them a school.  This promise eventually led him into founding the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and building dozens of schools in the hardest to reach corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It's a pretty amazing story, as Mortenson started out as a climber and a night nurse, without any particular expertise about that part of the world, building schools, or raising money.  But he plunged ahead anyway, and learned what he needed to do along the way.  And he did it more or less in obscurity, until 9/11 suddenly made a lot of people start to pay attention to that particular corner of the world.  Mortenson and Relin argue persuasively that the CAI's work does a great deal to create peace, in part by showing people that the US can do things other than drop bombs, but more significantly by providing an alternative to the radical madrassas that have filled the gaps left by the lack of government schools in much of Pakistan.

While it's an amazing story, I can't say it's an amazing book.  It focuses directly on Mortenson, without ever pulling back to provide a greater context about the culture and history of the area.  And while his successes in building the schools are improbable unto the point of miraculous, if you pick up the book, you probably know already that he's going to build the school, he won't get killed driving off a road, neither the Taliban nor the CIA will leave him in a jail cell to rot, etc.  So, while it was clearly very suspenseful to live through all of this, it's not that suspenseful to read.  My sister in law gave it to me last spring, and I read about half of it right away, and then got bogged down in the middle.

But read it anyway.  Because you'll learn a little about that part of the world, and because you'll regain some hope about one person's ability to make a difference.  And you'll be inspired to give what you can to CAI.  And to tell our elected officials to live up to their promises to help rebuild Afghanistan.

WBR: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

I seem to have fallen out of the routine of doing regular weekly book reviews.  I'm going to try to get back into the habit, since they often provoked good discussions, and the deadlines helped me control my bad habit of reading five books at once and not finishing any of them.

This week's book is The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.  The discussions of this book that I've seen mostly treat it as a dancing bear -- e.g. they don't criticize its skill in dancing, because the impressive thing is that it dances at all.  But I don't think the idea of rendering a serious topic as a comic* is such a radical idea.  So, I'm taking it seriously, and asking whether this is an effective use of the medium.

The first chapter of the book absolutely blew me away.  Telling the stories of the four flights that took off on the morning of September 11, 2001 as four parallel stories playing out horizontally across the page is a very effective move.  I've always been a little blurry on the timeline of that morning -- I spent it alternating between television and trying to contact people in NYC, and never sorted out what I was seeing live and what was replayed -- and this made sense of it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book didn't live up to this start.  The main problem is that, while the format is that of a comic, the rest of the book doesn't conform to Scott McCloud's definition in Understanding Comics -- the sequencing of the images does not contribute to the narrative; they simply illustrate the text.

Even as illustrations, the images don't always contribute to our understanding. I totally don't understand why the statement that Bin Ladin drew terrorists from at least 21 countries is followed by half a page of flags, rather than by a map of the world.  And in at least one case, the images confuse the story -- a discussion of what went wrong in the evacuation of the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing is accompanied by a picture of the towers on fire, an image from from 2001.

The book includes a forward from the chair and cochair of the 9/11 Commission, praising it strongly.  It is, by all accounts, a fair and honest abridgment of the report.  And I do think that making the key findings of the report accessible to people who would never pick up a 1000 page book is a valuable and important task.  But as a work of graphic narrative, it doesn't quite work.

* I'm calling it a comic because it's clearly not a graphic novel and we don't have a better word in English to use.  And because McCloud calls the whole category comics.

Infinite Jest

The title of the book Infinite Jest comes from a film within the story.  it's been a long time since I read the book, but as I remember it, people who come to see the movie see a projection of themselves sitting in the audience.  Nothing else happens, and eventually, some of the people give up and leave, but the film keeps going as long as a single person stubbornly sits in the auditorium, keeping the movie going.

My personal theory about the book is that Wallace intended it like the movie -- he didn't really expect that anyone would slog through the 1000 plus pages (including footnotes).  While he wrote darkly funny prose, and a lot of things happened in the book, it was just one thing after another, without a clear plot trajectory.  To be honest, you could  stop anywhere along the way and not miss too much.  Just as the audience had the power to end the movie by simply leaving, I think he was suggesting that his readers had the power to end the book just by saying "enough" and closing it.

This week, David Foster Wallace seems to have decided that he didn't need to find out what comes next in his story.  I didn't know the man personally, and I didn't even love his book.  But I feel diminished by his passing.

gone fishing

I'm busy getting ready to go on vacation, and the computer's going into the shop, so don't expect to hear from me for a couple of weeks.

I've got a stack of books that need to go back to the library before I head out of town, but what I've actually been reading is Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.  It's propaganda (the long lectures from the main character's history teacher wear thin), but fun propaganda, and unfortunately only slightly beyond what's believable.

First Tomato Soup

The tomatoes I planted this year did even worse than last year.  A few of the plants just got drowned in the torrential rains shortly after I transplanted them, and the one plant that got big and healthy hasn't produced much in the way of fruit.  I don't really get enough sun here for tomatoes, but I can't help myself. 

Today, we finally had a ripe tomato, and I let N pick it.  He came in with it and asked "Can we make First Tomato soup?"  This was, of course, a reference to one of the Voyage to the Bunny Planet books* by Rosemary Wells** where in the day that should have been, Claire gets to pick the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her First Tomato soup. 

I couldn't resist a request like that, but I also didn't want to waste one of my few homegrown tomatoes on something that could just as well be made out of store-bought tomatoes.  And I strongly suspected that neither of the boys would actually eat whatever I made.  So after a few minutes of googling, I made the simplest soup possible -- tomato, olive oil, and salt, pureed together without cooking.   D refused to taste it and N had just a few bites, but T and I enjoyed it.

*In each of these books, a young bunny has a terrible day, and then the Bunny Queen takes them to the Bunny Planet, where they get to experience the day that should have been.  Each of the days gives the child what they were really missing -- quiet and solitude, parental attention, warmth and affection.  The link is to a book that contains all three stories, but if you can find the out-of-print box set in a used bookstore or yard sale for less than the unreal prices being asked by Amazon sellers, I'd vote for that.  The books are larger than the classic Sendak Nutshell Library but only about half the size of a standard paperback and there's something about the small books fitting into their own little case that is absolutely irresistible for preschoolers.

**Yes, Rosemary Wells, better known as the creator of Max and Ruby.

What I'm watching, listening to, reading

I gave blood this afternoon and am feeling logy, so you get another bulleted post.

Landismom posted recently about giving up cable.  It made me realize that I haven't watched TV in months, not since the end of The Amazing Race and Heroes.  Here's some of what I am watching, etc:

• Right now, we've got Spiderman 3 playing.  Boy is it lousy.

• This weekend, I finally got a chance to see 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days.   It's painful, austere, brilliant, horrifying.  Watching it wasn't exactly enjoyable, but it's worth watching. 

• I've been listening to the podcasts of This American Life.  This week's episode, Switched at Birth, is truly haunting.  The women in question didn't find out about the switch until they were in their 40s.  But what makes the story absolutely bizarre is that one of the mothers realized the switch right away, but didn't do anything about it.  This could have been just a freakshow, but the interviewer has such empathy for everyone involved that it works.

• Dr Horrible's Sing a Long Blog is pretty funny.  Except when it's not.  Don't try to watch when your kids are anywhere in earshot.

• I just read The Miracle at Speedy Motors.  Fun, nothing profound.

• I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, and got about 200 pages into it (it's 600 pages long) when it needed to go back to the library.  One of the problems is that's just too heavy to haul back and forth on the metro every day.  So I bought it in eReader format -- I figure this will be a good test of whether reading books on the Touch is really something I'd do.

Updated: Meant to ask -- what am I missing by not watching TV?  Anything I should be adding to the TiVO?  (I assume I'll watch at least some of the Olympics.)

TBR: (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents

This week's book is (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, by Nan Mooney.  In many ways, it covers the same ground as The Trap, Strapped, and  The Two-Income Trap-- how families today are squeezed by the high costs of housing, child care, health care, and college loans. 

The only problem is that -- as we've gone over here before -- there's not actually a lot of evidence that this generation is overall worse off than their parents were, and if their parents weren't college graduates, they're probably earning a lot more.  Mooney deals with this by narrowing her subjects down to what she calls "the professional middle class" -- those with college degrees, but excluding doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, and anyone else who is actually making decent money.  She focuses on teachers, social workers, journalists, artists, workers for non-profit organizations, etc.   

I wanted to like this book, but I found myself muttering that the subjects seemed to believe in Marjorie Williams' "no fault fairy."  I'm not sure who they think promised them that there would be no tradeoffs between interesting work, living in expensive vibrant urban areas, and living a middle class life with homeownership and a secure retirement.  Easy credit may make it possible to postpone these tradeoffs (and may even make things worse by thus increasing the supply of people who are willing to take interesting jobs at non-sustainable wages), but the existence of these tradeoffs isn't something new. 

TBR: The Explosionist

When I wrote about Farthing, I wondered why so many alternate histories take World War II as their point of departure from our world.  In The Explosionist, Jenny Davidson takes a different tack.  This story is set in the 1930s on the possible eve of a second world war, but the two sides are an apparently fascist united Europe (unified by a Napoleon who won at Waterloo) and a "Hanseatic League" of Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia.  Oh, and Sophie, the heroine, is a somewhat skeptical medium who really can talk to the spirits of the dead.

I ordered this book because I read Davidson's terrific blog, Light Reading, and her broad reading and lively interest in the world shows through.  The plot of the book drew me in, and kept me turning the pages, but it's the subtle jokes and suggestions about the world that I expect will keep with me -- touches like the Wittgenstein Uncertainty Principle, and the phone having been invented by Alexsandr Bell.  (A main topic of the book is terrorist attacks -- which certainly existed well before the 1930s, although I'm not sure when they started being called "terrorist" attacks -- the English word itself apparently dates to the French revolution and the reign of terror.)

Until I clicked through from Davidson's blog to Amazon, I didn't realize that The Explosionist was being sold as a young adult novel.  It almost stopped me from buying the book, but I'm glad it didn't.  Davidson says that she didn't particularly think of it as YA, but they were the editors most interested in it.  She says that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was one of her mental models, but it actually reminds me far more of the Sally Lockhart books.

My one complaint is that the girl on the cover has long hair, and the first page of the book says that Sophie has "straight black hair bobbed short with a fringe to keep it tidy."

TBR: The Abstinence Teacher

This week's book is a novel, Tom Perrotta's latest, The Abstinence Teacher.  Like Little Children, the pleasure of this book is mostly how Perrotta captures the realities of daily suburban life.  In this one, the characters are a little older, on their second marriages, wondering whether it's possible to connect with their teenage children.  Perrotta occasionally loses his lightness of touch and relies on crude stereotypes (the stay at home mother who used to be a biomedical researcher working on autoimmune disorders but now is "playing a lot of tennis") but mostly his characters are both believable and likable.

The plot of the book on first glance is ripped from the headlines -- a sex ed teacher forced to teach an "abstinence" curriculum that she doesn't believe in, a soccer coach who causes waves by praying with his players.  But Perrotta doesn't really do much with the plot --- it's just an excuse to spend some time exploring the two main characters and what makes them tick.

In some ways it's a slight book,  but I was sufficiently engrossed in it that I missed my stop on the train coming home this evening. 

WBR: The Big Squeeze

Steven Greenhouse covers the labor beat for the New York Times, and The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker is his summary of the state of working America.  It's not a pretty picture.  He describes a world of layoffs, unionbusting, sexual harassment, workplace injuries, and broken promises.  These issues are what I work on professionally, so little of it was news to me, but Greenhouse brings the abstract issues to life with individual stories.  And even I was surprised at the ubiquity with which Greenhouse found that store managers forged timekeeping records and forced workers to work off the clock in order to cheat them of overtime and keep labor costs down.

Unfortunately, while the topic is important, I have trouble imagining anyone reading it all the way through but those who are already convinced.  The unremitting grimness of the book is only slightly broken by a chapter on model employers, such as Costco, Patagonia, and Cooperative Home Care Associates.  The last chapter of the book offers some possible solutions, all of which would be positive steps, but which either don't seem up to the magnitude of the challenge (enforcing wage and hour laws more strongly) or are far easily said than done (expand health coverage to all while bringing costs under control).

The Maternal is Political

Today's book review is part of a MotherTalk tour.  That means I got a free copy of the book and an Amazon gift certificate to review the book.  But, given the topic, I'm confident that I would have reviewed the book in any case.

The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, is a collection of essays by women writers about "the intersection of motherhood and social change."  Some of the authors are famous, either as politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto), activists (Cindy Sheehan), or writers (Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Anna Quindlen), but most of them are by women you've never heard of, talking about how their motherhood has affected their political activity.  In most cases, the essays are about how mothering has inspired them to take action, but some of them are about the struggles to balance the demands on their time from their families and their activism (the essay by Valerie Weaver-Zercher about "Peace March Sans Children" made me grin in recognition).

One of the things I liked about the book was the wide range of issues covered,  Several of the essays are about opposing war as a mother's issue, but others touch on abortion, homeschooling, public schooling, religious freedom, disability, environmentalism, sexual harassment, adoption and more. Of course, I have some quibbles about the topics that are missing... I find it hard to believe that there's not one about health care (Flea could have done a great job with that one) and in general, I think economic justice issues were under-represented.  (And yes, I should have submitted an essay... I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I posted the call for submissions here when it came out.)

In spite of that long list of issues, the voices were different enough that the book never felt like a litany of complaints.  Anna Quindlen's piece on being pregnant in New York made me laugh, and two essays made me cry -- Cindy Sheehan's anguished farewell to activism to "try to regain some of what I have lost... before it [the system] totally consumes me or any more people that I love" and Kathy Briccetti's joyful account of her family's second-parent adoption.

I also liked the recognition that there are many ways to be political.  A few of the writers were elected officials, and some engaged in politics by writing letters to the editor, going on protest marches, or submitting testimony to their state legislators.  But many of them were political in everyday ways -- raising feminist sons and daughters, choosing to reduce use of hazardous chemicals and natural resources, speaking up about equality in personal encounters, standing up to a man harassing another woman (who is someone else's daughter), helping out another mother by taking care of her kids when she's in a crunch.  I think those examples may really help people who feel like they don't have time to be politically active -- or that nothing they do will make a difference -- to think of ways to incorporate activism into their lives.

My one real complaint about the book is that there are two essays about personal relationships with people who are (gasp!) Republicans, but no actual Republicans -- or even conservatives -- in it.  I would have liked to read an essay by someone whose experiences as a mother made them an anti-abortion activist.  I would have loved to read an essay by Cathy McMorris Rodgers on the challenges and insights of serving in Congress as the mother of an infant with Down's syndrome.  I don't know if Strong made a deliberate choice to only include liberal voices, or if it's a function of the way the call for essays was marketed, but I think it limits the audience for the book unnecessarily.

odds and ends

Some quick reviews and comments:

• D and I have been reading The Phantom Tollbooth as his bedtime story.  I had great fond memories of this book from my childhood and was eager to share it with D.  We both enjoyed it, although not quite as much as I'd hoped.  He didn't get a lot of the puns, which probably means that it might have been better to wait a year or two.  And I was surprised in re-reading it to discover the near total lack of female characters.  (The exceptions are the Which, the Soundkeeper, and Rhyme and Reason, who need to be rescued, of course.)  My recommendation if you're reading it out loud is to go ahead and make Tock female.  Next up is The Champion of Merrimack County.

• I got sent a review copy of Snacktime! the new kids album from Barenaked Ladies.  I'm a fan of BNL and am always up for new kids music, so it seemed like a good fit.  It's a fun album, similar in silliness to Here Come the ABCs'.  N particularly likes 789, and D likes Popcorn and The Ninjas (although he protests that he's a ninja and he's not "unspeakably violent").  I don't think there's anything on the album that's as inspired as If I Had a Million Dollars, but I wouldn't want to throw it out the window after a long car trip (and that's actually high praise for kids' music).

• I've been getting Cookie magazine for a few months (I was offered a chance to get it for airline miles).  It's certainly nothing profound, but it's entertaining, and I think the reviews of kids books, games, etc. are interesting.  The fashion layouts are pretty absurd -- I don't spend $70 for a shirt for myself, and I'm sure not spending that kind of money on clothes for my kids. But they've decided that if I get this, I must want Lucky as well, which is a total waste of paper as far as I'm concerned.

I'm listening to the political news while I post.  I wouldn't have believed it two years ago, if you had told  me that on the night that Obama clinched the nomination, I'd be feeling bittersweet.

TBR: Predictably Irrational

This week's book is Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.  It's a quick read, but has far reaching ramifications.  It's about how people aren't as rational as economists think we are.  That's not particularly surprising, but Ariely goes on to argue that people are irrational in systematic-- predictable -- ways, and to explain the elegant experiments that psychologists and behavioral economists have developed to tease these out.  So, let's look at some of the examples:

• People are hugely biased for the idea of getting something for "free."  They'll take the crappy thing for free over the good thing for a modest cost.

• People don't know what things are really worth, and so anchor to arbitrary comparisons.  People often won't buy the most expensive thing on the menu, but they'll buy the next most expensive thing.  I was particularly impressed by the studies that showed that if the researchers asked people if a percentage was higher or lower than the last two digits of their social security number, and then had them guess at a concrete number, there was a strong correlation between the guess and those last two digits.  Based on this, I'd guess that including a high "buy it now" price pulls up the value of bids on ebay, even when no one uses the buy it now option.  (Although I don't know if it would pull them up to offset the increased fee.)

• When you ask people to choose among three things, two of which are similar (but one is clearly better than the other) and one is very different, they're more likely to choose the better of the two similar choices.  It's hard to tell if an apple is better than an orange, but a fresh apple is clearly better than a rotten apple -- and the presence of the rotten apple stand out against the orange.

All this isn't just entertaining, but has pretty significant policy implications.  Orthodox economists -- for all their pessimistic reputation -- actually tend towards a Panglossian view of the world -- that we're in the very best of all possible worlds, or at least that the world couldn't be made better for anyone without making it worse for someone else.  This is because economists take pretty seriously the idea of revealed preference: the idea that you can tell what agents in a free market prefer by what they chose, given the options that are available to them.

Ariely more or less blows up this idea, by showing studies where given choices A, B and C, no one chose option B, but taking away option B dramatically changes the distribution of choices between A and C.  The bad news is that this means that lots of people are making suboptimal choices all the time; the good news is that it means there's room for improvements without making anyone worse off.  The problem is that there's a lot of resistance -- for good reasons -- to having public institutions adopt the strategies of direct marketers...

Somewhat related books that I've read recently:

• Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowan (of Marginal Revolution).  While Cowan is much more of a traditional economist than Ariely, I'm not sure you'd be able to tell that by this book.  Cowan's big take-away here is that economics is about scarcity, and so the key is always to figure out what's the resource that's scarce (and it's often attention or time, rather than money).
• Your Money and Your Brain, by Jason Zveig.  Specifically focusing in on why we behave irrationally when it comes to investing.  I thought the first chapter or two was fascinating, but then it got repetitive, and I didn't finish the book before it was due back to the library.  Maybe a good one to give to your brother who thinks that he's figured out a way to beat the markets.

WBR: Life Work

This week's book is Life Work, by Donald Hall.  When I agreed to review The Ten Year Nap, the blog tour organizers sent me links to some resources, including a review that said: "In fact, the novel, like poet Donald Hall's memoir "Life Work," is a passionate paean to the redeeming power of purposeful occupation."  This sent me off looking for Hall's book.

Life Work is a short book, really just an extended essay.  In unfussy but eloquent prose, Hall writes about his daily routine, and connects it to the lives of his ancestors, in particular his maternal grandfather, in whose house he lives.  For him, contentment is "work so engrossing that you do not know you are working," what others might call "flow."  He writes about waking up in the morning, wondering if it's close enough to 5 am that he can reasonably get up and start working on his poems.  He criticizes the idea that only what is paid should be considered valuable.

Hall writes with love about his ancestors, and their work, especially his grandparents who were farmers in a time and place where farmers could still do a bit of everything -- raise cows for dairy, chickens for pullets and eggs, maple syrup, enough vegetables to eat year round.  Except for buying store-bought cloth, their lives were closer to the prototype of the Ingalls family than to modern farmers.  And he contrasts them with his father, who spent his life doing the books for his family's dairy business, and hating every minute of it.

I still can't decide whether I believe that Hall's grandparents were as content with their lives of unremitting labor as he makes them out to be.  He writes that his grandmother had planned to be a medical missionary until her mother died, and then she set all those plans aside to keep house for her father and later her husband and children, without a word of complaint.  I think there's a difference between being not unhappy and being happy, and it's hard to know where they would have fallen.  And for all of Hall's romanticization of his grandparents' lives, he doesn't have any interest in taking up farming himself, unlike his friend Wendell Berry.

In any case, it's a lovely little book, filled with Hall's love for his work, his wife, and his family.

The Ten-Year Nap

Today's book is The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer.  I'm reviewing it as part of a MotherTalk blog book tour.

The book follows the lives of four stay-at-home mothers who have been friends for years, at a point when they're sort of re-examining their lives and wondering what happens next.  The book is mostly set in Manhattan, with a nod to a neighboring suburb, and the characters are all the sort of upper-middle class professionals whose life choices wind up as long articles in the New York Times.  But Wolitzer isn't of this milieu herself, and the book isn't full of the brand name references that many such books drop in order to establish their accuracy -- when brands are mentioned, they're generally made-up (I think).  She's less interested in capturing the precise details of the lifestyle than in exploring what drives people to make the choices they do.

I disliked the start of the book: "All around the country, the women were waking up.  Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song..."  The move from "the women" to a subset of women -- those who don't have to go to work, who aren't already sitting bleary eyed with a nursing infant as the sun rises -- jarred me, and made me ready to dislike the book as a whole.

But I actually mostly enjoyed the book.  Once Wolitzer settles down to the individual characters and stops talking in generalities, her writing skills shine through.  And unlike Rachel Cusk, she seems to have some affection for her characters.  While the plot is fairly thin, and overly driven by random external events, I was perfectly happy to spend a few hours in the company of Amy, Karen and Jill.  (And Roberta, but in thinking over the book, I can't remember any of the sections from her perspective...)

I noticed in this interview in the NY Times last week that Wolitzer said "I’m not writing the Big Book o’ Motherhood and Work."  I think that's a bit disingenuous, as the book has a series of short vignettes of other people's lives that only fit into the book as quick looks into the role that work plays in people's lives --  Amy's mother discovering feminism and her life's work as a writer,  Nadia Comanici thinking that gymnastics isn't work at all, someone's aunt who is an assistant to Margaret Thatcher, feeling like she's part of something important even as she gets verbally abused, a minor character enjoying the camaraderie and energy of working in a dead end casino job.

At some point in the book one of the characters concludes "work doesn't make you interesting; interesting work makes you interesting."  One of the strengths of the book is that for all that Wolitzer comes down on the side of work (and I think she does), she also recognizes that most jobs aren't all that exciting and wonderful.

***

There's an interesting discussion of finding your passion going on in the comments on Ask Moxie's post on this book.

Clarke's 3rd law

... as a Venn diagram, at indexed.

T. showed me an article last week that pointed out that there's a reason that geostationary satellites are in what's called the Clarke orbit. 

TBR: Falling Behind

I thought about calling this post, "the book that killed my blog."  I read Robert Frank's Falling Behind a couple of weeks ago, and have been wanting to post about it ever since, but I'm not sure I can do it justice, especially when I'm tired and distracted.  Although it's a short book (just over 100 pages, paperback), there's a lot of ideas packed into it.  So let's see if I can unpack them.

The main idea in the book is that people's well being is determined by their relative income as well as their absolute income, and by how far behind they are as well as their ordinal ranking.  I think this is a relatively non-controversial statement if you're talking about people at the very bottom of the income distribution -- most people recognize that the poor in the U.S. are still very well off compared to much of the world's population, but suffer from their low relative income and status.  But it's a pretty controversial statement to say that the very high wealth of Bill Gates or Wall Street financiers makes everyone else worse off.

So, probably the first third of the book goes to justify that statement.  This leads Frank into some interesting detours -- he first has to justify that "happiness" is something meaningful, and that "having more money" is not synonymous with "being better off."  He then spends a good chunk of space arguing that the reason that other people's wealth makes us worse off is not envy, or conscious attempts to "keep up with the Jones'" but rather the result of  context affecting our perception of what's adequate and what's reasonable.

One example he gives is that the existence of $2,000 grills with all sorts of bells and whistles makes it seem more reasonable for him to spend $300 on a new one, even though his old one that cost $40 had done a perfectly adequate job.  I can verify that I could see this happening as we made our choices about our kitchen. 

In the second half of the book, Franks argues that positional concerns cause people to spend more and more of their money on things where ranking rather than absolute levels of consumption matter.  But this makes everyone worse off, because if everyone doubles their spending, the ranking is left unchanged, only people have less money to spend on other things (or less free time).  I thought this made a lot of sense, although I'm still not entirely convinced by his arguments about what is and what is not a positional good.

Frank poses a pair of thought experiments about this, and I'd be interested in reading some responses.  He asks, which would you prefer:

1) World A, where you live in a 4,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 6,000 square foot house OR World B, where you live in a 3,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 2,000 square foot house.

2)  World C, where you have 4 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 6 weeks, OR World D where you have 3 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 2 weeks.

I think I'll stop here, and come back to the discussion after I've gotten some responses in the comments.

TBR: The Missing Class

Today's book is The Missing Class, by Katherine Newman (author of Chutes and Ladders and No Shame in My Game) and Victor Tan Chen.  By "The Missing Class," the authors mean the not-quite-poor, those with family incomes between 100% and 200% of the poverty line.  And in particular, they focus on the experiences of several New York City families who fall in this category.  They explore the things that help them rise up (mostly getting a better paying job, or adding another wage-earner to the family, homeownership in one case) and the things that drag them down (predatory lending, poor health, legal troubles, divorce and separation).

Although Newman and Chen emphasize repeatedly that these families are not "poor," the book in fact covers much of the same ground as David Shipler's The Working Poor, as many of those families also had income above the official federal poverty level, which pretty much everyone agrees is outdated.   If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with Shipler's book, which covers a greater geographic and social range.  (200 percent of the poverty level is a lot poorer in NYC than in much of the country, and I'd also like to have learned about people who were slipping into the "missing class" from above, as well as those struggling to stay out of poverty.) One of the new contributions of the book is the discussion of No Child Left Behind, and how the combination of overworked, time-deprived parents, mediocre to lousy schools, and high stakes testing comes down hard on the children of the working poor.

My understanding is that the reason Newman and Chen want to draw the distinction between the "missing class" and "poor" people is that they want to draw attention to how these people often fall into the cracks, earning too much to benefit from means-tested public benefit programs.  I agree that's an important policy issue.  But I worry that their discussion creates an impression that the benefits for the poor are more generous than they really are.  And it doesn't acknowledge how much middle income people benefit from government subsidies for employer provided benefits, especially health care, and the mortgage interest deduction.

Picky eater, sneaky foods

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.

The World Without Us

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.

Daring and dangerous

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.

What I've read

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.

The Golden Compass

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.