Odd juxtaposition, this. In between reading The Disappearing Girl: Learning the Language of Teenage Depression, by Lisa Machoian (Dutton, 2005) today, I was selling Girl Scout cookies with a passel of tweens, on a college campus where we were surrounded by young women (and men) just on the other side of adolescence. Neither is that unusual an event, but it did put some of Machoian's warning into sharper focus.
My initial reaction is that Disappearing Girl was a decent enough book, well-written, and packed with extended, moving case studies. Machoian's goal seems to be to assist parents, counselors, and others who work with adolescent girls in understanding what depression looks like in this population, and how they can best help. I'm neither a clinician nor the parent of an adolescent (yet), but it seems like for the most part, she succeeds; if nothing else, the few reviews I was able to find online were positive.
There's not a lot of new content here; I can't say I learned much about depression or female adolescence that I didn't already know, though (as my blog-reading public will attest) I do tend to gobble up books on both topics. What is new is Machoian's focus on portraying, in direct quotes and paraphrases, the girls' own experiences of depression and its onset. She also returns repeatedly to the problem of distinguishing normal teenaged angst from genuine depression, and in the final chapters, offers some guidelines for parents and others who struggle with this question.
I can't find too much to criticize about the book, with the possible exception of Machoian's tendency to insert herself into the girls' stories a bit more than seems necessary, but I also can't seem to find much concrete to say to recommend it, either. This isn't because it's a "bad" book; on the contrary, one Amazon reviewer called it "paradoxically uplifting," which I can see; yes, it's a book about teenage depression, but it also reflects tremendous hope, both on the part of the girls Machoian profiles and the author, that this condition can be understood and treated. Mostly, I just came away feeling like I'd read this book before. Yes, it's more psychology and less culture than, say, The Triple Bind, but it also suggests that I've gotten into a bit of a rut when it comes to reading about certain subjects. I think perhaps I just need to lay off the books on treating and/or parenting adolescents, and read some nice juicy fiction for a while.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
117 - Why Sh*t Happens
And now, in the "yes, I picked this one for the title" category, 117 was Why Sh*t Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day, by P.J. Bentley (Rodale, 2009). This'll be brief (I've been blogging for much of the afternoon -- a convenient way to pay attention but not too much attention to the aforementioned daughter and the gaggle of friends she was entertaining), but this was a quick non-fiction read with a novel frame story around it. If you're a reasonably bright layperson who's interested in science, this would be a perfect traveling or vacation read.
Essentially, Why Sh*t Happens is Freakonomics or The Economic Naturalist for the physical and life sciences. And yes, I'm an applied econ wonk, so that's a good thing. In each of 39 short chapters, Bentley introduces a clear, often humorous overview of how things work by asking the reader to imagine ... the crummiest bad day you can think of, magnified by a factor of 10.
You start out by oversleeping, and when you finally get up, you slip on the soap in the shower, and cut yourself shaving. Breakfast doesn't go much better, with a bagel that catches fire, a superheated cuppa joe that explodes all over you, and (yum) a nice refreshing swig of sour milk. After finding that your MP3 player's gone through the wash and having a talented bird decorate both you and your car as you're leaving for work, you're so rattled that you leave your briefcase at home, spin out while speeding around a curve, and put diesel in your gas tank by mistake. Oops. You leave your car at the service station, successfully catch the bus despite tripping on the way there, and sink into a seat whose previous occupant has thoughtfully deposited a nice, sticky, ABC wad of gum. Distracted by the gum in your hair, you miss your stop, and end up caught in the rain and then lost, braving a bee sting, a superglued finger, a cell phone that jams a nearby police radio, and a puncture in your brand-new expensive sneakers before you finally make it to your office.
A colleague stops you to sign a form on the way in, and the pen leaks all over your hand. You slip into this morning's meeting just a few minutes late, only to realize ... you're in the wrong place, and have crashed a meeting of complete strangers. Frustrated, you slam the bathroom door a bit too forcefully, and tear your sleeve. When you get to your desk, you find the IT guy hard at work, trying to remove the virus with which you've inadvertently infected the entire company. You fidget with a juice bottle while waiting for him to finish, get your finger stuck, and eventually find that it's hopeless: your PC won't reboot even when the repairs are done. ("It's worse than that; it's dead, Jim.") While carrying it to the local computer morgue, your finger gets caught in a heavy door and broken.
Finally, time to go home and shake off the black cloud. Nope, no such luck. Your bandaged finger makes you clumsy, so you drop your house keys down the storm drain, and then pull a muscle in your shoulder while in the process of retrieving them. Trying to cook seems like a bad idea, so you pop something in the microwave. Unfortunately, you use a plate with metal decorations, and the resulting sparks startle you into dropping your drink, covering your nice white carpet with broken glass and red wine. You order a pizza, but get hot pepper in your eye, which makes you drop the 'za on the floor and come up with a nice tasty mouthful of grit, dust, and possibly broken glass. You decide to settle for a cup of hot cocoa and some mindless TV, but a lightning strike fries the TV, and you blister your hand with spilled cocoa. A relaxing CD? Scratched. A decadent chocolate dessert? Delicious, until you break a tooth on the fork? How 'bout just a nice hot bath? Great, until you stub your toe on the tub, which then overflows while you're whimpering over your boo-boo.
The story alone is so over-the-top that it's funny, though you're not quite sure if you should laugh or groan as things get worse with each passing chapter. I ended up doing both, along with paging ahead frantically to see what science lesson Bentley was going to tie in this time. If there's a formula to it, I couldn't figure it out, so I really just needed to wait and see. The cut-yourself-shaving chapter, for example, touches on the biology and function of our skin and hair. The swimming MP3 player tackles the physics behind batteries; the superglued finger, the chemistry of glue; the dropped keys, gravity; the broken tooth, dental anatomy. At only 7 pages (more or less) each, none of the chapters is able to delve into its topic in much depth, and most of the science was more along the lines of "Oh, yeah, I remember learning about that" than completely new information. (Guess I'm still trying to get smarter than a 5th grader, eh?) Hard-core science wonks (who at last count, make up between 20 and 33% of my readers) will probably find the book superficial at best, and simplistic or flat-out wrong at worst, but for the simple but curious social science dilettantes (who make up 100% of Cafe Hazelthyme's authors), it was a fun afternoon.
Essentially, Why Sh*t Happens is Freakonomics or The Economic Naturalist for the physical and life sciences. And yes, I'm an applied econ wonk, so that's a good thing. In each of 39 short chapters, Bentley introduces a clear, often humorous overview of how things work by asking the reader to imagine ... the crummiest bad day you can think of, magnified by a factor of 10.
You start out by oversleeping, and when you finally get up, you slip on the soap in the shower, and cut yourself shaving. Breakfast doesn't go much better, with a bagel that catches fire, a superheated cuppa joe that explodes all over you, and (yum) a nice refreshing swig of sour milk. After finding that your MP3 player's gone through the wash and having a talented bird decorate both you and your car as you're leaving for work, you're so rattled that you leave your briefcase at home, spin out while speeding around a curve, and put diesel in your gas tank by mistake. Oops. You leave your car at the service station, successfully catch the bus despite tripping on the way there, and sink into a seat whose previous occupant has thoughtfully deposited a nice, sticky, ABC wad of gum. Distracted by the gum in your hair, you miss your stop, and end up caught in the rain and then lost, braving a bee sting, a superglued finger, a cell phone that jams a nearby police radio, and a puncture in your brand-new expensive sneakers before you finally make it to your office.
A colleague stops you to sign a form on the way in, and the pen leaks all over your hand. You slip into this morning's meeting just a few minutes late, only to realize ... you're in the wrong place, and have crashed a meeting of complete strangers. Frustrated, you slam the bathroom door a bit too forcefully, and tear your sleeve. When you get to your desk, you find the IT guy hard at work, trying to remove the virus with which you've inadvertently infected the entire company. You fidget with a juice bottle while waiting for him to finish, get your finger stuck, and eventually find that it's hopeless: your PC won't reboot even when the repairs are done. ("It's worse than that; it's dead, Jim.") While carrying it to the local computer morgue, your finger gets caught in a heavy door and broken.
Finally, time to go home and shake off the black cloud. Nope, no such luck. Your bandaged finger makes you clumsy, so you drop your house keys down the storm drain, and then pull a muscle in your shoulder while in the process of retrieving them. Trying to cook seems like a bad idea, so you pop something in the microwave. Unfortunately, you use a plate with metal decorations, and the resulting sparks startle you into dropping your drink, covering your nice white carpet with broken glass and red wine. You order a pizza, but get hot pepper in your eye, which makes you drop the 'za on the floor and come up with a nice tasty mouthful of grit, dust, and possibly broken glass. You decide to settle for a cup of hot cocoa and some mindless TV, but a lightning strike fries the TV, and you blister your hand with spilled cocoa. A relaxing CD? Scratched. A decadent chocolate dessert? Delicious, until you break a tooth on the fork? How 'bout just a nice hot bath? Great, until you stub your toe on the tub, which then overflows while you're whimpering over your boo-boo.
The story alone is so over-the-top that it's funny, though you're not quite sure if you should laugh or groan as things get worse with each passing chapter. I ended up doing both, along with paging ahead frantically to see what science lesson Bentley was going to tie in this time. If there's a formula to it, I couldn't figure it out, so I really just needed to wait and see. The cut-yourself-shaving chapter, for example, touches on the biology and function of our skin and hair. The swimming MP3 player tackles the physics behind batteries; the superglued finger, the chemistry of glue; the dropped keys, gravity; the broken tooth, dental anatomy. At only 7 pages (more or less) each, none of the chapters is able to delve into its topic in much depth, and most of the science was more along the lines of "Oh, yeah, I remember learning about that" than completely new information. (Guess I'm still trying to get smarter than a 5th grader, eh?) Hard-core science wonks (who at last count, make up between 20 and 33% of my readers) will probably find the book superficial at best, and simplistic or flat-out wrong at worst, but for the simple but curious social science dilettantes (who make up 100% of Cafe Hazelthyme's authors), it was a fun afternoon.
116 - Free-Range Kids
#116 was Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, by Lenore Skenazy (Jossey-Bass, 2009). In a nutshell, this book is brilliant and hilarious! OK, "brilliant" may be a slight overstatement, though Skenazy does have some excellent insights to offer ... but "hilarious" is dead on. The jacket flap summarizes the book's premise nicely: "How come we had so much more freedom when we were kids? How can we give our kids that freedom now? ... In this funny, fed-up book, Lenore encourages parents to let their kids be kids. She's all for helmets and car seats, but insists children do not need a security detail every time they go outside." Skenazy is an author/ columnist, a child development expert only in that she has 2 sons, but comes to the topic with unique credentials: she unleashed a firestorm of criticism with this New York Sun article a year and a half ago, and now proudly proclaims herself (even on Free-Range Kids' cover) "America's Worst Mom."
Perhaps I'm just feeling a bit hyperbolic today, but man! If this book was around ten years ago, it'd have saved my life! (Fortunately, my own kiddo and I saved ourselves anyway, but I digress.) Skenazy devotes the bulk of the text to presenting and discussing what she calls the fourteen free-range commandments. Her approach, as she explains in the introduction, is one of healthy, don't-take-yourself-too-seriously skepticism, mixed with what I like to call benign neglect:
Remarkably, Skenazy's tone doesn't come off as condescending or snarky. She does make a clear distinction between legitimate protective gear for serious hazards (life vests, car seats, bicycle and motorcycle helmets), and being so terrified of lawsuits, even as private citizens, that simple everyday pleasures -- campfires, walking to school, swinging on the monkey bars, Trick or Treating -- seem unthinkably dangerous. I'll admit to squirming a bit uncomfortably at times, remembering how I'd taken my daughter ToT'ing with (mumble) more parents than girls (6/4) in our party, and gaped horrified when Kiddo asked on the first block if she could eat an unwrapped Twizzler. The book cites a Delaware sociologist who studied Halloween crime reports dating back to 1958, and found no evidence at all of a single child being "killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating."
The book also makes an interesting point when it suggests that "[t]he more safe our children became, the more we started to worry about them." One hundred years ago, it wasn't uncommon for children to die from illnesses or serious injuries; broken collarbones and other limbs were almost ordinary. Now, however, we've eliminated so many of the hazards from our kids' worlds that we've started to believe we can keep them perfectly safe, and forget that fate may sometimes have other plans. (Paradoxically, this illusion of omnipotence can actually make our kids' lives more dangerous; half of all children who are injured at school are hit by the car of parents driving their own kids to school. If we, collectively, could relax enough to let our kids walk or take the bus, there'd be fewer cars clogging up the streets and driveways around the school, and presumably, fewer accidents.) As Skenazy reminds us, "our goal is to raise young people who can eventually get along without us ... Work on banishing the fantasy of always being in control, and ironically, you'll feel less worried." She offers a take on the classic parental fear -- allowing a child to go somewhere (in this case, an ice cream shop after the school play) on her own -- that's both funny and pragmatic:
Can you tell that I really enjoyed this book? Yeah, I know it's a rather glowing and one-sided review; if I'd read it with a more critical eye, I could undoubtedly find and deconstruct its shortcomings. For now, though, I'll enjoy and recommend it as a welcome antidote to some of the maddening, mommier-than-thou dreck that's out there ... and while I'm at it, try to work up the courage to teach my daughter how to take the bus to Friendly's. Yes, alone.
Perhaps I'm just feeling a bit hyperbolic today, but man! If this book was around ten years ago, it'd have saved my life! (Fortunately, my own kiddo and I saved ourselves anyway, but I digress.) Skenazy devotes the bulk of the text to presenting and discussing what she calls the fourteen free-range commandments. Her approach, as she explains in the introduction, is one of healthy, don't-take-yourself-too-seriously skepticism, mixed with what I like to call benign neglect:
"In less time than it takes to unlock a babyproofed toilet seat (which, admittedly, can be an awfully long time when you're at a dinner party, and everyone's wondering where you are, and you cannot get that lid up), we moms and dads have changed. Somehow, even those of us who looked forward to parenting without too much paranoia have become anxious about every possible weird, scary, awful thing that could ever, just maybe, God forbid!, happen to our kids -- from death by toilet drowning to stranger abduction to electrical outlet cover ingestion. Yes, I just read that those little plastic things you stick in the outlets to prevent baby electrocution turn out to be potential choking hazards. Just try not to worry.A few pages later, she suggests that our ancestors had the right idea:
"The list of potential threats just keeps growing, and of course we pay attention because we want to keep our kids safe. That's our job, right? But it's getting harder and harder -- and, for the record, pricier and pricier, and pickier and pickier -- as new safety doodads and dire warnings keep flying at us. And sometimes, like when you have to strap your kid into the stroller as if he's about to blast off to Pluto, it's driving us nuts. ...
"It's possible you picked up this book because you have a sneaking suspicion that you don't have to be quite as worried about quite as much. After all, our moms sent us outside and said, 'Come home when the street lights turn on.' Their moms sent them out on streetcars and buses. And their grandmas sent their sweet children out on slow, rusty steamers to the New World with only a couple of rubles and a hard salami.
"These were all responsible parents! Yet here in the nice, safe, scurvy-free twenty-first century, we worry about our kids riding their bikes to the library, or walking to school."
"Not that the sixties, seventies, and eighties were so great, but at least our parents didn't spend all their time worrying that we were about to be abducted. And neither should we. As you'll read throughout this book, the crime rate today is just about on par with 1970 (and -- I'm already repeating myself -- down since it peaked in the early nineties.) I know it doesn't feel that way. We'll look into that later, too. But my point is: we got to explore the world on our own; we got to do things without adult assistance and make mistakes and even play on teeter-totters. (Which I never liked. But still.) Our kids deserve no less."From here, it's on to the Fourteen Commandments. The above excerpts give you a sense of what to expect in terms of tone, as do the chapter headings/ commandments themselves:
- Know When to Worry: Play Dates and Axe Murderers: How to Tell the Difference
- Turn Off the News: Go Easy on the "Law and Order," Too
- Avoid Experts: Who Knew You Were Doing Everything Wrong? ... Them!
- Boycott Baby Knee Pads: And the Rest of the Kiddie Safety-Industrial Complex
- Don't Think Like a Lawyer: Some Risks Are Worth It
- Ignore the Blamers: They Don't Know Your Kid Like You Do
- Eat Chocolate: Give Halloween Back to the Trick-or-Treaters
- Study History: Your Ten-Year-Old Would Have Been Forging Horseshoes (or at Least Delivering Papers)
- Be Worldly: Why Other Countries Are Laughing at zee Scaredy-Cat Americans
- Get Braver: Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn't Work Anyway
- Relax: Not Every Little Thing You Do Has That Much Impact on Your Child's Development
- Fail! It's the New Succeed
- Lock Them Out: Make Them Play -- or Else!
- Listen to Your Kids: They Don't Want to Be Treated Like Babies (Except the Actual Babies, of Course)
"The statistics cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself show that the number of children abducted and killed by strangers holds pretty steady over the years -- about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infintesimally small: .00007 percent. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen? About seven hundred and fifty thousand years."Sensational news stories are an easy target, and Free-Range Kids certainly isn't the first book to take these on. Where it stands out, though, is in moving from here to a chapter on the explosion of parenting advice books, most of which offers "advice so picky and so extreme, it's bound to make any mom self-conscious." Ah, takes me back to the days of throwing my own copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting off my pregnant belly and across the room upon reading the suggestion that once every week or so, it's OK to forget your diet and have a really indulgent treat, like ... a bagel. From here, it's a logical step to the "Baby Knee Pads" chapter, where she takes on (I kid you not) a professional babyproofer who alleges that 2 children a week die by drowning in toilets (actually, it's more like 4 a year), and a string of products she deems just plain ridiculous: knee pads to protect babies as they learn to crawl, helmets to protect toddlers from potential head trauma when they fall, and let's not forget the Baby Einstein videos.
Remarkably, Skenazy's tone doesn't come off as condescending or snarky. She does make a clear distinction between legitimate protective gear for serious hazards (life vests, car seats, bicycle and motorcycle helmets), and being so terrified of lawsuits, even as private citizens, that simple everyday pleasures -- campfires, walking to school, swinging on the monkey bars, Trick or Treating -- seem unthinkably dangerous. I'll admit to squirming a bit uncomfortably at times, remembering how I'd taken my daughter ToT'ing with (mumble) more parents than girls (6/4) in our party, and gaped horrified when Kiddo asked on the first block if she could eat an unwrapped Twizzler. The book cites a Delaware sociologist who studied Halloween crime reports dating back to 1958, and found no evidence at all of a single child being "killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating."
The book also makes an interesting point when it suggests that "[t]he more safe our children became, the more we started to worry about them." One hundred years ago, it wasn't uncommon for children to die from illnesses or serious injuries; broken collarbones and other limbs were almost ordinary. Now, however, we've eliminated so many of the hazards from our kids' worlds that we've started to believe we can keep them perfectly safe, and forget that fate may sometimes have other plans. (Paradoxically, this illusion of omnipotence can actually make our kids' lives more dangerous; half of all children who are injured at school are hit by the car of parents driving their own kids to school. If we, collectively, could relax enough to let our kids walk or take the bus, there'd be fewer cars clogging up the streets and driveways around the school, and presumably, fewer accidents.) As Skenazy reminds us, "our goal is to raise young people who can eventually get along without us ... Work on banishing the fantasy of always being in control, and ironically, you'll feel less worried." She offers a take on the classic parental fear -- allowing a child to go somewhere (in this case, an ice cream shop after the school play) on her own -- that's both funny and pragmatic:
"[T]hink of specific bad things that could happen to the girl: Is she going to overeat? Is she going to run out of the restaurant and get hit by a truck? Is she going to talk to some sleazy guy who comes over and tries to pick her up?She talks more about the whole "stranger danger" bugaboo in more depth in a chapter entitled "Strangers with Candy," which comes near the end of the book. Her argument here is, we spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy worrying about the very, very slim likelihood of a child's being kidnapped and molested or killed by a stranger (statistically, kids are far more likely to die in car crashes, house fires, or by drowning, or to be molested by someone they know -- yet we don't keep our kids out of cars, homes, swimming pools, or relatives' houses) when we should be empowering our kids to protect themselves (scream, run, and get another nearby adult to help).
"Nothing worse than a tummyache will transpire from overeating, and the mom knows the girl won't up and run out into the street, so those worries are off the list. But what if, strangely enough, some guy actually does harass her daughter?
"'Say he's a gross guy,' [a psychologist] proposes. 'So she comes home and says, 'Mom, this, like, really weird guy came over, and he said dirty words.' You give her a hug and let her have an extra scoop of ice cream, and it's not that bad.'
"So now, instead of just dreading 'something terrible,' the fear is very specific and, as it turns out, not that scary after all.
"OK, OK -- what if that mom's deepest, darkest, most unshakable fear was really that the gross guy would convince her daughter to come out to his suspiciously windowless van, and that was -- the end? That's when the mom has to do three things. One: believe in her daughter's good judgment. Two: believe in the odds. (Statistically, her child is forty times more likely to die in the car ride home from Friendly's than at the hands of a murderous stranger.) And three: believe in herself. As a mom, she has undoubtedly given her girl some lessons about life and safety. She must believe she has had some effect.
"An exercise like this remidns us that we always have a chance to prepare our children for the outside world. If we say to them, all along, 'Don't go off with strangers,' (a much more helpful lesson than 'Don't talk to strangers'), they'll know not to. Remind them that you'll love them no matter what, and they won't feel embarrassed to tell you about the sleazy guy. And please do teach them not to run out into the street."
Can you tell that I really enjoyed this book? Yeah, I know it's a rather glowing and one-sided review; if I'd read it with a more critical eye, I could undoubtedly find and deconstruct its shortcomings. For now, though, I'll enjoy and recommend it as a welcome antidote to some of the maddening, mommier-than-thou dreck that's out there ... and while I'm at it, try to work up the courage to teach my daughter how to take the bus to Friendly's. Yes, alone.
115 - A Short History of the United States
Same old song here. I'm hoping for real reviews later, but in the meantime, I'm just noting titles and authors to whittle down the backlog:
115 - A Short History of the United States, by Robert V. Remini (HarperCollins, 2008). OK, I have to admit, the title and format of this book made my eyebrows shoot up. Simply put, it's not a lengthy book; 373 pages, including the references and index, and the dimensions are about the size of a hardcover novel. How on earth does one do 500+ years of history justice in 11 short chapters? Some of the answer lies in how the chapters are constructed; for example, Chapter 7 lumps together "Manifest Destiny, Progressivism, War, and the Roaring Twenties," while its successor covers the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II.
Add to that the whole "are you smarter than a 5th grader?" angle. I consider myself pretty well-informed about U.S. history, but certainly there are gaps in what I know. From the Great Depression, even the 1920s, on, I'm in pretty good shape, but when it comes to the real olden days, I pretty much jump from one war to the next, without much recollection of what's in between save the motley stew of misinformation I've picked up from historical fiction. Perhaps that's why I chuckled at Remini's lumping the Great Depression and WWII together, but didn't really bat an eye at the "Emerging Identity" or "Jacksonian Era" chapters, even though those covered longer spans of time (1797-1829 and 1829-1846, respectively).
And so I checked out Remini's book. While it was a bit of a slow starter, I'm glad I stuck with it, warts and all. It has its flaws, but overall, provides a decent overview of U.S. history, and an extensive but not overwhelming reading list at the end for those (like me) who find that the 25-cent tour only whets our appetite for more details. The text really shines in two areas. One is its discussion of presidential selection. While the treatments are necessarily abbreviated, Remini does manage to give the reader a flavor for all but 2 of the presidential elections (the 2008 election hadn't yet happened when the book was printed, but I'm not sure why he fails to mention the 1852 election of Franklin Pierce) the U.S. has seen in its 233-year history. Anyone who remembers holding their breath in November 2000 and listening to yet another joke about hanging chads will enjoy reading about the election of 1824, when John Quincy Adams became president in exchange for making House Speaker Henry Clay Secretary of State, even though Andrew Jackson had more popular and electoral votes; or 1876, when allegations of fraud in Louisiana, South Carolina, and, yes, Florida, put the election in the hands of a 15-member Electoral Commission, which eventually split 8 to 7 along strict party lines, giving all the disputed votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden (again, even though Tilden led the popular vote). Likewise, more than 100 years before George Bush the elder's Willie Horton ads in 1988, and the era of the sound bite, came the elections of 1884 ("Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine" vs. Grover "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha" Cleveland) and 1840 (William Henry Harrison, a/k/a "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too," vs. incumbent Martin Van Buren, which Remini describes as "a rollicking campaign of songs, parades, noise, and nonsense. ... Complete with hard cide, coonskin hats, rolling balls, and other such paraphernalia, this campaign was one of the liveliest and funniest in American history.")
The other thing that impressed me about the book was Remini's ability to describe not just what happened, but why it was significant. For example, he notes Henry Clay's vehement objection to then-General Andrew Jackson's 1816 invasion of Florida, which set the stage for an enmity between the two that continued to affect politics for the next 20 years; James Garfield's election in 1880 as the first president to be elected directly from the House of Representatives; Grover Cleveland's record-setting 414 vetoes in his first presidential administration; and Ross Perot's 1992 performance as the strongest by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose in 1912.
As I noted earlier, the book has its flaws. One, though this will sound picky, is the maps. I'm usually a big fan of maps, but here, they're poorly executed, many are difficult to read (blurred, and with tiny text, which makes me think someone just shrunk 81/2" x 11" documents down to be roughly index-card sized), and they're often inserted at a point in the text that has nothing to do with what the map's illustrating. For example, a map illustrating westward exploration and expansion from 1803 to 1807 is tucked away amidst the Revolutionary War, and a map of the 50 states and their 2-letter postal abbreviations lands smack dab in the middle of the Cold War and Sputnik. (The latter makes some sense, I guess, as it comes just before a note about the election of 1960 being the first in which the new states of Alaska and Hawaii voted, but the lack of content or explanation made me look at it and say, "Huh?") Remini also has a habit of jumping around chronologically, and while I understand the reasons for this (it makes sense, for example, if you're writing about World War II, to talk about the North African, European, and Pacific campaigns separately, rather than follow a strict time line that jumps around from place to place and makes it tough to follow the big picture), some additional help (i.e., clarifying dates) would have been appreciated.
I also take issue with some of the book's presentation of late 20th and early 21st century history. Perhaps this is inevitable; Remini is primarily a Jacksonian-era historian, and the challenges of interpreting cause and effect and other relationships is different when we're looking back 200 years than when we're considering a more recent period from which frankly, all the dust is still settling. For example, in the "Cold War and Civil Rights" chapter, he notes that the 1950s saw the emergence of a youth culture that found its expression in rock and roll music. Fair enough, but the latter half of this paragraph conflates events which, while they may have happened around the same time, weren't all that closely related otherwise:
The last chapter, entitled "The Conservative Revolution," makes me further suspicious about the chip Remini may have on his shoulder about contemporary history. The title itself seems, if nothing else, a bit premature; as an historian, he should know better than to proclaim events of 15 years ago "revolutionary" without at least some disclaimer about how they'll be viewed in a generation or 3. Moreover, some of the comments about social changes are just plain wrong, or at least misleading:
That said, I still consider A Brief History on balance as a book that did what I wanted it to do: provided a mostly-balanced and thorough introduction to U.S. history, and provided a refresher in some of the pre-WWII era stuff that I either didn't learn or have forgotten since high school. I appreciate the Reading List at the end of the text, too, and am adding several of Remini's recommendations to my TTR list as we speak.
115 - A Short History of the United States, by Robert V. Remini (HarperCollins, 2008). OK, I have to admit, the title and format of this book made my eyebrows shoot up. Simply put, it's not a lengthy book; 373 pages, including the references and index, and the dimensions are about the size of a hardcover novel. How on earth does one do 500+ years of history justice in 11 short chapters? Some of the answer lies in how the chapters are constructed; for example, Chapter 7 lumps together "Manifest Destiny, Progressivism, War, and the Roaring Twenties," while its successor covers the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II.
Add to that the whole "are you smarter than a 5th grader?" angle. I consider myself pretty well-informed about U.S. history, but certainly there are gaps in what I know. From the Great Depression, even the 1920s, on, I'm in pretty good shape, but when it comes to the real olden days, I pretty much jump from one war to the next, without much recollection of what's in between save the motley stew of misinformation I've picked up from historical fiction. Perhaps that's why I chuckled at Remini's lumping the Great Depression and WWII together, but didn't really bat an eye at the "Emerging Identity" or "Jacksonian Era" chapters, even though those covered longer spans of time (1797-1829 and 1829-1846, respectively).
And so I checked out Remini's book. While it was a bit of a slow starter, I'm glad I stuck with it, warts and all. It has its flaws, but overall, provides a decent overview of U.S. history, and an extensive but not overwhelming reading list at the end for those (like me) who find that the 25-cent tour only whets our appetite for more details. The text really shines in two areas. One is its discussion of presidential selection. While the treatments are necessarily abbreviated, Remini does manage to give the reader a flavor for all but 2 of the presidential elections (the 2008 election hadn't yet happened when the book was printed, but I'm not sure why he fails to mention the 1852 election of Franklin Pierce) the U.S. has seen in its 233-year history. Anyone who remembers holding their breath in November 2000 and listening to yet another joke about hanging chads will enjoy reading about the election of 1824, when John Quincy Adams became president in exchange for making House Speaker Henry Clay Secretary of State, even though Andrew Jackson had more popular and electoral votes; or 1876, when allegations of fraud in Louisiana, South Carolina, and, yes, Florida, put the election in the hands of a 15-member Electoral Commission, which eventually split 8 to 7 along strict party lines, giving all the disputed votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden (again, even though Tilden led the popular vote). Likewise, more than 100 years before George Bush the elder's Willie Horton ads in 1988, and the era of the sound bite, came the elections of 1884 ("Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine" vs. Grover "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha" Cleveland) and 1840 (William Henry Harrison, a/k/a "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too," vs. incumbent Martin Van Buren, which Remini describes as "a rollicking campaign of songs, parades, noise, and nonsense. ... Complete with hard cide, coonskin hats, rolling balls, and other such paraphernalia, this campaign was one of the liveliest and funniest in American history.")
The other thing that impressed me about the book was Remini's ability to describe not just what happened, but why it was significant. For example, he notes Henry Clay's vehement objection to then-General Andrew Jackson's 1816 invasion of Florida, which set the stage for an enmity between the two that continued to affect politics for the next 20 years; James Garfield's election in 1880 as the first president to be elected directly from the House of Representatives; Grover Cleveland's record-setting 414 vetoes in his first presidential administration; and Ross Perot's 1992 performance as the strongest by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose in 1912.
As I noted earlier, the book has its flaws. One, though this will sound picky, is the maps. I'm usually a big fan of maps, but here, they're poorly executed, many are difficult to read (blurred, and with tiny text, which makes me think someone just shrunk 81/2" x 11" documents down to be roughly index-card sized), and they're often inserted at a point in the text that has nothing to do with what the map's illustrating. For example, a map illustrating westward exploration and expansion from 1803 to 1807 is tucked away amidst the Revolutionary War, and a map of the 50 states and their 2-letter postal abbreviations lands smack dab in the middle of the Cold War and Sputnik. (The latter makes some sense, I guess, as it comes just before a note about the election of 1960 being the first in which the new states of Alaska and Hawaii voted, but the lack of content or explanation made me look at it and say, "Huh?") Remini also has a habit of jumping around chronologically, and while I understand the reasons for this (it makes sense, for example, if you're writing about World War II, to talk about the North African, European, and Pacific campaigns separately, rather than follow a strict time line that jumps around from place to place and makes it tough to follow the big picture), some additional help (i.e., clarifying dates) would have been appreciated.
I also take issue with some of the book's presentation of late 20th and early 21st century history. Perhaps this is inevitable; Remini is primarily a Jacksonian-era historian, and the challenges of interpreting cause and effect and other relationships is different when we're looking back 200 years than when we're considering a more recent period from which frankly, all the dust is still settling. For example, in the "Cold War and Civil Rights" chapter, he notes that the 1950s saw the emergence of a youth culture that found its expression in rock and roll music. Fair enough, but the latter half of this paragraph conflates events which, while they may have happened around the same time, weren't all that closely related otherwise:
"With the arrival of the British rock group the Beatles, the popularity of rock and roll dominated all other forms of music. What soon evolved was an anti-establishment counterculture in which 'hippies,' as they were known, wore long hair, engaged in communal living, became sexually promiscuous, experimented with marijuana and other drugs, and foreswore political involvement. This hippie phase of the youth movement faded by the early 1970s."While there was likely some overlap between Beatlemania and hippiedom, the Fab 4's stuff was at best, a small fraction of the counterculture's music. What happened to Jimi Hendrix? Bob Dylan? CSN? I recognize that a book of this breadth necessarily sacrifices some level of depth, but given the full page devoted to the Roaring '20s jazz age culture, it seems like a bit more light could have been shed on the youth movement of the 1960s and '70s, rather than implying that all Beatles fans were pot-smoking, free-loving communitarians straight off the set of Hair. Mr. Remini, allow me to present my mother.
The last chapter, entitled "The Conservative Revolution," makes me further suspicious about the chip Remini may have on his shoulder about contemporary history. The title itself seems, if nothing else, a bit premature; as an historian, he should know better than to proclaim events of 15 years ago "revolutionary" without at least some disclaimer about how they'll be viewed in a generation or 3. Moreover, some of the comments about social changes are just plain wrong, or at least misleading:
"Of particular concern to an older generation was the fact that the family in which children were raised by two parents of the opposite sex, one of whom (usually the male) worked and the other (usually the female) stayed home and raised the children, was disintegrating at an alarming rate. Marriage was often put off until the male had reached his mid-thirties and the female her late twenties."While I won't argue with his assertion that "an older generation" may be concerned about this trend, I do think he's remiss in taking this concern at face value. Granted, this is my chip on the shoulder, but I feel compelled to point out that a) it's not that the average age of first marriage today is unusually high, but that in the 1950s, it was unusually low; and b) while it's true that compared to 50 years ago, far more children now live in single-parent homes because their parents are divorced or were never married, we also have far fewer children lose a parent to death (from wars, illness, etc.). I won't hijack my own review for the sake of my trusty soapbox, but I do think Remini does better when he sticks to legislative and political history, especially in the modern era, and leaves contemporary social history to those who specialize in this field (Stephanie Coontz's work makes fascinating reading, if you're interested.)
That said, I still consider A Brief History on balance as a book that did what I wanted it to do: provided a mostly-balanced and thorough introduction to U.S. history, and provided a refresher in some of the pre-WWII era stuff that I either didn't learn or have forgotten since high school. I appreciate the Reading List at the end of the text, too, and am adding several of Remini's recommendations to my TTR list as we speak.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
114 - Hothouse Flower & the 9 Plants of Desire
Today, waiting around in between out-of-town interviews, I finished Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, by Margot Berwin (Pantheon, 2009). With a title like that, and a garish hot pink cover to boot, how could I resist?
And I'm glad I didn't. Like the rare plants of the title, this one was both highly entertaining and unusual enough in terms of plot to keep me guessing. The bookclubs.ca Reader's Guide describes it as "Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief." Not having read the latter, I can't say if that's accurate, but it does hint at the book's intriguing nature. It tells the story of Lila Nova, a NYC advertising copywriter and recent divorcee who's decided that her "small, newly renovated studio with absolutely no character" needs some sprucing up. This decision takes her to the Union Square Greenmarket, where she meets the "rugged country-sexual" Plant Man, David Exley, who persuades her that a Hawaiian bird-of-paradise plant is just the thing. Whether it's David or the plant itself working the mojo, Lila's easily convinced ... but no sooner does she get the plant home than she begins seeing her life in a new light. The first and funniest inkling of this comes in the "Advertising" chapter, when Lila and coworker/ BFF/ surfer dude extraordinare Kody attend a film shoot for a sneaker commercial:
Sadly, not only does Exley not call the next day and disappear from the Greenmarket, but on Lila's next trip to the Laundromat, she finds it devastated: shattered windows, uprooted plants and soil everywhere, a hole in the secret back door, and the 9 plants gone without a trace. Exley is clearly at fault, as is Lila herself for leading him there. She offers to repay Armand, but he insists there's only one way she can make up for the loss: come with him to Mexico to replace the plants.
And so begins Lila's odyssey. Armand leaves before she does, so she finds herself driving and then walking alone through the jungles of the Yucatan, working her way towards Armand's second home as best as she can. She is rescued at gunpoint by Diego, a mysterious Huichol shaman sent by Armand who's a bit of a plant man himself ... just before she accidentally tramples on 2 of the 9 mythical plants. From here, the story veers into magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Lila must confront demons internal and external to repay her debt and reclaim her identity. The conclusion offers just enough twists and turns to keep the reader on her toes, though one of the plot lines is wrapped up just a bit too neatly for my tastes (and in a way that doesn't quite fit the story otherwise).
The book is tremendously readable, and at 260 pages, not all that long. Funny, thought-provoking, and just a little steamy in parts (at the risk of conflating my Spanish-speaking artists, the combination of the humorous and the erotic reminded me of some of Almodovar's films in places), it's an excellent choice for a damp, drizzly November weekend.
And I'm glad I didn't. Like the rare plants of the title, this one was both highly entertaining and unusual enough in terms of plot to keep me guessing. The bookclubs.ca Reader's Guide describes it as "Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief." Not having read the latter, I can't say if that's accurate, but it does hint at the book's intriguing nature. It tells the story of Lila Nova, a NYC advertising copywriter and recent divorcee who's decided that her "small, newly renovated studio with absolutely no character" needs some sprucing up. This decision takes her to the Union Square Greenmarket, where she meets the "rugged country-sexual" Plant Man, David Exley, who persuades her that a Hawaiian bird-of-paradise plant is just the thing. Whether it's David or the plant itself working the mojo, Lila's easily convinced ... but no sooner does she get the plant home than she begins seeing her life in a new light. The first and funniest inkling of this comes in the "Advertising" chapter, when Lila and coworker/ BFF/ surfer dude extraordinare Kody attend a film shoot for a sneaker commercial:
"When the hair and makeup people arrived, Kody and I gathered around to watch them turn the teenaged giant into a supermodel. ...It's on her way home from this very shoot that Lila notices "a most unusual plant" in a store window, and steps inside to find a far more unusual laundromat:
"The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while her genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over their faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a monotoned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes.
"When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the makeup artist dug through a suitcase of brushes and plowed through undreds of tubes of flesh-colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed, with a needle and thread, strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light-brown locks, creating a thick, full mane of shimmering gold."
"I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. ...She is drawn into a long chat with the owner, Armand, who offers her a challenge: take a cutting from the fire fern in the window home, make it grow roots, and he'll show her the 9 rare and valuable plants he keeps hidden in the back room -- that is, provided she agrees not to mention them to anyone else. While it doesn't make sense even to her, she is intrigued, and accepts:
"Thick grass grew from squares of soil perfectly cut to fit the tops of the industrial-sized washing machines and dryers. Dense pockets of jewel-colored flowers on long, thin stems grew from the grass. There were red poppies, purple bells, and bright-yellow daisies. The laundry looked like a meadow. Like a field of wildflowers.
"Plants were strung across the ceiling in between the tracks of flourescent lights, stretching from one side of the Laundromat to the other. Colorful flowers sprang from the pots and hung down over the benches and folding tables. The pots were hung on invisible fishing line, so the flowers seemed to float in midair.
"The Laundromat was like a jungle where washing machines had been dumped, or maybe a laundry where a jungle had sprung up."
"I stared at the cutting on the way home, trying to understand why I didn't throw it away. Or simply drop it on the street. It looked like any other cutting I'd ever seen. It was a basic, four-inch-long green stem with a few random leaves sticking off the sides. But somehow I knew it wasn't like any other cutting. I found myself gripping it more tightly than my bag with my money, phone, and credit cards. ...In the coming days, Lila cares painstakingly for the fire fern cutting, and returns to Exley's plant stand seeking further exotic adventures, not all of them horticultural. Initially, Exley resists her overtures, but after learning about the fire fern, he changes his mind. Smitten, she reneges on her promise to Armand, and takes Exley to the laundromat on their first date before heading home for a night of unprecedented passion.
"I'm not a superstitious person. I don't even read my horoscope for fun, but I knew I wanted to see those nine plants in the back room of that Laundromat."
Sadly, not only does Exley not call the next day and disappear from the Greenmarket, but on Lila's next trip to the Laundromat, she finds it devastated: shattered windows, uprooted plants and soil everywhere, a hole in the secret back door, and the 9 plants gone without a trace. Exley is clearly at fault, as is Lila herself for leading him there. She offers to repay Armand, but he insists there's only one way she can make up for the loss: come with him to Mexico to replace the plants.
And so begins Lila's odyssey. Armand leaves before she does, so she finds herself driving and then walking alone through the jungles of the Yucatan, working her way towards Armand's second home as best as she can. She is rescued at gunpoint by Diego, a mysterious Huichol shaman sent by Armand who's a bit of a plant man himself ... just before she accidentally tramples on 2 of the 9 mythical plants. From here, the story veers into magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Lila must confront demons internal and external to repay her debt and reclaim her identity. The conclusion offers just enough twists and turns to keep the reader on her toes, though one of the plot lines is wrapped up just a bit too neatly for my tastes (and in a way that doesn't quite fit the story otherwise).
The book is tremendously readable, and at 260 pages, not all that long. Funny, thought-provoking, and just a little steamy in parts (at the risk of conflating my Spanish-speaking artists, the combination of the humorous and the erotic reminded me of some of Almodovar's films in places), it's an excellent choice for a damp, drizzly November weekend.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
113 - Hotel on the Corner ...
Odd. I just blogged about Home Safe, wanted to say, "Well, it's not a moving, stay-with-you kind of novel like ___" ... and couldn't find a novel I'd read recently to fill in the blank. Well, now I've found one.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford (Ballantine, 2009) was excellent, memorable, and gently moving. Set in Seattle, it's actually two stories: one set in 1986, and one in during World War II. They're connected by the main character, Henry Lee, who's a pre-teen boy in the 1940s, and a widower in his 50s in the more recent chapters. Like Helen Ames in Home Safe, Henry has just lost his spouse of many years, but unlike Helen's, his loss was a long time coming.
This discovery, and the bamboo parasol the new owner opens to illustrate her find, takes Henry back to his own childhood, when the Panama Hotel stood on the boundary between Chinatown and the Japanese neighborhood of Nihonmachi. His vehemently nationalist father, eager to distinguish his son from China's and the U.S.'s shared Japanese enemies, makes him wear a pin on his school shirt that proclaims "I Am Chinese," but the distinction is lost on his peers. The neighborhood kids call him baak gwai ("white devil") because he attends an all-white school, while his schoolmates call him Tojo, Jap, and yellow.
Henry is further set apart by having to work in the cafeteria at lunchtime -- a requirement for his scholarship. This isn't all bad, though, as it's how he meets his two closest friends: Sheldon, a black streetcorner sax player who happily accepts Henry's brown-bagged lunch (Mrs. Beatty, the lunch lady, lets him eat cafeteria leftovers), and Keiko, a sansei Japanese-American whose insistence that she's American first goes over about as well with the Rainier Elementary bullies as does Henry's "I Am Chinese" button. Henry and Keiko gradually become friends, although he's careful to keep this fact from his father. "His father wouldn't allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day. ... Henry's father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home."
Henry and Keiko also discover a shared love of jazz, and over a trip to the Black Elks Club to hear Sheldon play with local jazz legend Oscar Holden, they begin to fall in love, in that poignant, familiar way of early adolescence. The evening takes a frightening turn, however, when the club is raided by the FBI, and a handful of Japanese patrons handcuffed and taken away. "'Collaborators, kid. Secretary of the Navy says there were Jap scouts working in Hawaii -- all of them locals. That ain't happening around here. ... They can get the death penalty if they're found guilty of treason, but they'll probably just spend a few years in a nice safe jail cell.'" (Never mind that at least one of those captured is an innocent schoolteacher.)
In the coming months, the situation grows still more dire for the residents of Nihonmachi. Panicked neighbors burn wedding dresses, photos, and other family heirlooms, eager to destroy any evidence that might connect them to Japan. Henry stands up to not only his local schoolyard bully, but his own father in his determination to protect Keiko's family's things. It's not enough, though; ultimately, the Okabes are rounded up along with all the other Japanese-Americans, and sent off to interment at the ill-named Camp Harmony. Heartbroken but determined, Henry manages to visit (with some unexpected help from Mrs. Beatty), and even gets Mr. Okabe's permission to court Keiko.
Parallel to Henry and Keiko's story is the more subtle, but nonetheless touching, account of the middle-aged Henry's life: his efforts to find Keiko's things among the basement stash at the Panama Hotel, his tentative relationship with Marty, and how that relationship evolves when Marty comes clean about his own forbidden love: his Caucasian fiancee, Samantha.
I've read plenty of World War II novels, and some of my favorites are set mostly on the home front; Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers is a prime example. I haven't come across many that tackle the Japanese interment camps in the U.S., though -- and as I'm always a sucker for immigrant stories about what it means to be of two different cultures (and not belong fully to either), this made for a good backdrop. Hotel on the Corner just may make my faves of the year list.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford (Ballantine, 2009) was excellent, memorable, and gently moving. Set in Seattle, it's actually two stories: one set in 1986, and one in during World War II. They're connected by the main character, Henry Lee, who's a pre-teen boy in the 1940s, and a widower in his 50s in the more recent chapters. Like Helen Ames in Home Safe, Henry has just lost his spouse of many years, but unlike Helen's, his loss was a long time coming.
"He missed his wife, Ethel. She'd been gone six months now. But he didn't miss her as much as you'd think, as bad as that might sound. It was more like quiet relief really. Her health had been bad -- no, worse than bad. The cancer in her bones had been downright crippling, to both of us, he thought.In his bereaved first-chapter wanderings, he encounters a to-do at the Panama Hotel, a long-defunct local landmark. It seems a new owner has just purchased the hotel, and as she explains to news crews and onlookers, "in the basement she had discovered the belongings of thirty-seven Japanese families who she presumed had been persecuted and taken away. Their belongings had been hidden and never recovered -- a time capsule from the war years."
"For the last seven years Henry had fed her, bathed her, helped her to the bathroom when she needed to go, and back again when she was all through. He took care of her night and day, 24/7 as they say these days. Marty, his son, thought his mother should have been put in a home, but Henry would have none of it. 'Not in my lifetime,' Henry said, resisting. ... He'd been raised to care for loved ones, personally, and to put someone in a home was unacceptable. What his son, Marty, never fully understood was that deep down there was an Ethel-shaped hold in Henry's life, and without her, all he felt was the draft of loneliness, cold and sharp, the years slipping away like blood from a wound that never heals."
This discovery, and the bamboo parasol the new owner opens to illustrate her find, takes Henry back to his own childhood, when the Panama Hotel stood on the boundary between Chinatown and the Japanese neighborhood of Nihonmachi. His vehemently nationalist father, eager to distinguish his son from China's and the U.S.'s shared Japanese enemies, makes him wear a pin on his school shirt that proclaims "I Am Chinese," but the distinction is lost on his peers. The neighborhood kids call him baak gwai ("white devil") because he attends an all-white school, while his schoolmates call him Tojo, Jap, and yellow.
Henry is further set apart by having to work in the cafeteria at lunchtime -- a requirement for his scholarship. This isn't all bad, though, as it's how he meets his two closest friends: Sheldon, a black streetcorner sax player who happily accepts Henry's brown-bagged lunch (Mrs. Beatty, the lunch lady, lets him eat cafeteria leftovers), and Keiko, a sansei Japanese-American whose insistence that she's American first goes over about as well with the Rainier Elementary bullies as does Henry's "I Am Chinese" button. Henry and Keiko gradually become friends, although he's careful to keep this fact from his father. "His father wouldn't allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day. ... Henry's father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home."
Henry and Keiko also discover a shared love of jazz, and over a trip to the Black Elks Club to hear Sheldon play with local jazz legend Oscar Holden, they begin to fall in love, in that poignant, familiar way of early adolescence. The evening takes a frightening turn, however, when the club is raided by the FBI, and a handful of Japanese patrons handcuffed and taken away. "'Collaborators, kid. Secretary of the Navy says there were Jap scouts working in Hawaii -- all of them locals. That ain't happening around here. ... They can get the death penalty if they're found guilty of treason, but they'll probably just spend a few years in a nice safe jail cell.'" (Never mind that at least one of those captured is an innocent schoolteacher.)
In the coming months, the situation grows still more dire for the residents of Nihonmachi. Panicked neighbors burn wedding dresses, photos, and other family heirlooms, eager to destroy any evidence that might connect them to Japan. Henry stands up to not only his local schoolyard bully, but his own father in his determination to protect Keiko's family's things. It's not enough, though; ultimately, the Okabes are rounded up along with all the other Japanese-Americans, and sent off to interment at the ill-named Camp Harmony. Heartbroken but determined, Henry manages to visit (with some unexpected help from Mrs. Beatty), and even gets Mr. Okabe's permission to court Keiko.
Parallel to Henry and Keiko's story is the more subtle, but nonetheless touching, account of the middle-aged Henry's life: his efforts to find Keiko's things among the basement stash at the Panama Hotel, his tentative relationship with Marty, and how that relationship evolves when Marty comes clean about his own forbidden love: his Caucasian fiancee, Samantha.
I've read plenty of World War II novels, and some of my favorites are set mostly on the home front; Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers is a prime example. I haven't come across many that tackle the Japanese interment camps in the U.S., though -- and as I'm always a sucker for immigrant stories about what it means to be of two different cultures (and not belong fully to either), this made for a good backdrop. Hotel on the Corner just may make my faves of the year list.
#112 - Home Safe
I love Elizabeth Berg. She's pretty prolific, and I haven't read all her books -- but I've read a few (I'm looking at the "Also By" listing now, and The Art of Mending, Open House, and Range of Motion are all familiar), and they're just what I want in a fun read: short chapters, not too taxing, but plausible and non-formulaic enough that I don't feel like I'm reading utter trash (yeah, I have weird Issues with this, I know).
So when I saw Home Safe (Random House, 2009) on the library's new acquisitions shelf, well, it just jumped right onto the stack in my arms. Uh huh. And I wasn't disappointed. It's certainly not haunting the way Columbine or even a particularly intense novel would be, but then again, that's not always what I'm looking for. If a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, well, sometimes a good story is just a good story.
And Home Safe is a good story. The protagonist is the recently-widowed Helen Ames, a middle-aged Midwestern author who's been unmoored since her late husband Dan succumbed to a heart attack at the breakfast table. As she muses in the first chapter,
No, this is neither a reaction to the recent financial meltdown or another story in which the absent husband turns out to have had another family and another life all along. It turns out that unbeknownst to her, Dan was building Helen's dream house in San Francisco, intending for them both to retire there. Convinced by architect Tom Ellis (himself a 9/11 almost-widower), she flies to the west coast to visit, and the house is indeed breathtaking ... but how on earth can Helen imagine living there without Dan? For that matter, how can she leave Illinois? And what about Tessa?
The unexpected depletion of her savings, however, forces Helen to let the house question take a back seat to more pressing matters: earning a living. After a whimsical attempt to get a job at Anthropologie ends in disaster, she accepts a gig she dreads: teaching a creative writing class. To make matters worse, the class is so popular that a second section is added, and Helen's nemesis, Saundra Weller, is invited to teach that one. "But Saundra Weller! Helen can't stand her, with her endless self-promotion and her snotty attitude toward ... well, toward Helen, for one thing. They were on a panel together at a book festival, and Saundra made no secret of the fact that she found Helen to be a vastly inferior writer."
As you might expect (OK, the book's not really formulaic), the writing class turns out to be a fascinating exercise, both for Helen and her students. Never mind that Saundra's star pupil, Margot Langley, recently wrote Helen an anti-fan letter, proclaiming her writing mawkish, clumsy, and insipid -- Helen's, er, unusual cast of students surprise her with their insights and their enthusiasm. Foremost among these is the inscrutable Claudia, a painfully introverted young woman whose shyness conceals the talent of a real artist.
Another theme which runs throughout the story is the tension between Helen and the 27-year-old Tessa. Helen seems to know she's leaning too heavily on her daughter, yet can't seem to help herself, whether it's dropping off leftovers or buying expressly unwanted clothes or attempting clumsy fix-ups with an eligible young man from her writing class. Tessa is kind but firm with her mother, and begins to think she herself might just want to move to the house in San Francisco.
None of the characters or story lines are exceptionally memorable, but Home Safe is nonetheless an absorbing and believable story of grief, loss, family, and the writing process. (I can't help wondering how much of Helen's character is autobiographical, but then again, how Helen describes her inspiration makes me wonder: Does it matter? Isn't all writing based on our own experience to some degree?) The weaving together of the plot lines is realistic and well-done, and concludes with just the right balance of resolution and uncertainty. (I don't like sloppy, unduly tangled plots, but I'm not a fan of overly tidy endings, either.) Not one I'd necessarily buy for myself, but well worth the read if it's a loaner or secondhand.
So when I saw Home Safe (Random House, 2009) on the library's new acquisitions shelf, well, it just jumped right onto the stack in my arms. Uh huh. And I wasn't disappointed. It's certainly not haunting the way Columbine or even a particularly intense novel would be, but then again, that's not always what I'm looking for. If a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, well, sometimes a good story is just a good story.
And Home Safe is a good story. The protagonist is the recently-widowed Helen Ames, a middle-aged Midwestern author who's been unmoored since her late husband Dan succumbed to a heart attack at the breakfast table. As she muses in the first chapter,
"She believes the last thing Dan felt was surprise, and to her way of thinking, it wasn't a bad way to go. The bad part is he left her here without him, ignorant of ... everything.For the moment, aside from annoying her daughter Tessa with requests for mechanical repairs, this isn't a problem. "Financially, she is fine: she and Dan created for themselves a nice nest egg. It is in other ways that she is not." Most poignant of these "other ways" is a paralyzing writer's block:
"People used to accuse her of being overly dependent on Dan, and it was true. 'You give away your power,' one friend told Helen. 'You infantilize yourself.' On that occasion, Helen looked down at her salad plate as though acknowledging culpability and feeling bad about it, but what she was thinking was, Oh, shut up. It feels good to infantilize myself. You ought to try it. Might take an edge off. ...
"In addition to her greatest love, Helen has lost the person who handled the practical side of their life together. All this time later, Helen is still shaky on managing the simplest aspects of her finances, despite the fact that she has an accountant to ask questions of. She trusted Dan to take care of his own income and hers; she didn't want to know anything about what he was doing."
"[S]he can no longer write. Bad enough that writing was the way she made her living; it was also her anchor, her lens, her abiding consolation. Next to Dan, it was her greatest love. Without her husband or the practice of laying out words on a page, she feels that she spends her days rattling around inside herself; that whereas she used to be a whole and happy woman, now she is many pieces of battered self, slung together in a sack of skin. ...Good thing, then, that the money's not a problem. Or so Helen thinks, until (after weeks of unreturned phone calls) her accountant finally sits her down and gives her the news: instead of nearly a million dollars, she has only $50,000 of her nest egg left.
"These days Helen looks around the places she goes to, and nothing seems worth noting, or even quite there. These days, she comes into her study, sits at the desk, starts up the computer, and drinks coffee while she tries to avoid looking at the blinking cursor, that electronic tapping foot. Sometimes she moves to her little white sofa to read from volumes of poetry she used to find inspiring, and sometimes she reads from her own previously published novels. Irrespective of what she reads, though, when she goes back to sit before the computer, there is the same stubborn emptiness, the same locked door. So she shuts the computer down and leaves the room, pulling the door firmly closed behind her."
No, this is neither a reaction to the recent financial meltdown or another story in which the absent husband turns out to have had another family and another life all along. It turns out that unbeknownst to her, Dan was building Helen's dream house in San Francisco, intending for them both to retire there. Convinced by architect Tom Ellis (himself a 9/11 almost-widower), she flies to the west coast to visit, and the house is indeed breathtaking ... but how on earth can Helen imagine living there without Dan? For that matter, how can she leave Illinois? And what about Tessa?
The unexpected depletion of her savings, however, forces Helen to let the house question take a back seat to more pressing matters: earning a living. After a whimsical attempt to get a job at Anthropologie ends in disaster, she accepts a gig she dreads: teaching a creative writing class. To make matters worse, the class is so popular that a second section is added, and Helen's nemesis, Saundra Weller, is invited to teach that one. "But Saundra Weller! Helen can't stand her, with her endless self-promotion and her snotty attitude toward ... well, toward Helen, for one thing. They were on a panel together at a book festival, and Saundra made no secret of the fact that she found Helen to be a vastly inferior writer."
As you might expect (OK, the book's not really formulaic), the writing class turns out to be a fascinating exercise, both for Helen and her students. Never mind that Saundra's star pupil, Margot Langley, recently wrote Helen an anti-fan letter, proclaiming her writing mawkish, clumsy, and insipid -- Helen's, er, unusual cast of students surprise her with their insights and their enthusiasm. Foremost among these is the inscrutable Claudia, a painfully introverted young woman whose shyness conceals the talent of a real artist.
Another theme which runs throughout the story is the tension between Helen and the 27-year-old Tessa. Helen seems to know she's leaning too heavily on her daughter, yet can't seem to help herself, whether it's dropping off leftovers or buying expressly unwanted clothes or attempting clumsy fix-ups with an eligible young man from her writing class. Tessa is kind but firm with her mother, and begins to think she herself might just want to move to the house in San Francisco.
None of the characters or story lines are exceptionally memorable, but Home Safe is nonetheless an absorbing and believable story of grief, loss, family, and the writing process. (I can't help wondering how much of Helen's character is autobiographical, but then again, how Helen describes her inspiration makes me wonder: Does it matter? Isn't all writing based on our own experience to some degree?) The weaving together of the plot lines is realistic and well-done, and concludes with just the right balance of resolution and uncertainty. (I don't like sloppy, unduly tangled plots, but I'm not a fan of overly tidy endings, either.) Not one I'd necessarily buy for myself, but well worth the read if it's a loaner or secondhand.
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