Jonathan and I were out on a date a couple of months ago (thanks Mom!) and we had some extra time after dinner, so we browsed in a bookstore. I first noticed the cover art for Little Bee, then was intrigued by the information on the front flap which states, “We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two hears later, they meet again–the story starts there….Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds.”

Ok. I was really intrigued, but didn’t really feel it necessary to purchase the book since our bookshelves had only recently been cleaned out during a bit of prebaby panic on my part. I looked for the book at the library and it was in circulation, but not on the shelf. I placed a hold and waited for two months for a copy to arrive. Once I started reading, I almost wished I hadn’t, but I’m glad I finished and it has made me think.

I won’t go into specifics of the plot because the author has requested as much (though you can probably read more about that on amazon or goodreads), but I will say this is a well written, cleverly told story of two women whose lives are impossibly intertwined. It was hard to pick up and continue reading after the first few pages and even more difficult to put down as I both hated knowing the story and needed to know what would happen to the main characters.

In short, I recommend this book. While it is an easy read, it isn’t the usual fluff I go for at this time of year. Also, if you happen to be pregnant, nursing or just someone who cries easily, this might be a difficult book to read. It will challenge you to think of what you might do in a similar situation and perhaps consider how your own life choices affect others you’ve never met. It might also make you cry.

There aren’t many “productive” things I’m able to accomplish these days (outside of nurturing and caring for a baby around the clock); however, I have managed to read one book since Beatrice’s birthday: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. I didn’t have any expectations when I began reading this book, the story just seemed to be interesting and since I was number 300 something on the library holds list, I knew it was popular.

The Help is the type of book I categorize as “television that you read” in that it is not challenging to comprehend, I did not encounter any words that I’d never before seen, the character development ranges from very good to non-existent and the story moves along quickly. These are the BEST type of books to read while nursing!

The Help is set in 1962 and the main character, Skeeter Phelan, has just graduated from Ole Miss with a degree in English. Unlike most of her peers, Skeeter did not get married while in college and has obtained a degree, only to find herself living back at home on her parents’ cotton farm. She finds herself writing a household hints column for the newspaper in which she responds to readers’ requests for tips on how to remove bathtub rings, the best way to remove stains from clothing and other questions that she is completely unprepared to answer as she has never had to do housework. She is able to use the help of her good friend’s maid, Abileen, who has spent a lifetime raising other peoples’ children, cleaning their houses and quietly slipping home at night without much recognition.

Through their time together, Abileen and Skeeter develop a relationship that would not be defined as a friendship, but more of a mutual respect. While the Civil Rights Movement is in the news, Jackson seems unchanged by the events sweeping the rest of the country. Skeeter is in communication with a publishing house in New York and comes up with a book proposal that includes the personal stories of several housekeepers in Jackson. She hasn’t gotten anyone to agree to tell their stories, but it’s the best idea she’s got. The Help is a story of two sides of a social divide trying to decide if they trust each other during a tumultuous time in American history. It is also an endearing story of families, love and deep friendship.

If you’re looking for a good read this summer that is thought-provoking, I recommend The Help. And if you ever find yourself in Jackson, Mississippi, please take your photo with the giant bust of Andrew Jackson!

I picked up this book because it had so many literary accolades, and because I am an absolute sucker for post-apocalyptic stories.

I had a hard time with the first ten pages. Cormac’s writing style can be hard to get past; it feels like something that should have received a C- in a high school creative writing class. The book is written in choppy, stream-of-consciousness sentences that are often fragments or run-ons, and the author gleefully omits punctuation and jams words together in a way that makes you sure he’s trying to increase your sense of unease just by making the words look wrong on the page. 

But then I got sucked in. The storyline is very simple, so simple that I didn’t believe it when I read it on the back cover. It is the story of a man and his son–both unnamed–walking through a barren, desolate, and cold America, just trying to stay alive and reach their destination. The terrors they encounter along the way are nightmarishly surreal–bands of starving people, unrelenting cold, forests of trees just falling down. The constant danger left me jittery and completely unable to put the book down; I finished it in a couple of nights.

The professional literary types say that this book is about hope, and three-quarters of the way through the book you’ll be wondering if there’s a shred of it anywhere in the bleak text. But there is: the father and his son exemplify a kind of transcendental hope that is completely separated from reason and circumstance. You could say that it’s hope in its most pure form or hope in its most foolish form, but it’s unquestionably hope, and an examination of what it means when it is, literally, all you’ve got.

There’s also a good dose of morality here, not in the preachy sense, but in the sense that makes you feel a little twinge in your gut at some of the hard choices faced by the protagonists. The right thing to do isn’t always obvious, and sometimes they don’t do it.

In the end I liked this book, but I can’t recommend it to you unless you have a high tolerance for sorrow, horribly disturbing images, and selfless love.

I’ve been trying to read up a bit not just on newborn/infant care but on parenting in general. This book was suggested to me by a friend at work, who I will refer to as Q., because that is not his first initial. Q. related the following exchange:

Q. is reading Unconditional Parenting in bed
Q’s son: Daddy, why are you reading that book?
Q.: Well, because I want to be a better dad.
Q’s son: But you’re already a good dad! *hug*

The author’s basic assertion is that “conditional parenting”–that is, using behavioral controls such as rewards and punishments–is a poor way to raise a child, for many reasons. Among them–and keep in mind that nearly all of these have at least one study supporting them:

• Children who are punished may temporarily cease the offending behavior, but only to avoid the punishment, not because they understand or have internalized the problem with their behavior.
• Children who are rewarded learn to stop doing things for their intrinsic reward and begin doing them only if they receieve an extrinsic reward.
• Animals are trained to obey with conditional rewards and punishments. It is disrespectful to train children like animals when we can train them like people. 
• Most parents want to raise adults who are intellectually curious, kind, and want to make a difference in the world. Rewards and punishments designed to produce perfectly obedient children may be effective in the short term but they are not effective in the long term and do not help children develop into the kind of people we want them to be.
• Rewards and punishments teach children that a parents’ love is conditional on the parent’s judgment of the child.
• Children need unconditional love more than anything. The lavish praise heaped on children by modern parents is often a stream of conditional judgments, even though they are positive ones.
• Children learn to make decisions best by making decisions, not by having decisions imposed on them.
• Children who are respected and made part of the decision-making process feel less need to assert their independence and are therefore more likely to obey.

Since we haven’t actually had any parenting experience of our own, we’re not really qualified to review the philosophy presented in the book. However, I found the author’s viewpoint unnecessarily dichotomous.

On the one hand, the author’s motives are pure. He wants to place the relationship above the rules, the long-term goals above the short-term behavior, and love over everything.

However, I don’t think it’s impossible to use rewards and punishments–albeit sparingly–in a way that still communicates unconditional love and still communicates the reason behind the rules. When I was growing up, my parents had plenty of behavioral controls, but I never felt that their love was conditional. I’m sure that taking the easy way out and making a power play is a constant temptation, but that isn’t a problem unique to a reward-and-punishment approach. 

Finally, while the author spends a vast portion of the book demonizing conditional controls, he has relatively little to say on how one might go about raising a child without them.

Do any of you parents out there have thoughts on the matter?

I first learned about this book from my sister, Megan. I later read an exerpt from the book published as a magazine article, and I knew I’d need to read the rest.

Like a lot of popular science books (and as the reader is warned in the title itself), this volume is intended to shock you. It’s a survey of recent research that attacks some of the long-held assumptions forming the core of modern American parenting. Initially skeptical because of the somewhat alarmist tone of the book, I admit that I found the research numbers very convincing. There were at least two or three chapters that made us rethink the way we will raise Champ.

Here are some of the more surprising things I learned from the book, presented in no particular order. Since the thing that makes this book entertaining is the little shock you get when they lay down the counter-intuitive research punchline, skip this list if you plan to read the book yourself.

• The biggest factor influencing verbal development is not the number of words a child is exposed to or how much parents talk to the child. It’s the way parents respond when the child makes sounds.
• Frequently praising children for their innate qualities (e.g. intelligence) often leads to arrogance and poor performance, as children fear that failure will demonstrate their lack of these innate qualities. Children who are praised more sparingly and praised for effort perform better and feel better about their work.
• Children who are not taught about racial issues form their own conclusions and stereotypes about race, which are often wildly inappropriate by adult standards. Children cannot think abstractly enough to comprehend simplistic statements from parents like “everyone is equal no matter the color of their skin.”
• Too much emphasis is placed on early development and “giftedness”. There is extremely little correlation between a child’s early identification as “gifted” (e.g. in kindergarten) and the child’s later academic performance. Many children truly are late bloomers.
• Baby Einstein and other television programming for very young children have a negative effect on childrens’ development, because children don’t learn from them and they take time away from parental interaction, from which children do learn. This is due partly to the role response plays in learning and partly to children discerning word separation from the lip movement of the speaker; educational videos often use disembodied voices.
• Children often learn negative behavior from children’s books and television programming while missing the moral of the story.
• Very involved fathers often have children that are just as poorly behaved as children of fathers who play a more traditional role. This is largely due to inconsistent discipline–lack of punishment, differing punishments for the same crimes, caving at the wrong time, etc.
• The most healthy teen-parent relationships include arguing. The teens who respect their parents’ authority will argue with rules; the teens who do not respect their parents’ authority simply ignore rules.
• Improving one dimension of a child’s life–for instance, teaching the child to be more grateful–does not necessarily improve any other dimension. That is, adding positives to a child’s life does not remove or even necessarily counterbalance the negatives.
• One of the best skills a child in the early years of school can learn is that of self-evaluation. Students who learn to critique their own and others’ work do very well later.

… And that’s not everything. Highly recommended for parents-to-be, but take it with a grain of salt: while the research is convincing, some of it is quite new and therefore hasn’t been well-established or duplicated outside one group or setting.

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll.

Here is the story of how I came to read The Cuckoo’s Egg: I purchased it at a library book sale because it looked interesting, tossed it in a box because I didn’t have time to read it, and promptly forgot about it.

Then I got married, and we got real bookshelves instead of boxes, and I put the book on the shelf because it was hardbound and hardbound books show that you are a serious, thoughtful person.

Then my Uncle Steve came over from Florida and started telling me about a book he had read, a true story of a guy tracking down a hacker in the 80s. “Wait a sec,” I said, “is it this book?” And I pulled down my dusty copy of The Cuckoo’s Egg. It was, in fact, that book, and I decided that it didn’t deserve space on the shelf if I hadn’t actually read it.

The Cuckoo’s Egg is written by an astronomer who had been put in charge of some computers. He’d been trying to track down a 75-cent accounting error–this was back when you had to pay for every cycle of computer time–and, almost entirely by accident, found a hacker in his system, using it as a stepping-stone to attack other computer systems around the country.

That all happens in the first twenty-five pages. Rather than closing the hole the hacker was using to get in, however, Stoll decided he wanted to catch the guy, and that’s where the real story begins, because tracking a communications link backwards is not very easy. None of the three-letter government agencies take him seriously, his relationship with his girlfriend is rather strained, and the three weeks his boss gave him to investigate the problem stretch into months. It’s tedious work (and, in parts, tedious reading) analyzing every move the hacker makes and trying to piece together enough information to catch him.

This book isn’t for everyone. It’s a spy story, but it’s been pieced together from Stoll’s logbook and the man is a scientist–you’ll find no melodrama or embellished details here, just the facts. The author doesn’t assume a technical audience but if you’ve ever used Unix (or its successor on PCs, Linux), you will understand a lot more of what’s going on inside the systems. There’s just enough real-human stuff to break up the technical monotony–Cliff has an active social life, sews his own Pope costume, and at one point microwaves his shoes–but in the end this book is great reading mostly for those interested in computers and security.

I also recommend it if you want to know what the Internet was like in its Wild West days, before the personal computer and the World Wide Web brought it to the masses. Scientists, military networks, and archaic file transfer protocols are all present and accounted for. It’s a fascinating how old everything seems even though the book’s events happened only a little more than twenty years ago.

In closing, here’s a number sequence puzzle that a three-letter-agency spook gave Cliff in the book that–at the time of the book’s publishing–Cliff hadn’t figured out yet. Can you? Hint: It requires very little math.

1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, ….

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (Book Website.)

There are books you read because you see them on the shelf and think hey, that could be interesting and pick it up.  And then there are books that you read because you keep hearing about them from everyone else who has read them.  This book fell squarely into the latter category for me, and I’m a little embarassed to admit that this gave me pretty low expectations; I half-expected a fad diet plan, a nostalgic journey though our ancestors’ eating habits, or another author railing against fast food and high fructose corn syrup to the already-converted.

I’m thankful to say that the book was none of these things.  It is, in fact, four books, if you ask me.  And here they are:

Book 1: Industrial fast food.  Pollan writes extensively about corn in all its forms, about how we’re effectively made of the stuff, about why it is used to make almost all of our processed food, and about the implications this has for the planet and ourselves. 

Book 2: Industrial organic food. A somewhat unexpected analysis of the organic food industry–how it started, what it used to mean for food to be “organic,” what it means now, and some of the tradeoffs that are made at the farm to get the green USDA Organic sticker you see on the box.

Book 3: Polyface Farms. Pollan visits a very unusual farm that rotates crops, grasses, and animals through a patchwork of formerly poor farmland to produce animal products (mostly) in a way that is perhaps the most natural and sustainable counterpoint to the industrial mechanism outlined in the first chapter. 

Book 4: Hunting and Gathering. A rather more personal narrative about the author’s experience hunting and gathering himself, including a discourse about the ethics of eating animals, during which he quotes heavily from leading philosphers; and a discourse about hunting them, during which he leans heavily on the poets.

The writing style is absolutely splendid.  Some will find Pollan’s prose to be a bit pretentious and rambling–he has a flair for the melodramatic and poetic and sent me running for the dictionary a number of times–but the book’s very well-researched and dense with information and thoughtful observations.

This book distinguishes itself from the huge (and quickly growing) pile of books about food because the author gives the reader no specific advice about what to eat, aside from some mostly-implied suggestions to avoid overprocessed food and choose local or sustainably farmed items when you can.  Instead, he just asks that readers think about what he occasionally refers to as the “full karmic price” of their food, not just its sticker price at the grocer’s, and that we think about the whole story of the food we eat, from farm to plate, and the context in which it is eaten. 

I can’t recommend this to anyone who wants quick answers about what to eat.  But it’s a great book if you want to know how to think about what you eat–not in terms of calories or the latest and greatest super-nutrient of the day but in terms of what it actually means to eat that thing. 

And that’s something I don’t think we do enough.

Welcome to the Oatmeal for Breakfast book corner.  I (Jonathan) will attempt to use this space to review some of the books I’ve read, if they are, in fact, worth reviewing.  This one was.

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back by Frank Schaeffer. (Book Website.)

When I picked this up in the bookstore, I was expecting an autobiographical Prodigal Son story, in the manner of Franklin Graham (the “Rebel With a Cause“). Children of superstar evangelists seem almost inexorably drawn to life outside their parents’ fame and faith, and just as drawn back to the fold after they’ve strayed.  Then they write a book about it.

It’s possible, though unlikely, that you haven’t heard of Francis Schaeffer. He was one of the few men of God who successfully brought the Gospel to the “hippie generation.” In the late 50’s, he founded a little place in Switzerland called L’Abri where students could come to study and ask questions about spirituality.  His approach to theology and apologetics was conversational, down-to-earth, practical and completely free of the stuffy organized religion that was understandably unpopular with free-thinking types. He consequently became famous as an author, then a speaker and eventually was propelled to evangelical superstardom. 

About two-thirds of the book covers the story of Frank’s childhood and coming-of-age: the family vacations to Portofino; his parents’ rocky relationship and flawed personalities; his escapades in boarding school; how he met his wife; the love of art and culture that eclipsed anything else his parents taught him.  We learn about what L’Abri was like behind the scenes and exactly how invisible he felt when his parents were consumed with “the Lord’s work.” (Frank always puts Christian-ese phrases like that one in quotes in his writing.)

The remaining third covers Frank’s part in his father’s rise in the evangelical Christian world, and Frank’s struggle to reconcile himself with the increasingly powerful evangelical right-wing movement forming around the political activism he and his father had stirred up. Frank is deeply critical of the men that spearheaded the movement and even more critical of himself for allowing what was for him a simple issue–abortion–to become a rallying cry for a group with whom he shared almost nothing else.  He describes the events that unfolded with a kind of dispassionate disgust for the people he worked for and with.   

Crazy for God is a supremely misleading title.  I don’t think it spoils the ending to tell you that Frank never was “crazy for God,” and still isn’t now.  But, with his father’s gift for words, Frank’s description of his struggle with faith is compelling, and his self-critical look at the ugly underbelly of the evangelical movement is a good gut-check for anyone who’s ever been part of it. 

It’s a book worth reading, for the stories and the honesty and the questions it’ll generate.  Just take my advice and queue up a more upbeat book to read afterwards. You’ll thank me later.