Book Review: How Children Succeed

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Paul Tough wrote the "biography" of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone I read a couple of years ago.  So when my boss asked me to read this, even though it's outside my frame of responsibility, I quickly consented.  I love a good theory book about how better learning and education can change the world.

Except this book is not that.  It's about how better people can change the world.  And it turns out that the things most of us think make better people may not necessarily be so.

If I had to summarize this book in one, terribly convoluted sentence, it would be, "Stress is bad except when it's good."

Tough spends a lot of time outlining how stress negatively affects our bodies; our stress-response system is mammalian, designed for short, acute bursts of stress, like running from a lion.  Our current society has translated that stress into a low-bubbling, constant flow.  Our bodies are not equipped to handle that.  And when you overload the stress system, there are serious and long-lasting negative effects.  When you overload a infant's or a child's stress system, it's even worse.

So keep your kid away from stress.

Except having no stress at all, no opportunity to fail, no situations that could result in a poor result, has a negative impact as well.  If you never have to really "try" and never really "fail" then you don't develop "grit" or what I call "sticktoitiveness" that's necessary to survive in the world.

So our privileged kids don't do well because we've made things too easy for them. And our challenged kids don't do well because we've made things too hard for them.

According to the KIPP schools, there are seven traits that predict achievement;  grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.  These schools even give their students "character report cards" that grade on these seven traits (a system that doesn't work in schools of privilege; a headmaster of one of those schools says, "With my school's specific population, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you're going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it.  I don't want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed.")

OneGoal has winnowed it down to five and calls them "leadership principles";  resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism and integrity.

But success cannot be predicted solely by these character traits or leadership principles.  Motivation has to be there too.  And, what do you know, there's a metacognitive strategy for that; "Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions" or MCII.  Being an optimist doesn't work.  Being a pessimist doesn't work.  What works is something in between.  I always say "Plan for the worst, expect the best and the reality will fall somewhere in between."  Turns out this is the exact strategy MCII encourages;  "mental contrasting concentrates on a positive outcome while simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way.  Doing both at the same time creates a strong association between future and reality that signals the need to overcome the obstacles in order to attain the desired future."

This is much more complex than "Dream and you can Do!"  And much more realistic.


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Book Review: Gold by Chris Cleave

Gold by Chris Cleave
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't read too many novels, so I'm not well-versed with current trends.  I suspect Chris Cleave is fitting into the the trendy moment of current literature but not knowing what the trends are, I approached this book without expectation.  And I found the structure exquisite, revealing information just like real life reveals information.  Without drama, without fanfare but surprising and shocking nonetheless.  The human psychology seemed real, too, as you end the book wondering why the heck those people acted that way and could live with the unconventional set-up without angst and turmoil.  Just like real life.

When Zoe is nervous before a race, her coach tells her that, at his age, it shouldn't be the big event that scares her; it should be "...the lingering sensation that in pursuit of my own exacting goals and objectives I might not have been as generous in spirit as I could have been with regard to the needs and dreams of the people I cared most about or for whom I was emotionally responsible."

Zoe "seethes" at this wisdom and that sets the path for the whole book; these characters don't grow in ways that the reader sees progress though they are given opportunities to grow.  Just like real life.

My biggest problem is that I didn't really like any of the characters; didn't understand their motivations, their patience with the selfish behavior of the other significant people in their lives or their choices.  The way Cleave structured the book I wanted to know their stories but, once I did, I didn't care that I knew them. I  don't know whether that's a failing of mine or a failing of the author's but, to me,  Zoe was downright annoying, Kate too pure and one-dimensional, Tom a caricature, Jack undefined and listless.  Young Sophie was the only one who resonated with me; her constructs to hide her illness because she didn't want to scare her parents were surprising in a world where attention seems to be something you grab at relentlessly.

Some lovely word combinations:

"...children were bottomless, echoing wells of need into which exhausted women...endlessly dropped brave little pebbles of certainty and anxiously listened for a splash that never came."

"...being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace."



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Book Review: Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"The vast, wet, chemical-electrical network called the nervous system.  The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us."

An entire book about how our conscious brain isn't really in charge, which necessitates changing our conscious thinking about who we are, the decisions we make, the art we create.

Take Coleridge.  He began using opium in 1796.  He wrote "Kubla Khan" while on an opium high.  So is the genius of that poem Coleridge's?  "We credit the beautiful words to Coleridge because they came from his brain...But he couldn't get hold of those words while sober, so who exactly does the credit for the poem belong to?"

The book is chock full of great food for thought; the blind lady who can see, creating the illusion of truth simply be repetition of lies, what a "gut feeling" really is, cognitive reserve fighting off Alzheimer's,

Perhaps the most (conscious)thought-provoking chapter was Eagleman's exploration about our penal system and how brain studies could allow us to change our ideas of guilt and capacity for reform. 

A fascinating read.  Perhaps dumbed-down a little too much but, frankly, had it been more intellectual, I would not have found it as intriguing and meaningful.

"The way we see the world is not necessarily what's out there: vision is a construction of the brain, and its only job is to generate a useful narrative at our scales of interaction.  Visual illusions reveal a deeper concept; that our thoughts are generated by machinery to which we have no direct access. Useful routines are burned down into the circuitry of the brain and consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry."

"The complexity of the system we are is so vast as to be indistinguishable from magic.  As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them."







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Book Review - Madam, Will You Talk?

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When I was about 11 and living in Mandeville, Jamaica, I was wandering around the dusty bookshelves of the used bookstore run by the cancer society, where my mom volunteered periodically.  I had a couple of dollars in my pocket, probably earmarked for an Archie digest comic book, but I picked this up instead.

During the next several months, I combed the used bookstore for more Mary Stewart. I was in luck; a whole shelf full of worn paperbacks that had that wonderful smell of aged paper. I read Nine Coaches Waiting, My Brother Michael, Wildfire at Midnight and Airs Above Ground.  I liked all of them.  But none of them as much as Madam, Will You Talk?

For years, it was a go-to book every couple of months.  We didn't have a library to frequent in Jamaica and I often would sit, staring at my bookshelf, wishing for something new to read. And when I didn't have anything new, I'd invariably pick this up.  And read it again.  And again.

Eight years later, the book fell apart in my hands. I taped it together with duct tape and got three or four more readings out of it but eventually had to throw it away.  Two years after that, I found another copy, same 75¢ Fawcett Crest Book edition, idling away its time in the philosophy section of used bookstore that obviously had lax organizational requirements.  By this time, I was finishing college and my re-reading became less frequent.  But when I was 28, I had to drive from Omaha, Nebraska to Kansas City, Missouri to hop on a flight to Texas to audition for grad school.  A blizzard hit but I made the drive anyway.  I packed a coffee can, a box of 500 matches, several rolls of toilet paper, a huge down comforter, a +10 sleeping bag, a sack full of food, a couple of gallons of water, my late 90s cell phone, a flashlight, extra batteries and Madam, Will You Talk.  And the whole drive, I was found myself wishing I'd slide off the road and get stuck, just so I could cuddle up in my sleeping bag, next to a nice TP fire-in-a-can, and read while I was waiting to be rescued.

I've not read this book in over ten years.  I picked it up earlier this week because I had miraculously caught up on my New Yorker reading and didn't have anything from the library cued up and ready to go.

It's just as good as it's always been.  And maybe even better.

So off I go on an indulgent re-read of Stewart's books, starting with The Rose Cottage, which is her last book (though she's still alive and kicking at the ripe age of 96, she has not published anything in 15 years)  Her books are often classified as romances but they aren't, really.  They are about strong women who aren't so strong that they don't worry about fashion or fall in love with the wrong men.  They are the Grace Kellys and the Audrey Hepburns of fiction.  They are the women I'd like to be.  In my next life, maybe.



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Book Review: Eleanor and Park

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I will use three emails my husband wrote to Rainbow while he was reading the book as my review:

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Dear Rainbow,
I am on page 95. I think your next book needs to be more boring and have much longer chapters that start very boring.  You need to do this for those of us who have lives. You see I am going back to school to get certified to teach English to high school kids. I have real classes. And today I had a real test in a Blue Book. People have to study for tests. Even I have to study for tests. But it is hard to study when Rainbow's book is in your bag.

The problem is that your writing is the kind that sort of stops being writing and becomes just a flow. Then, boom, you hit the end of a section. Hmmm, you say, I guess I could just check out the first sentence or two. I mean, the sections are pretty short and all. Then... shit, I've read the whole thing. Effing Rainbow! I have to study!  Hmmm.  I guess I could just check out the first couple sentences of the next section.

This is a problem for me. I did get some studying done. And I did well on my test, I think. But I worry about brain surgeons or detectives or other people who need to focus on their jobs or people's brains don't get fixed or crimes don't get solved because of you.

So, in summary -- Quit writing such good books. Or at least wait until I'm on spring break or something to have them put in stores.

****************************************************

Dear Rainbow,
The hand rape line was really funny -- I need to stop reading to eat lunch now, but I may just read one more section.

****************************************************

Dear Rainbow,
Now you've screwed up a perfectly good nap window. I'm losing patience with you. I have to walk the dog now. Can't read and walk at the same time.





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Book Review: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lovely read.  A turn of the 20th century girl who longs for more than what her lot holds.  Colorful characters, light on the angst, heavy on the atmosphere of central Texas in the summer of 1899, Darwin thrown in as a sideline.  No magic.  No secret societies. No intermittent cartoon graphics.  No vampires.  No dystopian futures.  So atypical of books for children these days.  Which is maybe why I liked it so much.

In describing an ongoing altercation between a cat and a possum, where the possum always plays dead, the cat stalks off triumphantly then the possum opens its eyes slyly and slinks away;

"The scene played night after night, all summer long. Neither I nor the adversaries ever fatigued of it.  How satisfying to have a bloodless war in which each side was equally convinced of its own triumph."

I hope I can get my nine year old boy to read it.


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Book Review : Straphanger

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A combination of a manifesto against the automobile and an ode to trains.  With a coda grudgingly giving credit where credit is due to the bus.

One thesis is a worn one;  we're running out of oil to power our personal automobiles and even if we go electric, most electricity comes from coal.  So it's lose lose.

But Grescoe approaches his ode not from an environmental standpoint, but from a social standpoint.  And a community structure standpoint.  And a health standpoint.  The automobile has isolated us.  Dallas-Fort Worth is as large as Israel.  People have skin cancer on the left side of their bodies more often than the do on the right.  We're fat.


We are like this by choice;  we have chosen the freeway over the light rail. We have endowed personal ownership of a car as a symbolic representation of liberty, freedom and prosperity.  We've paved everything in sight and called it progress.  We have laws that require a minimum number parking spaces per development that guarantees that transit won't have a chance.  Developers operate with a formula that people won't walk more than 600 feet to get to a parked car and build with that in mind.

But if it's hard to drive, people take transit and transit improves and more people take transit and transit keeps improving.  But if you make it hard to drive, you are ousted from office.  So how do we invoke change?

Grescoe looks at 12 cities all over the world; paragons of transit and paragons of the car.

And the history is interesting.  The first suburbs were built within easy distance of the city and connected by commuter trains.  But then the car came hiccuping off the assembly line and made the possibilities endless.

Then in the 1950s, Eisenhower built up our concrete infrastructure, not to help us go on Kerouac-esque odysseys of discovery but to make sure we could get the military where we might need them in case of an invasion and evacuate our cities in case of nuclear war.  No invasion, no nuclear war and lots of highway infrastructure = suburban sprawl and big box stores.

And that's the American way.  Public transit is for poor people.  Public transit is communist.  Socialist.  I am an American.  I work hard.  I buy my own car.  I pay my own way.  Somehow I forget how much public money is used to keep the roads upon which I'm exerting my libertarian independence in useable form.

Public transit is also dangerous.  A target for terrorists.  A killer.  Of course, in Japan, you are more likely to die from your pajamas catching fire than you are in a train crash.

I live in Kansas City.  A city completely enamored with the automobile.  Though my neighborhood is an early suburb, built with trolley and streetcar access to downtown, all of those tracks are gone.  One is now a well-loved jogging path.  A MAX bus runs on the street next to the jogging path but there is no rail.  And those who advocate rail are immediately labeled as crackpot sociopaths.

But Kansas City doesn't have gridlock.  So there's no reason to change.  So we won't change.

In Bogota (my favorite chapter of the book) the mayor championed public good over private interest.  He restructured Bogota to "show that a cyclist on a thirty-dollar bike was equally as important as a citizen in a thirty-thousand dollar car.  We were saying, 'You, with your big cars and fancy jewels, we think you are stupid, we think you are animals.  What we respect is music and sports and libraries.  For us, the neighborhood hero was the young man who played sports and read books and rode around on an old bike.'"

And it worked.  For the most part.  Until he was ousted from office.  But he plans to run again and continue molding the trend.

I wish we had a visionary like that in Kansas City.  I don't take transit.  I could take a bus.  But it's so much easier to get in my car and drive.  So I do.  And until transit becomes more than an indicator of poverty or hipster moral superiority, nothing will change.

"Every time you choose to drive you are, in a tiny way, opting out of, and thus diminishing, the public realm.  And that, finally, is the problem with suburbs and freeways.  In order to gain spurious freedom, which is in fact just increased mobility, millions of people turn their backs on civility--not just politeness, but also the process of civilization building, in which cities play such a crucial role.  Sprawl may end in cul-de-sacs and foreclosures, but it begins every time you slam a car door on the world."


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