A Welcome Shock Makes a Great Teacher Gift

NurtureShock, by psychologists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, is some of the best non-fiction I've ever read. Each chapter is essentially a meta-review of current large, long-term studies on childhood development issues like sleep, sibling rivalry, achievement tests, and so on.  It could have been drier than toast. Instead, it's enjoyable reading; the authors and editors deserve lots of credit for bringing it to the mass market. Now let's all just take a few days to read it...

If only! Look, even if you don't plan to read it, consider the title as an excellent end-of-year gift for the terrific teachers in your life. (Or even for the bad ones.) The science is solid and the studies worthy of considerable thought and attention. The authors make the clearest case I've ever heard for pushing back the starting time for high school classes, for one thing. And yet they don't make the case - they simply present the information in clear, interesting prose and the book is so well-organized that it's not overwhelming.

I truly believe that the more school psychologists, teachers, and parents that read this book, the better off we'll all be. As a bonus, if you give NurtureShock to your kids' teachers as a gift, I'm pretty sure you'll make the parent honor roll. ;D 

Slice of Indian Life Lacks Compelling Story

I think Karan Mahajan's family planning (c) 2008 is a very realistic farce, but it was hard for me to be sure just what the author was trying to convey at times...fortunately, his prose was pleasing enough to keep me reading through some of the rough spots in this, his first book.

The HarperCollins website offers a lovely synopsis of the book, so I won't try to duplicate it. In a nutshell, family planning is set in modern Delhi, featuring the large and ever-expanding Ahuja family. Father Rakesh, utterly disappointed in his (deceitfully) arranged marriage, finds he is, thankfully, attracted to his wife - but only when she is pregnant. Ergo, the couple has produced thirteen children and Mrs. Ahuja is pregnant again as the book begins.

Fifteen-year-old Arjun is the only one of the children we get to know, following the teen drama of his crush on the girl who rides his bus, his attempt to form a band explicitly to impress said girl, and Arjun's utter despair when he realizes that he can never have the band over to his house to practice, as he's unable to admit to his friends that he has twelve siblings, not six, as he's always maintained.

Ah, adolescence.

Ironically (and comically) Rakesh's antics at work are as juvenile as his son's high school foibles. But again, it's hard to say whether that comparison was intended by the author, or not.

One of my frustrations with this book is that Mahajan seems to have a lot of talent, but instead of showcasing his best talents in this book, he chose to give us a collage.

Mahajan drops readers into modern India on every page, with descriptions of unfinished flyovers, political corruption, plates of chappati. He drops humor into the mix too, with running gags about Mr. Ahuja's hearing problem and Mrs. Ahuja's pronoun usage. (Mrs. Ahuja rarely uses her children's names; instead, she's constantly saying, "tell him to come here" - which is both confusing and useful in a house with 13 kids.) But at odd spots - sometimes in the middle of one of those gags - the author stops to jab the reader with savvy but melancholy observations on love and marriage and the lives lost in between. At such a spot, however, when the jerky pace annoys, Mahajan's well-crafted narrative soothes.

He knew nothing about this woman, this wife of fifteen-odd years. Vague details, yes--the tough jackfruits of her elbows, the sullen hump of her jaw, the bulbous nose she had proudly passed on to each child except Arjun...a fierce protection of her Right to Eat at the table--but nothing more. He twisted and turned in his head the Rubik's cube of domestic details and arrived at no sustainable patterns. His mind was a drawer rummaged of all its contents.
- p 228

family planning had its merits, but unlike some reviewers, I'm not completely smitten with Mahajan's storytelling. His insight is delightful, and he has a tendency to surprise with it, rather than with plot twists or tension between characters. The lack of external conflict was disappointing to me.

family planning is so ripe with potential clashes among its many unique characters that every chapter seemed ready to burst. It never did. You might enjoy it anyway. I did.

More here:

Bite Me

Chew On This by Eric Scholosser & Charles Wilson
(c) 2006 302 pages

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. The cover of Chew On This advises it contains "everything you DON'T want to know about fast food." And it does.

At times a tad didactic, more often hard to stomach (sorry; you know my addiction to puns) Chew On This is never subtle, boring, or vague.

Remember the 1993 E. coli outbreak among Jack in the Box customers? Here's a refresher from page 192:

"One of the first kids to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother's arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old."

She was also a month ahead of the curve. In January, doctors in a Seattle hospital noticed an unusually high number of cases of children being admitted with bloody diarrhea - and shortly after health officials connected the dots, Jack in the Box recalled all of the contaminated ground beef.

The authors don't mince words about the fast food business and the enormousness of its impact on health and the economy, but then again, they also didn't point out that gee, it would have been really nice if Jack in the Box (or McDonald's, in 1982, or, or, or...) could have been more proactive, more careful, less driven to sell burgers at all costs. Maybe the book isn't as didactic as it is just plain accurate.

Sure, I'm biased. I don't like grease and I've been avoiding high fructose corn syrup for several years now. I buy "free range" chicken and even harvest a few vegetables from my own (woefully small) garden each year - knowing it's only a nod at the problem. In other words, Schlosser and Wilson had me before I opened the book. Still, I will never look at fast food the same way again.

It's hard to say how individual kids will respond to the book's blatant message - but at least, I think it's very unlikely to make many of them fans of the very, very successful industry. (And the folks at TeenReads.com apparently agree.

Of course, plenty of folks - not surprisingly, many higher-ups at McDonald's, Burger King, et al - don't agree. The industry reacted by creating its own website (long live the fast food giants, but not necessarily their clientele) and campaigning to keep the authors out and pop and branded fries/pizza/etc. in our kids' schools. Sick, sick, sick.

Public relations is about spin more than facts, however, and Schlosser and Wilson did a beautiful job of documenting their facts in a 31-page notes section proving (warning, bad pun coming) meat can be beautiful.

I promise, no more today. Chew On This is highly recommended for readers (12 and up) and contains very, very few puns.

--Can you handle it? More info available here or just buy a copy and dig in.--

You Go, Girl

I've been on something of a kick reading about adolescent girls, Hold Me Close, Let Me Go (by Adair Lara) being the latest. Of the pile I've read so far, it's been the least illuminating but most personal. I found it disappointing, in that I had hoped for a whole book along the lines of Lara's wonderfully clarifying essay referred to in most reprints I've seen as The Cat Years.)

Reviving Ophelia surprised me the most - I didn't want to read it, rather, I thought I should. I had dismissed Mary Pipher's book as "just" the seminal diatribe on adolescent girls and eating disorders, when it is quite a bit more than that, and much more palatable than Queen Bees and Wannabees. (Which scared and scarred me, I'm telling you.)

As the admittedly anxious and confused mother of a teenager, I'm still open to suggestions for reading materials that might make the next few years of my life a little saner and a little safer for us all...