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March 2002

Created Unequal, by James K. Galbraith

Not to be confused with his dad, John Kenneth. Both worthy, but dad is a much better writer.

Galbraith is, unfortunately, actually an economist. That basically makes him incredibly opaque as a writer. The good news is, he is an economist, and has the guts to run some very interesting numbers. The main ideas are: high interest rates are bad all around; a strong dollar kills exporters; both of the above contribute to high unemployment; high unemployment contributes to inequality; attempts to tinker by educating people and so forth can reshuffle who gets spots where on the ladder, but the ladder continues to get taller and narrower.

It's not like these ideas are all that controversial. Galbraith steps in it a couple of times in the course of the book (but in ways that support his argument). On page 194, when talking about budget deficit reduction policies in the US (copyright date on the book is 1998), he notes that it would take a recession or a catastrophic tax cut to destabilize the trend established starting under Bush Sr. Add shooting war to that list, and Bush Jr. has supplied everything necessarily. On page 207, in a discussion of infrastructure investment and big business, he specifically notes that Silicon Valley does not experience brownouts. Ah, Enron, and the privatization and deregulation of energy markets. These in no way detract from his arguments (quite the contrary -- they both show how loopy the conservative agenda was really willing to get).

Page 245 summarizes his program for the future nicely: "low interest rates, high employment, a higher minimum wage supported by a stronger union movement, a maximum-minimum pay ratio and a national prospective inflation adjustment." The mini-max thing is a fine or tax on corporations with a ratio larger than some preset number between their highest and lowest compensated employees. The prospective inflation adjustment would put the COLA number for all government employees in the president's hands on an annual basis.

His analysis of the economy splitting into three sectors (a K-sector, knowledge sector, creates machines that make shit; a C-sector, consumption sector, uses the machines to make shit; and S-sector, a services sector, doesn't use machines, just their own labor) is reasonably good, but doesn't have some of the finer nuances of, say, Andrew Hacker's Money. He has the usual stuff about the transfer of wealth to older people, and the huge increase in inequality overall. No big surprises here. He believes technology has a bigger impact than trade (or jobs moving to Third World nations) in destroying the wage structure; the argument here is covered in detail in a technical appendix. He does a good job generalizing the argument to other countries, where any data at all is available to do so. He doesn't ever go near any of the asset inflation issues that plagued the US in the 1990s (aka The Bubble), and so didn't predict the problems that would create for a low-interest-rate policy with an unreconstructed financial sector. And while Galbraith talks a bit about the interactions of countries, their workes, their economies, etc., he doesn't ever discuss issues revolving around capital flows directly.

Do I trust his program? I'm not sure. I really like the mini-max tax idea. I'm solidly behind the higher minimum wage. Low interest rates in an environment like the stock market of the very late 1990s are clearly a crappy idea. They allow financial institutions to engage in very profitable speculation with the country's money. That's probably addressed best through either better enforcement of existing regulation or possibly new regulations. This is one of the things we should be addressing in the wake of Enron. I abhor the idea of putting the COLA in the president's hands explicitly. I don't like a lot of his ideas for reform of the Federal Reserve (which I'm not going to get into here). High employment is great, but I have no idea how to make that happen, and apparently he covers that it more detail in his earlier book. Hmmm.

Viral Sex: The Nature of AIDS, by Jaap Goudsmit

Goudsmit's prose is clear and friendly. His diagrams are appropriate and easy to comprehend. When he needs to use a word a lay-reader might not understand, he explains it along with mention of roots that help make sense of it. He supplies a glossary. There are no notes, but honestly, after Created Unequal and One Market Under God, I'm so pissed off at authors whose notes section includes neither page references nor chapter titles, and whose main text header does not include chapter number, I almost didn't mind.

It's a few years out of date, but a good survey of the history of AIDS, HIV-0, -1, -2 and some of their subtypes, also HTLV, STLV -1 and -2 of each, SIV in its myriad forms, and a little bit about spuma virii. Nothing to speak of about herpes virii. Bunch of other species versions: FIV, FeLV, BaEV, BIV, okay, that's enough. I got this at the library to find more detail about the Heerlen outbreak in the '50s mentioned by Gladwell in The Tipping Point. There isn't enough additional detail to tell whether anyone went back and blood tested the survivors of the Swedish Barracks outbreaks.

Probably the two best bits of information that were new to me were: the mix of endovirii that make those lab mice so sure to get and die of thyroid cancer; and what the Jurassic Park DNA really is (nuclear integrated mitochondrial DNA). I think I'd like to find a more up-to-date version (this is from 1997), but it was a worthy read.

Corporation Nation, by Charles Derber

Another resident of Dedham, a neighborhood I may one day live in. Derber's a sociologist, and he's written a two-part book about a subject close to his heart. The analysis of the first half is material better covered in Created Unequal, One Market Under God and The Edges of the Field. The second half is his program.

The first half made me realize that while Wendy Kaminer thinks 12 Step programs and other irrational, therapy-culture ideas are undermining democracy, the corporation and it's remarkably pervasive and non-democratic power does it a lot more and a lot more effectively. Doh. Kaminer is conservative in some important and bad ways. Derber provides detail about the joint-stock charter and the process by which it was dismantled after the Civil War. A sidelight here in Delaware. Derber's conclusions overlap but do not precisely match Galbraith's. Derber blames corporations for inequality, where Galbraith focusses on public policy choices. Derber's menu includes union busting activities, the rise of contingent labor, corporate control/influence of government at all levels, deregulation sponsored by corporations, the massive decrease in taxes paid by corporations and, of course, the efforts to balance the budget. Does it matter? I think it might. Either way, public policy clearly has to change. Derber's formulation makes it very clear whose fault it is. Stupidity, death wish or evil intent. You decide. I've read some of what fundies want to have happen in the US. I'm going with suicidally evil intent.

Galbraith was dismissive of racism and sexism. To him, those determine spots on the ladder, but have no impact on the shape of the ladder. Derber correctly notes that corporations and governments play minorities against each other. In particular, he talks about the use of underage nonwhite female labor. He could have used US instances from the Gilded Age, with the textile factories and servants, to further support the phenomenon (starving women work, forcing men to accept lower wages).

Derber's discussion of corporate social responsibility could have been drastically improved with an assist from One Market Under God, particularly since Frank and Derber share a "true populist" orientation.

What's the program of the second half? Since Derber agrees with Galbraith that macroeconomics matter ("It's the economy, stupid."), he thinks that Federal Reserve policy has been sucky bad, and we should go back to a high growth strategy. Not a lot of detail (that Galbraith offers) on how else to avoid inflation, which is reasonable, even according to Galbraith, altho possibly a rhetorical issue in convincing conservatives. Like Galbraith, he blames economists (the profession) for the mess we find ourselves in. Boo, Milton Friedman.

Derber wants us to think long and hard about markets and what we want to use them for. He wants stakeholder influence to be meaningfully felt in the boardroom, but worries that this might create a false sense of complacency that would inhibit regulation. He advocates a recreation, at the state, federal and even international level, of the corporate charter. He's interested in community based business and ownership structures. And of course he wants to increase democracy everywhere.

Fight the evil shadow government, or at least get it to represent democratic interests (IMF, WTO, MAI, NAFTA all targetted here). Derber wants to see labor, Rifkin's Third Sector (a service oriented focus on non-governmental, non-profit activities: family, church, school, volunteer work), multcultural/identity politics and environmentalism join forces. He perceives some of these as having universal values (labor -- economic justice and democracy; 3rd sector -- love, service) that have widespread appeal. He fails to note that identity politics has similar underpinnings (heritage, loyalty and tradition); likewise environmentalism (a concern for the future). These universal values should merge with therapeutic politics, a politics of the heart for the Left. He's a little vague on the details, but it doesn't sound like something that can be reduced to simple slogans.

The epilogue at the end lists a series of actions or strategies individuals can adopt to try to make things better.

I'm a little bummed. This is one of those books that has both pieces of a puzzle that are desperately needed together: a description of a serious problem, and a real program to tackle it. Unfortunately, I've recently read better descriptions of the problem. I'm still looking for a better program (maybe I'll write my own).

A thought-provoking read, and a call to a good cause. Give it a shot.

Falling from Grace: the Experience of Downward Mobility in the Middle Class, by Katherine S. Newman

Rather older than the other books I have been reading lately on related topics (1988) and from an anthropological, rather than an economic, political or polemical stance, this work provides numerous anecdotes and a few numbers to describe reactions to job loss, divorce and other sources of downward mobility on the part of managers, white-collar workers and some blue-collar workers. The PATCO strike is covered in some detail, which provides an important counterpoint to the general feeling of I-can't-do-anything-(different)-about-this that pervades the rest of the stories.

Several beliefs pervade American society to a varying degrees. Hard work will be rewarded. Delayed gratification is worth it. If you're smart, you can succeed. Loyalty on the job will be recognized and rewarded. This chaos is the result of a market, and therefore no one's fault. All of those ideas are so clearly demonstrably false, now if not before, they reliably infuriate me. We live in a world where defection is massively rewarded, a lottery culture, a winner take all environment. Your best hope is to find the tall ground in a rainstorm and hope to be struck by lightning. That's an insane way to run a country, an economic empire, a world. Here's a quote from Joan deLancy, with her view of a small part of the problem:

So myopic. So incredibly unaware of what a small fraction of American society her family represented. So willing to believe that private solutions, familial solutions, are possible. She has all my sympathy (and I whole-heartedly agree that this is a terrible burden for providers, male or female, and definitely takes years off their life-expectancy), but how do you overcome that level of blindness?

Pages 121-130 (ish) include a description of reciprocy and gift relationships in families that strike me as unbelievably wrong. From this I conclude that Newman is describing something that was very normative for at least part of American society in the past -- so normative, she didn't realize it wasn't universal in American society. And on page 142 she has the gall to compare the experience of the children of laid off middle managers in America as being comparable to the experience of children in Nazi Austria. I don't think so. Her language about the narratives used to explain life and all its obnoxious twists and turns by managers, union members and blue collar workers whose plants have been closed is every bit as patronizing and biassed as I've come to expect from mediocre anthropologists. Whatever.

That said, this book primarily served to gel in my own mind why it is that we haven't done anything about these problems that have been growing over thirty years, quite dramatically over the last 20. Thinking about macroeconomic issues (and really, that is what this is all about, no matter what anyone says about meritocracy and retraining and more education) forces us to confront the devil in ourselves and the devil in others, and that is not something we do if we can avoid it. Some of these people lost their jobs and hung onto the shambles of their former life for the better part of a decade before moving on. The longer we participate, the tighter our grip becomes, because now we have participated in crushing so many others beneath us, to change would be to damn ourselves.

What could possibly induce us to change (other than another round of 1932, which I'd just as soon avoid if possible)? I'm thinking religion. I'll be detouring into sports, to see what that particular opiate offers, then I'll be off to read Robert Stark on the growth of religions, historically and currently. Solidarity, loyalty, compassion for others don't strike me as strong enough on their own to succeed (if they were, air traffic control would have changed drastically some time in the last two decades).

Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit

I bought this sometime in 2001, I think, in an odd format paperback. My reaction to this book is mixed. She acknowledges this is a history, not the history, and in many ways I think it could be better described as a historical essay (but an awfully long one) or memoir with historical diversions. It's just not up to my usual standards of history, either. But I don't think it's bad. In a lot of ways, I think it's just not for me.

Reviewing the literature and history of walking, as well as the politics, Solnit covers those who walk for pleasure, health, fame, politics. Her focus is overwhelmingly on the solitary walker who writes about his or her experiences and theory of walking, from the Enlightenment on. There are exceptions. Egeria, from the fourth century, a Christian woman who scaled Mt. Sinai, is one of a number of pilgrims ancient and modern. The Wordsworths (William and Dorothy) are notable not-particularly-solitary walkers. Peace Pilgrim didn't write much if anything about her experience, but she did speak, and other people wrote about her. She ends with the Vegas strip, populated by walkers who don't ordinarily walk.

She doesn't much care for people who tout walking (and/or nature) for its health benefits. She notes how the desire to walk in wilderness is very much a culturally acquired desire. She has a great digression on the subject of exercise (I think she specifically means calorically inefficient activity whose purpose is shaping the body, rather than the environment), including a sidelight on the history of the treadmill.

Her chapter on women is really terrible in so many ways. It exposes the biggest problem with her history. Her language suggests trends that are nonexistent. And she fails to include appropriate qualifers. Hence, women are hauled in for examination for walking in England, rather than women of a certain age and class, walking alone or with one man to whom they are in no way related in particular areas at particular times who have the misfortune to be spotted by certain officials are hauled in for examination in London during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Very different statements. Some of the qualifiers become clear in the chapter; others are never addressed (the class, and alone or with a man not a relative). I'm not saying there wasn't a problem. I'm saying it's a different one than the one she got excited about.

Or is it? She later discusses her own experience of unpleasant street encounters, and I am struck by my own present experience and recollection of the past. Were my teen years and early twenties so difficult because of the way I walked, where I walked, my own perceptions of my experiences, the shape of my body, my clothing -- or just plain my age? From the perspective of my thirties, I believe all are factors. A lot of the same things are happening -- or start to happen -- but my responses are so different now. As I've aged, my perception of a safe or dangerous area has drastically changed, and how I interact with those I encounter has changed as well. I try to be the first to speak now; before I hoped no one would speak and ignored them if they did. As a driver looks further down the street to avoid the possibility of accident, I now watch a much larger area when on foot, and never hesitate to change direction to avoid encounters. Should I have to do this?

Honestly, I think I should. The problem of some preying upon others in the street is not limited to men preying upon women. If you doubt it, chat up a short male friend and ask him. Visit a martial arts dojo, and determine the average height of men there, compared to the average height of men in the surrounding neighborhood. Humans are violent. The best response on the part of women is to learn to participate in public culture in a way that removes them from the obvious victim category. Then we should focus more of our efforts on protecting our children. On the other hand, getting more women out on the streets, learning how to be safe alone and with others, public marches and events to draw attention to the issues are all well and good, so perhaps her desire to treat attacks on women as hate crimes makes some sense. Still. It just strikes me as another opportunity to write repressive legislation and that way lies curfews.

Finally, Solnit's style of walking is very rhythmic. She's not a rock climber, whose style of "walking" is completely arhythmic. But she isn't just in the middle of that continuum. Walking with those slower than her, walking along the Strip, all these arhythmic walks exhaust her. I would have appreciated an analysis of walking that investigated not merely walks toward someone or something, walks away from someone or something, walks through an area, walks for mental, psychological or emotional discovery, walks to make a point, but also the mechanics of walking and how those have changed in response to changes in footwear, paving, climate, etc. It may seem a foolish point, but the walks available in regions of extreme climate pre- and post- mall building have changed dramatically. She touched upon evening walking, which is the result of similar issues (too hot during the day? walk early or late). She touched upon constraining women's clothing (but misidentified long skirts as inhibiting, which is doubtful), but never mentions footwear except when her boots pinch. (And in that lovely description of the successful, multi-year strike at the Frontier in Vegas.)

Finally, a few instances of bad analysis:

On page 24, Kirkegaard is quoted: "Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblance, when the tumult and nosie require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object"; also: "In order to bear mental tension such as mine, I need diversion, the diversion of chance contacts on the streets and alleys, because association with a few exclusive individuals is actually no diversion." From these, Solnit concludes that Kirkegaard "proposes that the mind works best when surrounded by distraction". Wrong. Kirkegaard says his mind works best when surrounded by distraction. This is actually an important distinction, because she then surmises that while others remember him wandering the city, "there must have been long solitary intervals in which he could compose his thoughts and rehearse the day's writing. Perhaps it was that city strolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively,". If he's anything like others I know, he was composing his words while interacting with others, unable to compose while alone. If she hadn't generalized his description, she would have been able to spot her flawed assumption.

She notes the development of the suburb, with its winding lanes that increase walking distance, and its impact on walking. I perceive that trend reversing. Is it? Have zoning changes percolated through the whole country? Are twenty and thirty somethings moving back into the city everywhere, or just in the cities I know and love? I don't know. But she didn't even mention that it's happening in a few places.

The Age of Access, by Jeremy Rifkin

I picked this up in hopes of reading a bit more about the Third Sector that Derber attributed to Rifkin. Frustrating. I gave up attempting to read it and sampled it instead. First off, the usual issues associated with using sources like Privatopia. Bleah. I am so tired of hearing that "first mall was Southdale in 1956" crap. Bullshit. 1949, Seattle, Northgate. There are potentially some quibbles associated with AC vs. no AC, but come on. Whatever. Oh, he also reproduces 20 year old critiques of MTV and fast-cuts, with no apparent realization that MTV doesn't really even play music videos anymore, and its programming is dominated by a lot of what he said doesn't exist in that context.

My real issues with Rifkin are as follows: he has minimal to no perspective on the macroeconomic issues, as a result, he blames on a variety of other issues what can be directly attributed to increasing inequality, itself the result of some fairly specific, well defined public policies. He has some weird theory about the heft of money and how as it dematerializes we save less and run up more debt. He's even bought the bankruptcy has lost its stigma theory so cherished by conservatives. I don't think he believes that it's real if you can't touch it, so intellectual property, electronic files, franchise agreements, etc. seem to really bother him. Paying for experiences is troubling. Property as exclusionary, ditto. He doesn't address how the biggest malls are located in areas which have truly horrendous seasonal variation that makes outdoor anything really difficult.

If he had a macroeconomic perspective, he would realize that property is now, and has always been about exclusion and control of access. For a long while now, like, since Croesus, money has been a token used to mediate the exchange of property. In a while that is fully monetized, everything has the potential to be exclusionary, to be controlled-access. It would make for a much clearer rhetorical structure, that would lead more directly into his idea that cultural, social, religious, charitable, etc. institutions (notably less monetized than the market sector, yet not retaining a degree of day-to-day choice not present in the governmental sector) should stand their ground, and people should use them to take back some of what the market sector has taken over.

I'm reminded of something Ehrenreich mentioned in a book panel hosted by the 92nd Street Y in NYC, broadcast March 10 on CSPAN-2's Book TV. When she confessed to coworkers at WalMart that she was working their for research on a book, that she was really a writer, no one thought it was weird, or that big of a deal. Other coworkers were working on books, novels, etc. When she asked around, she learned that nearly everyone there wrote, in a journal if nowhere else. Ed Lazowska, ex-head of the CS department at the UW is fond of citing statistics that 90% or more of all new information is created digitally these days. That might be the case, particularly as film is increasingly replaced with digital cameras. But what about all those paper journals, kept by women across the country? Does anyone even count those? (Mine, I might note) is created digital, but I have a secondary paper one.)

I am not convinced that politicizing the Third Sector is the right idea. I think we should all participate more, but if we do it out of political motives, ideas of winning and losing are bound to fuck us up. I'd rather see us participate in non-monetized activities for intrinsic reasons: because they are fun, they have meaning for us, they make us feel good, they connect us to others, they're the right thing to do.

Bottom line: not the program for me. I got it at the library. If you do, look it up by the author. They almost certainly mis-categorized this puppy when they catalogued it.

Some Magazines

Bitch, issue 15

Extra!

Back to the books

Plain Brown Wrapper, Karen Grigsby Bates

Oddly reminiscent of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, if she were a light-skinned African-American journalist with a great body and great taste in. . . everything. I know that sounds weird, but like Kinsey, Alex has taken herself out of the game (only to get dragged back in). She has a gem of an apartment that belongs to a house owned and lived in by an elderly person who takes an interest in her life and serves as sounding board and good friend. Alex and Kinsey have soft hearts, more balls than any ten men, and can mouth off with the best of them. But the weirdest thing about this book is the stuff. Art objects. Clothing. Meals. Real estate. Airplanes. Cars. Jewelry. Ties. Scents. Smell plays a crucial part of the sleuthing in this murder mystery.

It's an enjoyable read. I don't know if there are (or will be) more in this series, but if there are, I'll either borrow them from the woman who loaned me this one, or possibly start buying my own copies.

How to Write a Dirty Story, by Susie Bright

Loaned to me by a friend, I may at some point go pick up a copy. As always, Bright's prose is unbelievably readable. Her directions for editing suggest why: she favors Anglo-Saxon words over Latinate, and she's adamant about the importance of reading aloud what one writes before inflicting it on other.

Unlike other books on the subject, Bright isn't here to maximize the amount of money you make. She's a nice blend of writing-as-a-career and writing-as-a-vocation (that would be the somewhat religious kind of vocation). She's got great comments on book tours and other risks of successful writing.

While I don't agree with everything she says (some of what she finds obvious, I find risibly wrong), she's entertaining to read. Her exercises struck me as useful, and her judgment largely accurate. I recommend it.

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, Miles Harvey

I've seen this puppy on a lot of bookstore display tables. I am, once again, so glad I got it at the library. Like a number of recent books by writers for Outside magazine, this book is nominally about one subject, really about a second subject and whinges on about a third. The first subject is the tale of Bland, a map thief. The second subject is map collecting in the last couple of decades, with sidelights on the last few centures. The third subject is Mr. Harvey's psyche. I have no interest in the third subject, so when he goes on about the ghost of Lloyd A. Brown in the Peabody Grand Stack Room, or how maps talk to him, or how his grandfather's jail term affected his mother, or how he differs so much from Bland, or his various failures of the imagination (he doesn't think a True Believer would dare to put the Garden of Eden on a map today -- how wrong he is), or how he feels like a Kafka characters, or how this hunt for Bland started to feel like a search for self, I just couldn't give a shit. (Altho that bit about Prester John made me wonder if those legends were the basis for Wright's Islandia. The first subject is moderately interesting, but not worth three hundred plus pages. And he did a piss poor job of covering the second subject.

Certainly don't give this pretentious blowhard any more money. If you feel like risking the time, that's your call.

Sports Economics: Current Research, edited by John Fizel, Elizabeth Gustafson, and Lawrence Hadley

I got this for section five, which is about labor markets, and that's all I read. Someone else who knows a helluva lot more about sports than I do read some of the other articles and was not overly impressed. I didn't spend a lot of time analyzing the statistics; I was mostly interested in the conclusions.

After reading a number of books about increasing inequality and the hazards experienced by unions, I was curious whether the same issues apply in the rarefied atmosphere of the NFL, MLB and the NBA. None of the essays here were directly about basketball. But it turns out that recent agreements in the NFL have contributed to inequality, despite rhetoric that the union is there to represent everyone, not just the stars. I was also curious whether anyone managed to devise meaningful salary caps, or punishments for exceeding compensation limits, as those might be helpful guides in establishing something similar for CEOs. No such luck. Evasion is rampant everywhere. Each round improves things, but it's hard to motivate new rounds of negotiation. Baseball's strategy so far sounds like the best: a tight focus on revenue sharing to distribute money more evenly to players, and to smaller clubs.

Gabriel's Woman, by Robin Schone

Sequel to The Lover (?), the one about Michel des Anges. Like that book, lots of French words for genitalia and other matters sexual. Amazingly enough, Schone works the Altoids trick into a period erotic romance. Who'd'a thunk? Frustrating to read people being so stupid in a pinch and people dying as a result. Not hugely inspiring, altho not quite as nastily gross as the previous book. I'll keep reading her. I borrowed it from a friend.

Protect and Defend, by Richard North Patterson

I borrowed this one from my neighbor. It's a good read, a complex tale of political intrigue, secrets, a Supreme Court nomination, and a well-constructed late-term abortion case. The random anti-gun commentary irritated me, in particular the words put in the mouths of the Republicans didn't sound quite right to me, and periodically put me off. But I finished it, and I'm glad I did.

Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block

If I were to say that this book is about a stylin' L.A. high school dropout, her gay best friend, his lover, their baby, her lover, his baby by a witch, and other members of their extended family, it just wouldn't do the story justice. In the background of this enigmatic narrative is a harrowing depiction of the changes in L.A. from the late 1950s through the 1980s, and how TinselTown destroys artists, shreds relationships and deifies kitsch. It's very, very cool, and the family that grows in the rubble is extremely charming. I understand there are sequels. If they come my way, I'll give them a try. Yet another borrowed read.

Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

My favorite in this kind of survival story genre for young adults is The Island Keeper by Harry Mazer. But, then, I do always pick the one with the female protagonist, don't I? I also enjoyed My Side of the Mountain.

The stories are all basically the same. Kid winds up roughing it with some degree of supplies. The Jean George books take place close enough to civilization so we're never really worried about our hero, and he can survive injury. He's also the one who comes from the healthiest family. Mazer's heroine camps out, and gets stuck when her boat fails her. She stays out through the worst weather unprepared. Paulsen's kid is only out in the summer. George's kid is prepared and has a blast in the snow.

All stories emphasize reconnecting with food, the problems of city living and the consequences of making mistakes. It's interesting to think about food in the context of adolescent growth spurts. I think back sometimes on how incredibly hungry I was during that last phase (13 inches in 11 months. Don't do that. It's bad for your back.). That kind of growth tends to eat up body fat (just like roughing it in the books) and remove a bit of a belly (trust me, I remember concavity and I sure hated it). The consequences, and being picked on by the local animals, but eventually learning to fit in, add to the metaphor successfully.

Taken on a more literal level, these fantasies disturb me somewhat as an adult. Do we need rites of passage? I don't know.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the First, The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket

My cousin's son luuvvvvs these books, as does the niece of a friend. Rumor has it they aren't alone. The author works in quite a lot of vocabulary, with the which-in-this-case device. The narration moves along crisply and with some suspense, but no pain. The kids are resourceful in the face of relentless persecution, and a lot of what they do to cope is clearly widely applicable and presented in a way to assist the reader to recognize their own experience in that of the orphans, viz., feeling better after a good cry, even if the situation hasn't changed, or feeling better after having someone agree with your complaints and anger, even if things haven't changed. Snicket keeps the adults-only jokes to a minimum, and presents them in a way useful to youngsters (the trickiness of law, for example).

These last two I borrowed from my cousin's son. It's taken me forever to get around to them; I'm glad I did. I might even read more in this series, if I tripped over them on a slow day.

Deadly Persuasion, by Jean Kilbourne

Well, the central thesis (advertising influences all of us, especially when we think it doesn't) isn't one I'm inclined to disagree with. The food and body issues are particularly dire. It bothers me a lot that she focuses so exclusively on women and girls, because I think it makes her less effective. She mentions on one page that African-American and Asian women have much lower smoking rates than other women in America, then turns around and argues that women who are multiply oppressed are more likely to turn to cigarettes etc. than other women, producing anecdotes to support the statement. That doesn't make sense, and she completely skipped the opportunity to speculate on, much less investigate, the countervailing force(s) that might explain that contradiction (religion? other social forces? economics?).

She advocates parenting classes and other interventions to prevent child abuse (home visits by nurses and social workers for everyone, or at least everyone at high risk). It's a sound idea, and she integrates it with more environmental/economic suggestions like flexible work schedules and generally changing the economic environment which produces these problems.

In the end, Kilbourne is opposed to cultural, social and environmental focuses which put things above people, relationships with things above relationships with people. She doesn't do as good a job at positive planning to put relationships with people higher on everyone's agenda (once again, a complete failure to even mention religious organizations handicaps an otherwise excellent argument). Given her focus on raising awareness, the lapse is not too great. I got it at the library. I'm going to try to lay hands on one of her documentaries and watch it.

The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen

I caught yet another Lazowska lecture on UWTV the other night, and he rattled off several books as the basis for various points he was making. As he did so, he said whether he recommended the book in general, and this one he did, as I recall, specifically for making sense of the disk drive industry's bizarre history.

Christensen not only makes sense of the disk drive industry, but also the rise of minimills, the failure of the Newton, some stuff about excavators I had never given any thought to, and concludes by speculating on electric vehicle technology. When I first read the introduction, it immediately occurred to me that digital photography was a classic case of disruptive technology and indeed, it headed his list of other possibilities. By the time I was done with t he book, I was dying to know what he thought of the Segway. Alas, at the time of writing, rumors of it had not even surfaced yet.

A library book for me, but it's good enough to keep around if it's relevant to your work. I I have not yet decided whether it is worth purchasing as an investor. The ideas are straightforward enough to stick well after one reading.

The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark

I read an Atlantic article about New Religious Movements that refered to, as I recall, Stark, and got this from the library. The thesis is straightforward: people pick and stick with religious organizations that satisfy their needs and/or desires. In general, monopolies will have fewer adherents in a population than the sum total of competing organizations. And because an easy way to discourage free riders in voluntary organizations is through hazing (they don't call it that), members will always be in favor of small decreases in sacrifice and stigma -- but the cumulation of those decreases results in mainline status, and eventually sideline status, because the belief in rewards in the hereafter is thereby decreased.

Their research is good. Their presentation of the numbers is compelling. I don't completely accept their assertion that religion is a collective activity (I know a few people who have an at home yoga practice and others who have an at home magickal practice that has nothing to do with anyone else, ever, anywhere), but I don't imagine the numbers would change that much. Next up in the religious reading will be more books by Jim Wallis, whose Who Speaks for God? I read a while back. The discussion about Catholics in this book was particularly interesting. In so many ways, I would be happy to join an organization that restricted what I could eat, or even what I could wear, as long as it took stances I agreed with in other areas. And I think that Vatican 2 messed up badly, by removing the Friday meat restriction, but retaining the birth control policy.

The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark

I increasingly accept Stark's thesis that religious goods are produced collectively.

I learned a few harrowing new things about the Roman empire that I did not know before. Sex ratios of 140 men to 100 women, achieved through infanticide and abortion (the latter mandated by men and often lethal to women). Frequent marriage of pre-pubertal women (12 and under), and not just in name only, either -- those unions were consummated. The Christian church provided a much needed haven for women in that era, and that plus their requirements to love each other and even non-Christians, and show that love through actions (such as nursing) made a huge difference in Christian longevity and fertility, especially in times of crisis and plague. Stark makes a compelling argument that the tangible effects of doctrine are key to the long-term success of Christianity.

This was such a good read, I'll probably eventually pick up a copy. I got it from the library.

The Woman's Book of Sleep, by Amy R. Wolfson, Ph.D.

I still prefer William Dement's book, The Promise of Sleep. For no readily apparent reason, Wolfson is dismissive of the theoretical construct sleep debt. She also assumes that self-reports of insomnia are somehow meaningful, despite her acknowledgement that during transient sleep, people may not even realize they are asleep, and that many prescription sleep aids increase transient sleep while decreasing later phases of sleep. Which is to say, people self-treating, or being treated for insomnia won't perceive improvement because of the probably effects of the treatment. Dement solves this problem nicely.

Wolfson spends a lot of time dissing smoking and drinking, and hammering on losing weight and getting exercise. Can't argue with a lot of that, but come on, it's a book about sleep. Like Dement, she repeats herself endlessly. I'm still waiting for the definitive book on sleep.

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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.

Created: March 3, 2002 
Modified: December 9, 2002