What the Dog Saw

What the Dog Saw is the first Malcolm Gladwell book I've ever finished.

I'm familiar with his work -- I've read excerpts from The Tipping Point and I use some of its philosophies on a daily basis in my classroom.  I've skimmed Outliers when I read Dweck's Mindset last year since they both deal with the psychology of success.  Blink has been on my list of books to read when I finally have time for longer than I want to admit.

I didn't even know this existed until my older brother received it as a birthday gift.  He didn't seem terribly excited, so I picked up the book and skimmed the back while we watched him open the rest of his equally mundane gifts.

Except that something about the back of this book sounded awesome.

Gladwell is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, which is known for its strong writing staff and eclectic audience.  I haven't touched it in years, to be honest -- I barely have time for what I read now, let alone adding a behemoth of fresh reading every month.

But as it turns out, the magazine may be worth my time.

This book's content is a series of essays Gladwell originally wrote for The New Yorker.  Some are older, published as far back as 1994, while others are newer, closer to 2012 or 2013.  Some cover topics I've never once given a second thought, like Ron Popeil and his makeover of home shopping.  Some cover topics of great personal interest, like hiring the right teachers to be successful, or how much being smart actually matters in the real world.

And then others, like why it is we have a million types of mustard but only one type of ketchup, are so off the wall and unusual that I can't help but be curious.

The beauty of Malcolm Gladwell's writing lies in its abilities to connect ideas that I had never once considered, such as the connections between the recruitment process for college quarterbacks into the NFL and how we recruit and hire teachers for America's public schools, or why banning certain breeds of dogs, like pit bulls, represents a mistaken application of generalization.  There is so much detail poured into each of these essays (there are close to 20) that I am almost blown away -- each must have taken months to construct and write, and each represents a wealth of knowledge and insight into the topics at hand.

Some, like one about Enron that questions how badly the company truly falsified its earnings, or the one analyzing stock market losses and gains as it discusses Nassim Taleb's analysis of risk and its application for the economy, introduce entirely new information.  (I found that, like The Sixth Extinction, I was incredibly grateful for my smartphone.)  I learned so much! I've never understood the stock market very well, for example, but the careful attention to audience and detail meant that, with a little concentration and research, I could suddenly converse on the subject with others.  That's the mark of a truly well put together piece right there: It is not only thought-provoking and hard to put down, but it is teaching those who read it and inspiring them to take that knowledge further.

Gladwell may be one of the smartest minds alive right now.  To have the mind that can make those kinds of connections! To be able to hold all that information in your head at once! I love what I do, and there have been moments in my life when I've revealed what I'm thinking about to my husband and he says something to the effect of, "I can't believe your brain works like that!"  And in those moments, I am just the tiniest bit like Malcolm Gladwell.  

Maybe, with a lot more learning and perhaps 50 more years of reading in my spare moments between grading and teaching, I can be a writer like him, the kind of writer I'd like to be.  

It's weird in a way -- as soon as I started reading more of his work and mentioning it to others, his name and work started popping up all over the place.  My mom has read and loved Outliers, about success.  My dad has followed his essays online for years.  My librarian friend at school loves The Tipping Point.  I'd never once had a conversation with any of these people about his work, and yet some of the people I interact with the most were reading him.  

What else out there might be like that?  I lugged home every one of his books I could find from my school library, and I'll easily be reading them from now until the New Year.  What other amazing, new, exciting things could I learn about, if only I knew what to ask for? 

With that in mind, I think nonfiction will be my reading of choice for a while.  There's so much out there, so much weird and wonderful truth waiting to be discovered, and I can't wait to dive in.  

The Martian

I love this fucking book. 

Like seriously.  I love it.  I want to have its tiny, accident-prone, red-haired babies. 

This is the first book in months to inspire such feelings in me, where I just want to sit and read all day and do nothing else.  I’ve been squeezing in extra minutes everywhere just to make it happen – ten minutes here and there on my plan time, during the 6 minutes I have between classes during the day, the 30 seconds it takes my coffee to reheat because I’ve abandoned it in favor of Mark Watney…

I love The Martian. 

I have always loved to read, but let me be honest: I don’t have a lot of free time lately, and most of what I’ve been reading the last few months has been fanfiction. 

Not a ton of pride there.  I’ve learned to count it as a “real” book since that tends to happen when you invest a truly disgusting number of hours into reading hundreds of thousands of words.  But a lot of people, myself pre-March 2015 included, don’t really count that.  Check my list – I haven’t read near the number of ‘actual’ books in the past six months as this time last year. 

The Martian changed all that.  

I read The Martian in about six days.  For most, that’s ridiculously fast for close to 400 pages.  It’s not for me -- and I’m not trying to brag; that’s just how fast I read.  If I made the time, I could probably read War and Peace in about a week too. *shrugs*

Anyway, speed isn’t a good indicator of how much I enjoyed a book.  But dreaming about a book… that’s a pretty strong, honest indicator, and I can happily report that every night since finishing The Martian has been full of vague impressions of astronauts and red dust. 

In a way, I’m glad I don’t remember the specifics – The Martian is, after all, a survival story, man vs. nature at its most foreign and harsh.  I really don’t want to actively ‘live’ the accident that strands Watney on Mars nor any of the wide variety of events, accidents, mistakes, and just plain bad luck that contributes to his barely eked out existence on the red planet. 

But if my brain is so worked up over this story that it has to work things out while I sleep, then clearly: it’s an awesome book. 

I so don’t want to spoil anything either, especially given that the movie just came out, so I’m going to try really, really hard not to.  Spoiler Alerts will be posted if I just can’t help myself. 

No one reading this should expect this book to be stupid, but I was blown away by just how smart it actually is. 

No, scratch that: this book is fucking brilliant. 

There’s no question that there’s just a disgusting amount of math, but it’s all pretty accurate.  I admit, after about 50 pages, I gave up doing the equations myself and just trusted that Watney was right, but I suspect that if someone was in fact stranded on Mars with identical supplies and a copy of this book, they might be able to survive. 

Part of this is also a challenge for readers.  I found myself trying to think of what he could use next, what would then make it possible for him to pull off whatever insane trick he was about to try.  There’s no way, of course, that I could have figured out that he was going to try to use spare rocket fuel to make water. I just don’t have the technical education to even know what, exactly, is in rocket fuel (big surprise, English teacher and all).  But occasionally, I could get an idea about it, and once – when something goes wrong and he needs to find something flammable, fast – I actually got the solution about 2 sentences before Watney said it!

I was so proud of myself.  Like, so proud I did a little happy dance in my living room. 

The character development of Mark Watney himself syncs beautifully with the intelligence displayed by the novel.  Weir has crafted Watney into a likeable character full of dark humor and searing brainpower, and every time something goes wrong (which is all the time), I wanted to fall over and cry until Watney himself cheered me up as his own expense. 

After the first maybe six pages, which he spends bitching endlessly about his predicament, Watney turns into a surprisingly optimistic character.  For a while, I was suspicious of this: How could it possibly be realistic that this guy just didn’t give up and say “Hm… trapped on Mars with almost no chance of survival? Fuck it!” 

There is of course that typical “survival of the human spirit” thing that I could cite here.  I’m not going to do that, perhaps because I’m too pessimistic to buy into it.  Watney is, at times, pessimistic as well, but his personality buoys him in those moments with sarcastic and wonderful humor that could crack even the darkest moods. 

Like this, for example:

I swear, I will update this right side up just as soon as I figure out how to fix it. It's right side up on MY computer screen :) 

Weir actually discusses that potentially unrealistic personality in his book.  When NASA figures out that Watney is indeed still alive on Mars, the directors talk about whether or not he has the mental fortitude to survive, and Kapoor says that he was in fact chosen as an astronaut due to his personality.  His humor, his adaptability, and his intelligence all combined to create an astronaut who would get along with everyone without creating conflict in the group.  And this makes sense; why would NASA want to send up an astronaut who’s an asshole?  These people are trapped in small, tight spaces for months, and required by their jobs to rely on each other for every bit of their survival.  They have to be relatively pleasant, or everything is going to fail. 

I may be biased, but I think his personality makes perfect sense.  And boy, did I enjoy his Martian-antics.  

What I found perhaps more unrealistic than Watney's character was the global effort to bring him home.  Watney spends about two paragraphs close to the end of the book pondering this very effort:  Would people, in fact, unite to try to bring a stranded astronaut home?  After all, the theoretical cost must be in the hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars -- few countries just have that kind of money lying around waiting to be spent on one man.  

But, as Watney points out, people want to help, no matter the cost, and they are willing to selfless things to do so.  They line up to donate blood after accidents, donate money from around the world after natural disasters, travel long distances to devote time to helping others in need.  

Could it be true? Would the world join together to bring one astronaut home?

Honestly: I’m not sure.  Maybe? It’s a disgusting amount of money (part of the never-ending stream of math! Hooray math! *sarcasm*), but the drive to help others is strong.  The urge to rescue people is strong, and the idea of someone being actually stranded on a foreign planet… it would be such a strange, new, and truly horrific situation that I bet the money would be found, somewhere, to make a rescue happen. 

Perhaps the world is brighter than I want to see sometimes.  

(FYI: I feel like this isn’t a spoiler – all you have to do is watch the movie trailer, and poof! You know they’re attempting a rescue.  That’s all I’ll say though.)

I also just finished The Martian Chronicles about two weeks before I read this book, which was an interesting juxtaposition to The Martian. 

The Martian Chronicles is old-school, Asimov-style science fiction.  It’s interesting, yes, but like a lot of classic sci-fi, it’s rather dry.  Bradbury spends a lot of time world building and less on character itself, whereas Weir has delved deep into the human psyche when thrown into this situation and the futile nature of the man vs. nature conflict. 

In that way, The Martian is part of the new generation of sci-fi writing.  I realize it’s not actually a new generation, but I don’t read a lot of sci-fi so I’m not altogether sure what this genre has looked like, writing-wise in the last ten years.  However, my husband reads and writes a lot of sci-fi, and he informs me that it’s a relatively neglected genre.  There are lots of publications, sure, but not a lot of attention.  The fact that The Martian is one of the most popular novels of the last few years is a big deal for the genre.    

I’m not always up to date on current popular books, so I was kind of excited to finish this just in time for the movie.  My students know I read it – it’s been on my “Currently Reading” sign for a few weeks, even though I really just dove into the meat of it in the last few days – and they’ve asked me about it.

Frankly, it’s hard to recommend simply because it’s so filled with language.  Seriously.  The opening line says “fuck” after all (check out my first line – see what I did there?? *self-five*), and there are potential ramifications if parents ask who recommended such a ‘vulgar’ book to their children.  Much as I love it, I don’t want to get in trouble.  (Although, truly, it’s not inappropriate other than the occasional curse, so I’d be okay recommending it to my seniors. J) 

Curses aside, I desperately wish I could have kids read it.  The Martian might be the most perfect example of man vs. nature since Moby Dick, and lord knows I’m not teaching that (17 pages about sunrises? No thank you!).  Examples of that kind of book are just so few and far between, and often they require a lot of back explaining to make sense to my students.  I could talk about Into Thin Air, for example, but I would have to explain the whole plot.  The Martian, being thus introduced into pop culture as a movie, is much more accessible.  I can reference it and they’ll understand, and that’s really what I need. 

But it would be really cool to teach.

One last thing: I was looking for illustrative pictures and stumbled upon basically the coolest website ever: All the real-Mars pictures of the sites from the book. 

http://www.uahirise.org/martian/

Here’s the thing: there’s a detailed series of maps at the beginning of the book, but it’s still hard to really picture it all since it is, after all, set on Mars.  Plus, I forgot the maps were there before long – the rush of reading and the tension of the book meant that the maps got totally abandoned. 

And really, this is the resource I WISH I’d had while I was actually reading.  The real NASA pictures of all the places Weir is describing, the areas where Watney lives and travels over, are far more impressive than any black and white line map could ever be. 

This site also has some articles linked to it, and those are good reads as well.  There are some minor examples in landscape; for example, apparently the Acidalia Planitia, where the Ares III (and later, Watney) is located, is actually much more rocky and rugged than Weir describes.  But honestly, if those are all the mistakes of this book are, then who cares?  It doesn’t diminish the story at all, so I’m not worried about it. 

It’s far cooler to open up the pictures and see Mars, regardless of if the rocks are in the right places. 

Ok, I swear I’m almost done. 

I’m also super excited to go see the movie.  I purposefully put off seeing it opening weekend because I hadn’t finished the book yet, but I’ve heard stellar reviews thus far. 

Because I’m that guy, I know it can’t quite live up to the book, and there are some misleading moments in the trailer that make me a little nervous about seeing it.  For example:  The trailer has a moment where he’s narrating about his family and it shows a mom and a kid.  Nope. He’s single – he actually talks about ¾ way through the book that he’s hoping this whole “survived on Mars” thing will help him get laid, which is hilarious.

Or that moment where Matt Damon goes “surprise!” and the whole of Mission Control cheers? Also nope. 

Even so… I’m not sure I care.  The book was so good! I can’t pass up the chance to see that on the big screen, not when it’s Ridley Scott directing and Matt Damon as Watney. 

I can always count on xkcd to be smart and hilarious. 

My personal assessment is this: the movie is either going to be high-tension with a fabulous dark humor side, or it’s just going to be two hours of watching Matt Damon do math. 

Either way, frankly, I’m in. 

(Hey! I think I got all the way through this without any spoilers! Hooray! As a celebration, I’m going to see The Martian J)

I Do Love a Good Book

In a flurry of fanfare, Go Set a Watchman was published this past summer.  It remains a hot topic of conversation this school year, and I've had multiple people ask either if I've read it or if I'm planning on reading it.

I'm not sure about my answer yet, but one of these conversations really stood out to me.

My husband comes from a family of readers.  Both of his parents love to read, and they read all sorts of stuff -- his father reads a lot of mystery/thriller stuff, and his mom reads a lot of realistic fiction and educational stuff.  Between the two, I always have someone to talk with about books when I visit.

My mother in law in particular likes to stay up on current best-sellers, so over this summer she bought and read Go Set a Watchman.  I was on the phone with her around when she started reading it, and she asked if I was planning on reading it.

I was honest: I'm not really sure.  I didn't love To Kill a Mockingbird (which continues to scandalize my fellow Language Arts teachers :)), so I didn't have a lot of interest in its sequel.  On top of that, I'd read a lot of the controversy so I wasn't sure how I felt about reading something that Harper Lee, perhaps, didn't really want published.

My opinion basically became this: If I heard from enough people I trusted that it was good, I'd probably read it.  So I asked what she thought.  Like so many others, she wasn't sure -- she liked parts, but couldn't resist comparing it to Mockingbird, against which it of course fell short.

At the end of this conversation, like so many others, I told her, "Well, when you're finished with it, I'll borrow your copy and try it."

"Oh, no! You can't," she said rather sadly. "It's on my Kindle."  

I realized then just how much I miss real books.

There's something about a hard copy of a book for me.  I'm a very hands-on reader: I dog-ear pages, underline quotes, add post-its, all that stuff as I read.  I want to remember important lines, moments I loved, language I found beautiful as I was experiencing it.  I cry on my books, leaving smears and wrinkles where emotions really got to me.  The bottoms of pages are torn where I was in a rush to get to the next page.  My books are not just that; they are the experience of my reading, too.

And the experience of being handed a copy of a well-loved book... there's nothing like it.  I love knowing that someone trusted me with their favorite book.  I learn so much about them -- which events or pages they found important, what quotes they loved, and in doing so, I come to know them better.  When, on our first date, my husband gave me a copy of his favorite book, my heart melted.

I do indeed love a good book.

Don't get me wrong -- I read digitally too.  I have a tablet with the Kindle app where I can borrow books from Amazon, and I upload PDFs of friends' writing so I can read it on the go.  I read a disgusting amount of fanfiction, all of which is through digital media.  I have borrowed others' Kindles to read a book they own and I do not, and I've lent mine out too.

But I worry that this practice, somehow, devalues the experience of reading.  Suddenly, it becomes screen time, and screen time is something you're supposed to limit.  Blue lights that keep you awake, screen resolutions that make your eyes tired, and so on -- there are lots of good reasons to limit time in front of a screen.  But reading! I can't think of a good reason to limit how long I spend in another world, how long I spend enjoying what life could be like, exploring the ways ideas connect, understanding others' experiences of the world.

Reading is a very real, authentic experience for me.  It's reveling in a part of humanity: the only species ever to record their experiences in writing, and the only species to share that writing with others in order to create a shared experience of being.

There are times, like now, when I miss actual books.  Most of what I've read lately has been online: I've read a bunch of fanfiction, I've been working my way through a series of student essays that are all submitted using Google Drive, and I've been doing a lot of research for a class I'm taking, which is mostly online articles from databases.

I miss books.  I miss the physical qualities of a book -- the ink on the page, the rustle of pages turning, the bending of the binding as I get into the meat of the story, all of it.

It's not a feeling I was expecting to uncover, but I haven't read a real book in almost a month.  I miss it.

So when it comes to Go Set a Watchman, maybe I will read it eventually, and maybe I will just borrow my mother-in-law's Kindle, but it will never be the same as if she handed me a book.

Dad is Fat/Food: A Love Story

I didn't read as much as I wanted to this summer, and I definitely didn't read the caliber of book I wanted to this summer.

I left school with a giant bag of books to read, all chosen from the school library and with the help of fellow teachers.  Total, I went home in May with around 20 books.

I read four of them.

Instead, I spent my summer reading fanfiction and a lot of humor-type stuff.  Granted, I also read The Sixth Extinction and Lord of the Flies, but those were high quality reads in the midst of a lot of garbage.

Still, I greatly enjoyed myself.

Two of the books that stood out of this mess were comedian Jim Gaffigan's books Dad is Fat and Food: A Love Story.  I'm a big fan of Jim Gaffigan, mostly because I love food almost as much as he does (though I am one of the described "skinny people" he criticizes in Food: A Love Story because they can stop after only *one* donut).  His comedy doesn't rely on being vulgar or the shock value of saying something disgusting, and I appreciate that.  Don't get me wrong, I love raunchy comedians too, but when one says 'fuck' every other word, I lose interest.  If a joke needs the F word that many times, it's usually not funny.

Anyway.  I picked these up because I like Gaffigan's stand up.  If you aren't already a fan of his, you've probably heard of him thanks to his "Hot Pockets" routine, which is what got him started.

He talks mainly about food and family, which sounds boring, but his deliveries are great.  He uses this little "inside voice" that's supposed to sound like someone in the audience; usually this person is easily confused or offended by his comedy, and it's hilarious.

(I can't find a clip of the actual video, but here's the audio so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about.  Trust me, it's worth a listen.)

Now, I've read a lot of comedians' books -- George Carlin's When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops and Napalm and Silly Putty, both of Stephen Colbert's books, Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred, and others -- and I've found that I'm usually disappointed.
So many of these comedians write just as they perform, which means that they lose a lot of voice on the page.
Others don't bother to include much new material, and so reading their books is just a rehash of their stand-up.

Sadly, it's into this category that Jim Gaffigan's books fall.

It's not that I didn't enjoy Dad is Fat.  The book just didn't offer much that was new.  Instead, it's a lot of his normal stuff about his family, normal meaning that it's in his stand-up.  And I've seen ALL of his stand-up.

So there's not much that was new, which I guess I should have seen coming.  But beyond that, his work loses something when it's on the page.

The delivery is off, his 'inside voice' has vanished which leaves it sounding critical and mean, and there are moments when the funny gets lost inside his love and cuddles for his family.

I'm a little conflicted about that part of the book.  Often, after he's made about a dozen jokes about how much trouble it is to raise 5 really little kids, Gaffigan will then spend a few pages talking about why he loves them so much.  I don't really have a problem with that -- better than he likes those 5 kids, let's face it -- but I wasn't expecting such a cuddly book when I picked it up.

I don't generally read warm-fuzzy type books, which I'm sure is indicative of my own mindset about warm-fuzzy feelings.  Anyway.  I don't read them because I generally think they're boring -- something has to happen in order for life to be interesting.  Think Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You -- I'd much rather read that than a guy babbling about how much he loves his kids.

So I wasn't a huge fan of Dad is Fat.

Then there's Food: A Love Story.

The cover of this book cracks me up. 

Don't get me wrong: the man should be incredibly proud that his rants about food are prolific enough to fill over 300 pages.
But those 300 pages are all old news if you already watch all his stuff.

There's little here that isn't fresh.  Some parts, like his discussion of BBQ around the country, has been expanded to include more areas, but for the most part, it's still much of what I've seen and heard from his comedy over the years.

I know that his comedy about food and family is what made him famous, but I'm looking forward to his branching out a little.  He's had some funny bits about being lazy and working out, and I'm always amused with his takes on religious holiday traditions like Christmas trees and bunnies for Easter.  I would love to read something of his that's new, that's never been performed before, and I'm sure I'll read his next book too.

Overall, what stood out about these two books was just how much I didn't like them.  I was expecting to really enjoy them, given how much I enjoy the author's comedy.  But I didn't.

I would still recommend them as books, but I would ask if you were a fan a Gaffigan's first.
If you've never heard of him, then read away! It's funny stuff.

But if, like me, you're already a fan -- just boot up Netflix and watch his stand-up, or his new show, instead.

The Sixth Extinction

The Sixth Extinction is not a hopeful book.

It is a well-researched, carefully written, and fascinating book, but it is not a hopeful one.  There is no "feel-good" ending, no comforting platitudes, no moment of resolution -- nothing that would make a reader feel better after the gravity of the situation sinks in.

No.  This is a book about the real world and its consequences, and it makes no apologies.  

In that way, it is one of the most powerful nonfiction books I have ever read.

I stumbled upon this book while reading the news -- someone had interviewed author Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, about her latest work and I happened to click the link, probably because it said something about extinction and I was curious.  About half an hour later, I was totally hooked and went in search of this book in my local library.  It was pretty new, published in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Price for general nonfiction in 2015, so I expected there to be a long waiting list to get it.

There was no such list.  None.  I was the only hold in my entire area -- and I live in the suburbs of a fairly large city.

Now, having read it, I am even more depressed that no one around me seems to be paying attention.

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction blends careful discussion of past scientific discoveries and analyses with her personal narrative of visiting important sites for the study of extinction.  I haven't read her other book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, so I can't say if this is a unique style to this book; however, I can say that it makes for compelling reading.

Using various endangered species as jumping-off points, Kolbert walks readers through the history of extinction on Earth, discussing everything from how scientific theory developed to include extinction in the 1700 and 1800s to modern studies being done to monitor and measure current extinction rates. Each of the 13 chapters uses an endangered or extinct species to tie to some part of extinction's history; the great auk for example, a large penguin-like bird that went extinct in the 1800s, is used to discuss how extinction became accepted as a scientific principal.  Other examples, like mastodons, are used to explain humanity's role in the current extinction event.

Throughout these chapters, she blends in discussions of the Big Five: the five previous extinction events in the history of life on Earth.  Each, as she explains, stems from different causes, some of which haven't been fully understood yet, but all of them reshaped our planet.  And all remain important in understanding the current event.

Here's a rough timeline:

The graphic she uses in the book is a little easier to understand -- perhaps because she explains everything as opposed to my just plopping it on here -- but this gives a rough idea of the timing and how drastic each event was.

Ours is at the end, where the number of species has skyrocketed and there's not yet a plunge to represent what's happening.

There are critics and nonbelievers, of course, but the conversation sounds a lot like that surrounding global climate change: Most scientists seem on board with it, while the loudest opponents are those who have the most to lose (politically or otherwise). And as Kolbert points out in this National Geographic interview, by the time the sixth extinction is so obvious as to be indisputable, it will be too late to save those species it wipes out.

This is one of the reasons why I'm hoping more people start reading this book.

Kolbert giving a lecture/book talk on CSPAN 2

I also have to mention that I had to look things up constantly as  I was reading.  Kolbert does a great job of explaining complicated concepts, but she also writes in a way that inspires curiosity to learn more about whatever topic is at hand.  I have never been so grateful for my smartphone.

That writing style comes from her blend of personal narrative with scientific discussion, as I mentioned earlier, and her own story adds a nice touch to the book.  So much of this research is abstract; things like the background extinction rate, plant and animal migration due to human interference, and so on simply aren't relevant to the average person.  But the stories of Kolbert's visit to the Amazon rainforest, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a frog sanctuary in Belize, a cave in northern New England, bring those ideas to life.  I can picture the colonies of bats on the ceiling of the cave much more easily than I can picture a plesiosaur fossil (no matter how cool that may be).  The movement of plants to new continents seems more real when I can picture the purple loosestrife blooming thousands of miles from its original home.

So many nonfiction books suffer, and even lose readers, because their writing is too dry, too boring.  This is not, and that made it an easier, and more relevant, read.

There are moments when this style backfires though.  Kolbert's narratives tend to stop rather abruptly, just before whatever realization her experiences helped her reach is fully spelled out on the page.  Sometimes, this isn't that big of a deal.  When a dozen pages are spent analyzing the important of coral as the basis of reef life, and then Kolbert walks out onto a reef to find the coral dying, the aha! moment is pretty obvious.  There, her writing doesn't need to say anything for readers to draw their own conclusions -- generally, the same ones she wants us to draw.

At other times, her realization is implied to the point of obscurity.  Now: I'm not saying she needs to employ that awful high school writing tactic of "This shows that..." and so on. (For the record, I teach my students to remove this phrase from their vocabulary.) But  an implied point leaves a lot out there between the writer's mind and the reader's.  And when readers are left to figure things out on their own, they inevitably get lost. It's not a mistake, minor as it may be, that's worth making in a book of this magnitude.

However, I generally overlooked this small stylistic issue in favor of a much greater point -- the amount of work that had to go into a book like this.  I can't even imagine the hours Kolbert spent researching her topics, interviewing scientists, and organizing each chapter.  And that doesn't include either her extensive travel or the hours of actual writing  that went into it.  When the absolutely overwhelming quantity of her research is blended so well into her writing, a little occasional abruptness is forgiven.

It's certainly not a reason to put down the book.

The last chapter of this book is titled "The Thing With Feathers," an allusion to the Emily Dickinson poem about the power and necessity of hope.
In that way, and in that way alone, it tries to end on a positive note.  But that title is the only hopeful moment, and frankly, it's a fairly deep allusion to get unless you were paying really close attention in your high school poetry class.  Even the author points out that, really, this is not a hopeful book -- and a hopeful book isn't the one she set out to write anyway.

[English Teacher confession: I did have a moment, upon opening this chapter, where I wondered about those who either ignored or have forgotten their Dickinson poetry.  Do those readers get this allusion? Do they realize that this is a reference to hope, or do they assume it's another chapter about birds?  My hope (ha!) is that this book's intended audience is educated enough to get it, but I bet there's someone out there going, "Really? Another bird chapter?" Anyway.]

So when I read the title of this last chapter, I wondered if perhaps this was going to be the part about how humanity still have time, how we can save the Earth and all its species, that we can avoid the sixth extinction.  Maybe this was the part where Kolbert offered up that hope, shouting "It's not too late!" and providing all the standard recycle, get involved, donate money, etc propaganda that's been pandered around for years at this point.  (I'm not saying those aren't good things! They absolutely are.  It just wouldn't be new information for such a powerful book.)

But it wasn't.

Instead, it ponders what happens next for humanity.  Will we, as one scientist she quotes wrote, saw off the branch on which we're sitting in the ecological tree?  Who or what will come after us?

It's a true chapter.  True to the form of the book, but also true to the form of the world: it will keep going, regardless of whether or not we're on it.
We have power over the ways in which we change our planet, not over whether or not we destroy it.

One day we'll be just a layer in the sediment of our planet, found in ice cores and canyons and fossils. The Sixth Extinction is happening, and like it or not, humanity is right there with it, intimately involved with it.

One day, we too will be extinct.

But our planet will keep going -- it may be drastically different from how we know it, but it will still be there.  Humanity will change the face of the earth, but we will not, cannot, destroy it, and we can make choices about the kind of legacy we'll leave behind.

Maybe that's where she intends there to be hope: not in the salvation of our race, but in the continuity of the world and what we'll leave behind.

The Brief History of the Dead

I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the afterlife.

I honestly don't think about it too much.  I wonder about what it's like to die, and I've pondered the immense nothingness that could be out there -- will it be like being asleep? where things are so deep and dark you don't even realize you're asleep until you wake up? Will that waking be a new life, like a reincarnation? -- but that's about the extent of things.

I am also not particularly religious, which feeds into this 'meh' feeling about the afterlife.  If I were religious, I do not doubt that I'd have lots of feelings and opinions about the afterlife.
Perhaps I will, someday.

For now, I'm happy with the life I have, a life I love living, and so I'm not so worried about what happens after.

None of these things change the fact that Kevin Brockmeier's vision of the afterlife is a masterful creation, a deep pondering of what it means to live and remember and love.

I quite literally judged this book by the cover.

A fellow teacher and I were perusing our library with a student, just walking along and pulling books out at random to discuss or recommend.
I saw this one and liked the title, so I plucked it from the shelf, and when I liked the weird cover picture, into my back for summer reading it went.

That was it.  No one recommended it or anything; A Brief History of the Dead just sort of fell into my lap.

The concept yanked me as soon as I opened it, and I was not disappointed.
In this book, people die just like in any other.  But here, as long as someone still alive remembers you, you stay in some sort of afterlife 'limbo' until they, too, die (or forget you).  It doesn't have to be that someone remembers your name, or your profession, or where you lived -- no, they just have to remember you, your existence.
Those who are dead but remembered live in a large, almost infinite city, and oddly enough, they know they are dead; they also know they are remembered.  This leads to some frankly fascinating conversations about what they think the afterlife might be like -- like most people, they believe there is something after this never-ending city of memory.

The plot alternates perspectives, sometimes focused on Luka Sims, a journalism professor who was killed in a car accident and now resides in the city as its only newspaper publisher, and sometimes focused on Laura Byrd, a young woman who was sent to the Antarctic on a research expedition.  Other characters, other lives, intermix with these, but the story consistently returns to their experiences, and they are by far the most empathetic of the characters.

As it turns out, the city is gradually emptying of citizens; eventually, by interrogating new arrivals before they inevitably vanish, the dead realize that, among the living, there is a viral epidemic that kills something like 99-100% of people it infects.  In short, the population of Earth is plummeting, and thus there are few people left to remember those who have died, those who still live in the city.

Only a few living people seem to be holding the city of the dead together, and that's when the novel starts to get really interesting -- so I won't give anything else away.

It's a great book -- a unique reading experience of mystery combined with the poetic narcissism of everyone wondering who, exactly, still remembers them on earth.  It's quite beautiful, actually -- part of the human experience is wanting to leave a legacy in some form, whether it's through having children or changing the world or writing or what have you.

I know I've thought about what I will leave behind someday, and this book taps into that.  I wonder, now more than ever, who will remember me when I'm gone.  And if this city of the dead could exist, if this odd combination of purgatory and limbo really did exist, who might be there only because I remember them?

I will never know just how far-reaching my life is, like everyone else.  The ripples of my life are likely insignificant in the grand scheme of time.
But in this book, that doesn't seem so heartbreaking or depressing as it might.  Instead, it makes me feel more like a member of humanity, one who has lived and will die and is thus just like everyone else.  There's unity, comfort, in that.

This book also emphasizes just how wide-spread our lives are -- at one point, a character estimates that any random individual has met roughly 40,000 people in his or her life, from immediate family members and intimate friends to the mailman whose face you just barely remember as he drives by each day.  Every person in your life... and it adds up to around 40,000.

Reading this book makes me wonder if that's true.  Did Brockmeier keep a list like the character in his story until he had an approximation of every human interaction in a person's life?

I would never imagine that I've encountered 40,000 people in my life (or that I will, by the time it's over), but maybe I have.  Maybe I will.  Maybe I'll remember them, and maybe they'll remember me.

The Brief History of the Dead is not just about the dead; it's about the living and what inspires us to keep going, to remember those who've passed with honor and make our own lives worth remembering.

I never expected to get this experience from a random choice in my school library, but I'm glad I did.  Take a chance, like I did, and maybe, someday, I'll be in the city because you'll remember me.

V for Vendetta

In a new twist of events, I got to teach V for Vendetta this spring. 

It was a bit of a hard sell to our school’s approval people: there’s nudity, violence, some drug use, and a lot of really horrific concentration-camp events.  The ideas expressed are very anti-establishment, and Alan Moore, the reclusive author, has labelled himself a “ceremonial wizard,” a title that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. 

However, it passed.  It passed, I think, largely because it’ll be seniors reading it, not freshmen, and seniors are much better prepared to handle things like that.  They’ve heard the language before, and seen the movies, and statistically been involved in the nudity, so there’s not a ton that’s an actual surprise. 

The message of the book itself though does seem to be a surprise, and one I was happy to provide. 

My experience with V for Vendetta prior to this semester was pretty limited. Many years ago, I saw (and was briefly obsessed with) the film, which I now regard as a piece of garbage.  I read the graphic novel when we sent the book for approval (back in early 2013... which should tell you something about both its content and the approval process).  That’s about it – I remembered liking the graphic novel much better than the movie, which should surprise no one. 

Then, as I was teaching it, I read it again along with my students so I could mimic their experience.  This time around, I was much more impressed. 

V for Vendetta is a terrifying glimpse into a future of totalitarian government and citizens controlled by a chilling combination of fear and apathy. The people in this future version of England don’t care anymore – they have been beaten down by war and starvation and plain exhaustion into a state of complacency.  The government utilizes surveillance through cameras and audio recordings to keep track of their citizens and an elaborate news broadcast system to send out their message.  People hear, see, believe, think exactly what the government wants them to, and nothing more. 

Into this future steps V, a (let’s face it) terrorist who wants to set the people of England free from this insane regime, free to rule themselves again.  He was one of many ‘not normal’ people rounded up into resettlement camps – code for concentration camps – and experimented on during the war a few years prior to the start of the book.  In doing so, the government unwittingly created their own enemy, and when he steps up on the Fifth of November to lead the charge to anarchy, and by extension freedom, they are woefully unprepared. 

In the opening pages, V kidnaps Evey Hammond, a teenager who is just trying to survive this future.  He spirits her way to his home, The Shadow Gallery, where you slowly realize that he’s training her to follow in his black-clad footsteps.  There, she watches as the rest of the novel unfolds: V slowly gaining power over the government, the leaders descending into chaos, and the people starting to take back control. 

In a way, readers are like Evey.  We are not privilege to V’s plan of action; instead, we are watching as it unfolds, trying to put the trees together to see the forest as he sees it.  V is walking us through his world and training us to follow in his footsteps just as surely as he’s training Evey. 

More students came to me and said, “Hey, I actually READ this book!” than any other in the year, including Frankenstein.  That’s saying something, especially when most of them didn’t seem to realize the graphic novel even existed before I passed it out. 

Instead, they know the movie, 2003’s V for Vendetta as produced by the Wachowski Brothers and then critically ripped apart.  (Even Alan Moore washed his hands of it.)

The movie is filled with changes to the atmosphere of the world, the character of Evey and many others, the style of V’s antics.  It adds romance and martial arts where there was no need for it, and it removes so much power in the process of all these changes. 

Something important was lost in the translation between page and screen, something much more than my usual assertions of “the book was much better!”

It could be a really high-minded movie, just as it’s a complex, thought-provoking book.

Instead, its writers/directors chose to drop it down to the lowest common denominator of understanding, which undermines its message and thus its power.

The tone of the movie shifts dramatically away from that of the book; now, everyone in England is suspicious, a poor change from the terrifying, oppressed atmosphere of the novel, where any false move could get you killed.  Instead, this suspicious, decidedly more light-hearted attitude brings the people of England in on the joke.

That shift continues in the changes to V’s antics: the masks sent to everyone in the novel suggests the country is much more ready for revolution than the book leads readers to believe, which makes sense – the government in the novel runs and functions entirely out of fear, and V turns that against them to make them powerless (like by taking over the Fate computer, for example).

But when everyone is on the knife’s edge, when everyone is ready for a revolution, V’s ideas lose power.  The general public of the movie cares less about V’s message of anarchy; instead, they are ready for ANY change, regardless of what it is.

That’s never the point in the book; the point in the book is to let the people have their power back, have their government back, through anarchy; the movie paints that anarchy just as the general public sees it, which is as chaos instead of freedom.

It should come as no surprise that Alan Moore refused to have anything to do with the movie, including writing it, adapting the screen play, or indeed even accepting any kind of monetary compensation for it – he instead gave it all the David Lloyd, the illustrator who brought V to life on the page.

The movie also adds some really unnecessary elements, most obviously the romance between Evey and V.  First, let me remind you: Evey is a child in the book.  Literally: She’s 16 when it starts.  V is definitely not age appropriate for romance, nor does Evey experience any romantic inclinations toward him. Instead, V’s anonymity raises the question of if he could be Evey’s father, who was murdered when she was a child.  Her emotions toward V trend toward that parental affection. 

Falling in love (since of course he reciprocates her misguided movie-feelings) also gives V a much more human façade than he has in the novel. There, he’s single-minded in his intentionality and his work.  He allows for no distractions other than preparing Evey to follow in his path. He has no time, or arguable capacity, for love. 

In addition, his never-revealed face provides him the necessary anonymity to carry out his task; giving him an emotion, especially love, is too much connection to the people around him.  Adding love, frankly, undermines the themes.

The movie also spins V a little more positively than the graphic novel, which undermines a really important point:  V is a terrorist. 

There’s little question about this.  He is trying to inspire fear in the government, change in its people.  He is trying to frighten them out of their complacency.  Those are the actions of a terrorist. 

In that way, V is an anti-hero.  He’s not supposed to be the hero. 

The movie, again catering to the lowest common viewing denominator, recognizes that in post-9/11 America, terrorists can never be viewed as positive, or even just neutral characters. They must be actively evil.  Thus, the movie spins V into a savior of the common people, never stopping to analyze the other perceptions of his actions. 

The one thing I take positively from this movie is a line that Alan Moore would be proud of: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”  The man didn’t write it, but it encompasses so much of his message. 

Governments should be afraid of their people.  Not the kind of fear that leaves you cowering in the basement, overwhelmed and just wanting things to end, no – the kind of fear that keeps you in check, that makes sure you understand where you are and what those around you are capable of.  That’s the kind of fear governments should have of their people, because people should be the ones controlling their government.  Think about to Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 150 years ago, Lincoln discusses exactly what this book does: government is for the people.  It deserves to last when it serves the people, and it should recognize the people as the source of its power. 

That’s why governments should fear their people.  They should fear that if they don’t do their jobs right, they will be fired.  They should fear that the people will want change away from them.  A complacent government, a government that sits and twiddles its thumbs and ignores its own, is under grave threat from its unhappy citizens. 

With that tiniest of concessions in mind, read the book. Just ignore the movie. 

The true power of a book like V for Vendetta is that it invites us, as readers, to put on the mask and invoke change.  It begs us not to accept the status quo, to instead fight for change and improvement, to hold our power as the people safe and strong and never give it up. 

What will you do with your mask?

[I’d also like to take a moment to point out that these Guy Fawkes masks have become this symbol of anti-capitalism/anti-establishment that’s used in protests around the world.  The irony of it – not that it ties back to the events of 1605, but that people use it constantly now for anonymity without ever understanding its meaning – cracks my shit up. Anyway.]

FanFiction Confliction

I am almost embarrassed to admit what I've been reading throughout March, but here goes: *deep breath*  I've been reading fan fiction.  A LOT of it too, and rather obsessively.

I've always harbored this aversion to fan fiction, thinking of it as the poor writer's refuge -- taken up when one cannot be bothered to create characters or worlds of one's own.  Instead, though, I'm finding that these stories have offered me the chance to delve even further into a universe I love: that of Bioware's video game series, Dragon Age.

I have played far too many hours of Dragon Age in the last year or so -- Origins, at about 40+ hours per playthrough, twice, Inquisition (at about 70+ hours per playthrough) twice, and I'm in the midst of Dragon Age II right now (currently logged at about 19 hours).  It's been spread out since last June, but nonetheless, that's a lot of hours spent gaming.

I cannot deny, however, that I've loved every minute of it.  The universe is carefully created to be deep and fulfilling, rife with complicated situations to be resolved, religions to be understood, and characters that I can't help but come to care about.  In fact, what I quickly realized when I picked up Dragon Age is that I want more of these characters, their lives, their struggles, and I had to be content with that the games offered.

Until about a month ago, when I stumbled upon a blog filled with short stories constructed around one of my favorite characters, Cullen Rutherford, the Commander of the Inquisition's military.

Inquisition stands as the most recent of the Dragon Age universe, and I have fallen madly in love with it -- those two playthroughs, 70+ hours each? Yeah, those have both been since January began. Obsessive? Not at all! *heavy sarcasm*  Anyway. Within Inquisition, you play as the Inquisitor, who in my case is a female rogue about 27-30 years old.  She's sarcastic and a badass, wielding dual blades against anyone who crosses her path and dispensing justice and one-liners in equal measure.  In short, she's everything I would love to be, if I were actually athletic and perhaps thrust into a world where I had to destroy monsters and demons in order to survive.  Unlikely, if I do say so myself.

There's a lot to her story in 70 hours or so, but not enough. It's never enough, if the number of novel-length fan fics I've read in the last month are any indication.  I always want more -- not more action, lord knows I killed enough demons and darkspawn throughout those 70 hours, but more detail.  I want to know more about each character, know what all the conversations look like, not just the ones with cut scenes attached.  I want to see the lives of the members of the Inquisition come to life!

And that's where fanfic comes in.  All the things I wanted are come to life within these pages, and I cannot look away.

So: Here's the list of what I've read in March. I've tried to include only those stories that are novel length (50K words or more) in the interest of keeping track of the 'books' I've read -- each would definitely count as a book if officially published anywhere other than on a fan fiction site.

1. Of Fear and Lyrium
2. The Soul has Bandaged Moments
3. Though the Darkness Comes
4. Tearing Down the Heavens
5. Herald and Commander
6. In Good Times and in Bad
7. Winter's Grasp
8. As the World Falls Down
9. Her Lion
10. And If I Fall
11. The Inquisitor's Lover
12. Against All Odds
13. Templar Enchanted
14. Of Sweet Memories and Guarded Moments
15. As the Crow Flies

Each different version of the Inquisitor, each different version of the Cullen romance arc, each different imagining of the Inquisition itself offers something wonderful to the universe.  Some of these obviously have titles that are more fitting for bad romance novels, and I have trouble denying that that is, in fact, what some of them are. But even then! It's a perspective I hadn't thought of, one that I'm finding more valuable than I ever expected.  Ah, the nuances of romance!

These stories are just those I read in March, and at its heart, this month was beautiful.  Hours upon hours of reading, hours of romance, and hours of a new, passionate love for fan fiction.

I guarantee there are more stories I've read already, and more to come, in April.  I may started out very skeptical, but I know now I'm a full-on convert to the world of fan fiction.

Now I just have to keep myself from writing it, too...

Diana: Her True Story & The Diana Chronicles

A teacher friend and I were discussing nonfiction recently, and I mentioned that I was currently reading my second biography of Princess Diana.  He chuckled and asked, “Why?”

“… I don’t know,” I realized.  “I’m not sure why.” 

“You don’t know,” he said incredulously, “or you don’t want to admit it?” 

The truth is that I really don’t know why I’ve been reading so voraciously about Princess Diana’s life.  It started with a TIME magazine article about the new biography of Prince Charles that just came out.  Charles has a very interesting and complicated life, one that only seems to become more complicated as his mother The Queen ages and his son has children, and I enjoy reading about it.  Sometimes I've wondered if Charles gets a bad rap due to his presence in the media opposite Diana, so this kind of naturally led to me being curious about her life. 

I originally ventured to the library looking for a biography written after Diana's death in 1997.  I found that in Brown's The Diana Chronicles, but I was also drawn to Morton's 1992 biography, written not only before Diana died but before she and Charles even divorced! Fascinated, I grabbed it -- and ploughed through it in roughly 3 days. 

The portrait it paints is of a depressed, downtrodden woman who is utterly alone, and it's incredibly sad.  The reading experience was fascinating but difficult at times; it's hard to read about her life and know that she isn't some made up character and instead she's really experiencing these things. 

Brown's The Diana Chronicles was something else entirely, and the contrast is quite striking. 

Brown’s biography is much harsher, much more judgmental, in comparison to Morton’s.  This makes sense in retrospect: Diana later admitted that much of the material in “Her True Story” actually came from her as opposed to or via the friends credited in the book.  In that way, she was able to cushion her appearance to the public; Brown offers her no such sanctuary. 

The Diana Chronicles is also from a media perspective; Morton is associated with the media, for sure, but he seems to also be an extreme Diana sympathizer, willing to shelter both her and her image in exchange for her favor.  Brown appears much more removed, more journalistic than anything else, and in doing so, Diana’s story changes.  Where Morton offered exclusively Diana’s opinion and reflection on most topics, Brown expands on events, providing different sides of the stories and drama and interjecting her own opinions about how events played out. 

I think what makes Brown’s account so interesting is that she is constantly suspicious of events, regardless of their origins. Sometimes she has Diana in mind, questioning if the Princess was really as depressed or innocent as she seemed; at other times, she has the Royal Family in the crosshairs, accusing them of destroying opportunities or failing to support the Princess.  There are moments where Brown deviates entirely from accepted versions of events, such as in discussions of who visited Charles just weeks before the first famous Royal Wedding; here she offers her own analysis of events, citing evidence and uncovering stories previously absent from the record.  In this way, her book is absolutely fascinating, perhaps more so than “Her True Story.” 

At their hearts, both books ask the same question: Why is the world so fascinated with Diana?  Both illustrate distinctly different times: Her True Story came out in 1992, years before Diana died, and The Diana Chronicles was published in 2007, about ten years after her untimely deal.  Both are widely read and remain interesting, even when the fairytale wedding that captured the world was close to 35 years ago and Diana herself passed almost 20 years ago. 

Her life and death continue to hold sway over the public, and the question of why remains at the forefront of the discussion. 

Diana famously said that she wanted to be the “queen of people’s hearts,” and Tony Blair crowned her the People’s Princess just after her death.  Both titles demonstrate that allure which Diana embodied (and both also demonstrate why Brown pulls in a lot of psychology in her analysis of Diana’s personality, too).  She was the People’s Princess – she was accessible to the public, a huge change from royalty of the past, and that made her popular in ways beyond anyone’s expectation or control.  Analyses of her life and person make it clear that she thrived on this exposure, wanting to be connected to the people, for good or ill.  (That feeds into the conspiracy theory community surrounding her death too, though that’s a different topic entirely.) 

I understand this about Diana and her life, but I remain curious about why I find her fascinating.  The unfortunate answer remains that, deep down, I’m not really sure. 

I remember where I was when Diana died.  There are few moments in my life like this, where the outside world embedded itself into my memory.  It was August 1997, which means I was only 8 years old, and I was spending the weekend with a friend's family at their lakehouse.  The crash happened in the middle of the night in Paris, which means it was early evening for us, and I recall watching it on the news.  I can still picture the living room where we stood, oddly enough; the TV was canted in one corner near the deck, its blinds moving gently with a breeze from the open door. The ceiling light made the room seem almost yellowy, and I remember seeing the black car, crushed, on the screen.  I had been playing with someone's knee brace but stopped when I realized how upset the adults were.  If I remember right, I think my friend's mom called my mom to discuss the accident. 

I didn't know this was such a significant moment at the time.  Looking back, it's easy to see based on how others responded, but even so, I didn't really attach a lot of meaning to it until I was far older.  Diana's life was important, her death defining.  The world changed, just a little.

Even so, even now, so much about Diana remains unknown.  She has been picked apart for years, and yet it seems like so few actually knew the ‘real’ Diana, whatever that might mean.  She’s so wildly public, and yet she’s so alone; she’s one of the most discussed people on the planet, and yet she’s unknowable. 

She’ll stay this way forever, and I think that’s what makes her life worth knowing. 

The Price of Privilege

Parenting has always struck me as intimidating. 

It involves so much of everything you have: money, time, energy, work, emotion, responsibility, and everything else, so much of your life.  And even if you do everything right, you still have the chance to profoundly fuck something up. 

I’ve never wanted kids – frankly, it’s never occurred to me.  I’ve never had that “parental” instinct, and I don’t feel a lot of affection for little kids either.  I like the kids I deal with – seniors in high school on the cusp of the world, kids who are (for the most part) pretty functional and self-sufficient. That’s about it.  The overwhelming responsibility of raising my own kids, the effort involved, the expense, the idea that someone out there is relying on me for every single thing in their life… no, thank you. 

I can’t even handle the emotional responsibility of a dog; how on earth could I have a kid??

There are those in my life who have undoubtedly decided that this lack of interest in kids indicates something profoundly fucked up about me, and really, I’m okay with that.  I know who I am, and a parent is not part of that. 

This book, The Price of Privilege, is one of those books that confirms all my fears about parenting, solidifying my lack of desire to produce one of my own.  At its heart, The Price of Privilege is about what happens when parents try to do everything right, and how those kids can (and do) still end up screwed up. 

The Price of Privilege deals with children of affluence, those kids who tend to be psychologically ignored due to the obvious and serious issues faced by children of poverty and other poor circumstances.  But the children of affluent parents, affluent lives, struggle with just as many issues as children in other circumstances and their problems have largely gone unstudied until Dr. Madeline Levine noticed a pattern in the patients coming into her private therapy practice. 

Her patients seemed to have everything: their parents were well off, they went to good schools and lived in good neighborhoods, they were involved in activities and extracurriculars, and they wanted for little.  Often they had strong social skills and good grades too.  There was no reason for these kids to have problems, and yet they were deeply unhappy, many dealing with anxiety and depression, involved with drugs and alcohol, or worse. 

Parents, as a group, are under immense pressure.  The ability to raise a functional, well-adjusted person to adulthood stuns me, especially when I consider that it happens fairly routinely.  But sometimes – often, perhaps – things go wrong, and that’s where people like Levine come in, the therapists who must try to collect the broken pieces and somehow re-create a whole person. 

The phenomenon she describes seems to happen when parents have money to support their children but lack the time to devote to them.  In those cases, children can develop the sense that they are being bought off – a car to cover up the fact that a parent missed their birthday, an allowance being spent to buy drugs while the parents are out of town, endless funds devoted to club sports and equipment but no attendance at games, the list goes on.  Over time, this sends a clear message about what’s more valuable, and the kids respond accordingly. 

(There’s so much more to this in the book, so much psychology and detail that I can’t begin to recreate here.  Suffice it to say that the book is a smooth, interesting, and educating read, one well worth your time.)

It is not a universal practice, thank goodness – parents with money are not destined to treat their kids like like, nor are children of privilege doomed to being ignored emotionally but overflowing financially.  But the pattern is clear, and it’s scary. 

There’s a wonderful article in The Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kids in Therapy” (here) that dovetails nicely with this book; it’s a great read that breaks this down into a more manageable size if you can’t get to the book J

I do sometimes wonder about how much of these issues are truly, at heart, the parents’ faults.  

Throughout the book, the ability of kids to make choices is essentially removed from the equation.  So I can’t help but think: what about those situations where the parents are great, involved but not too involved, balanced between emotional functionality and giving their kids independence, but their kids screw around anyway?  I guarantee it happens, but that’s not discussed much here. 

In fact, I see it on a near-daily basis at my job.  Since I’m a high school teacher in a pretty affluent area, I watch all of this happen (that’s how I ended up reading the book in the first place).  I definitely see students whose parents are great but they suck anyway.  It’s a fact of life: kids make choices that aren’t always smart, regardless of the way they were raised. 

Levine is clearly going for a broad picture of this issue, a generic of how this works and how to fix it, but it runs the risk of placing kids into a broad category. 

This book also ignores those kids who have great lives but suffer from depression or anxiety anyway, and I see those kids all the time too.  I have many great kids – smart, capable, independent, friendly – who struggle immensely anyway.  I’ve seen kids hospitalized for anxiety, placed in emergency care due to suicide risk, or something worse.  What things like that happen… well, too often the parents seem to be awesome (at least from what I see).  They’re scared, clueless about what went wrong, and often it was nothing they did.  That falls by the wayside too.   

I know that this isn’t an all-encompassing book, but still.  Sometimes parents do everything right, and that should be acknowledged and celebrated too. 

Levine writes a short section about how to try to address mistakes in the back of the book, a section that I found more interesting than I was expecting to.  The ideas of responsibility and boundaries, the ideas for how to push kids to find independence, to find themselves, are all things I can work to incorporate into my classroom.  Teachers may not be kids’ parents, of course, but we do still see those kiddos a lot – it’s just as easy for me to assess how a kid’s doing emotionally as academically, so I’m glad to have a guide for offering the support and structure that can help them grow and heal. 

It’s a worthwhile book, especially for parents and teachers, and seeing as I’m not planning on leaving my school district anytime soon, it is definitely a resource worth incorporating.