Now that is what I call olde school...

The story I am about to tell will give you the wrong impression of us as a high-brow and literary family. Just remember, we are all about Disney Pixar...

However, this week, Beanie received a somewhat unusual gift for a 7-year-old from a friend of the family: Her own two-volume set of Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene." It is a beautiful set - the Everyman's Library edition - in like-new condition, but with the old scent of a library wafting off its pages.

I believe I read, as a college undergraduate, a portion of Spenser from my Norton's Anthology, but it failed to leave a lasting impression on me. So, I admit that I looked a bit skeptically at the books, as lovely as they are. To be honest, I just like holding the books and turning the pages and smelling the librariness of them - and though I have not asked her, I think Beanie does, too. She not only likes to read, she likes books. Take that, amazon...

StraightMan and I have read a few verses aloud with her - I know that we failed to do justice to the Elizabethan English - and I am surprised at how we have been enjoying it.

(Of course, part of me inwardly groans at the notion that Beanie will become obsessed with Elizabethan literature, eventually writing her PhD on Spenser and the making of the modern English imaginary, then spending her days teaching composition to college students who will be unable to grip pens in their hands b/c they have evolved agile and elongated thumbs for texting. However, I digress.)

Beanie esp. liked the image of "a Dwarfe did lag, / That lasie seemd, in being ever last." "What does that mean?" she asked. I told her to imagine taking a walk with her brother and how much further and further behind he falls as we walk.

She objected to the characterization of "a Dragon horrible and stearne." "Well, actually," Beanie said, rather authoritatively, "dragons can be quite nice."

A Dwarf and a Dragon, not to mention a Knight and a Ladie?! I find myself being drawn into the story.

So, that is my message for today: Read something olde school with your kids!

About A Singular Woman

For Father's Day, I treated myself (ha ha) to a copy of Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.

It might tell you a bit about the frame of mind I am in, as I am rewriting sections of my own book manuscript, but it strikes me (yet again) that a book as well done as this requires not just the talent and skill of the author, but the conditions (i.e., having time and means, thus liberty) to do the job right!

I am about a third of the way into the book, but I peeked ahead at the upcoming chapters b/c I confess that I am curious about S. Ann Dunham as an anthropologist. She died so young, but for most of her adult life, Dunham worked and lived as an anthropologist. I think Scott might have set out to describe who Dunham was, or at least might have been, to have us understand who Obama is, or might be, but it turns out that Dunham's work and life (in development) was significant in its own right. So, that it seems unfair to think about her only as a mother.

Among the "lessons" that I keep repeating in the courses that I teach, I like to tell students that a difference between other disciplines and anthropology is that in other disciplines, you expect to find the answer is this or that, but in anthropology, you start from having to understand the answer is this and that.

What is the point of college?

Is it merely that I am sensitized to the topic of higher education b/c I work in it - or is there quite a bit of public discourse, including the publication of books and book reviews?

The latest installment appears in the June 6th issue of The New Yorker, which features a review essay by Louis Menand. In the essay, he features two books - Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa's Academically Adrift, which already has garnered a lot of attention and is based on an analysis of the College Learning Assessment (a kind of standardized test that is being used at a number of colleges and universities in an attempt to measure what a college education might "yield") and Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which is a kind of memoir based on an essay previously published in The Atlantic. I am unfamiliar with Professor X's work, but Menand makes him sound like a real-life William Henry "Lucky Hank" Deveraux.

This is fitting b/c in the public discourse on higher ed, I think we need to hear more (and take more seriously) about the experiences of the "teachers" - that is, the professors (who BTW do more than teach) and the adjunct instructors.

On a related note, I think we also need to hear more from students themselves - not just about the standardized tests that they take, ostensibly to measure what they have learned or been taught. This is where faculty feel frustration: As in the discourse on K-12 public schooling, the talk is all about "whether or not" (yes or no) students and learning and teachers are doing their jobs.

What, in fact, is the point of college for students? This is the point where Menand starts. Students bring diverse expectations (as well as experiences) to college - and this bears directly upon what they learn in college (and how and what professors also teach).

Menand describes three "theories" of what college is for Americans:

1. "College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test" that is used to sort individuals according to "intellectual capacity and productive potential."

I admit that I cringe at the thought, and wish that this were not true.

2. "College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing."

I imagine that a number of my colleagues oh-so-want this to be true: I want to believe. (In fact, I do.)

3. "College is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work."

In fact, this is what I think a lot of students attending the four-year comprehensive public college where I teach believe this - or at least a lot of their parents do. Which is why I sit with students and talk with them about what to do with their major in anthropology - which they tell me they took b/c they "love" it, not b/c they think it is "practical," which I take to mean pre-professional. (In fact, about 60 percent of the majors in our department have anthropology as their second major. Not necessarily paired with a pre-professional major: I wonder whether or not there might be a perception that an anthropology major on its own might be fine, but pairing it with history or psychology or biology adds a bit of heft?)

Menand's conclusion is a bit bleak, as it suggests that the problems of higher ed might be much more difficult than simply testing students in order to assess* the value of collegiate learning and then weeding out the "bad" teachers - that is, those deemed ineffective at student engagement*:

*Buzzwords in higher education today.

Assuming that these new books are right, and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roska believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated - their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected - and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on it really matters, it's hard to transform minds.

I think Menand is right to point out that a problem of higher ed today is that it is trying to be all things to everyone. On the one hand, I appreciate the idea of having college accessible to "everyone": Not that long ago, women and people of color and poor students were excluded from opportunities for higher education. It would have been unthinkable for someone like me to graduate from the privileged little community of the mind that I attended. The mission of higher ed, too, has changed, will change, and ought to continue changing.

On the other hand, I think the problem of "motivation" is not just what happens between between students and professors, in classrooms and on campuses, but the even larger system of the rest of life - or "reality," as my students call it.

When I talk with students, they are as likely to call college as a "break" as to describe it as an opportunity or a rite of passage. In their eyes, college is a last chance to "enjoy" themselves before "reality" - and the reality that they perceive is at best uncertain and at worst uninspiring and apparently unrewarding. They know that love can end in divorce as well as marriage, that women still bear the (unappreciated) burden of care, and that careers can be cut short as even the most loyal and experienced workers become "let go."

What, then, is the point of reading the assignments and writing the papers and acquiring those skills that standardized tests seek to measure? What is the point of college?

What needs to be "fixed" in collegiate student learning is not necessarily the teaching: Instead of blaming the professors, how about we take a look also at students? What needs to be "fixed" in higher ed is not necessarily just higher ed itself: What about the rest of the world that colleges and universities ostensibly "prepare" students to face? How about we try to fix that, too?

Making privilege

While reading sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan's Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, the thought uneasily crossed my mind that this is exactly the kind of academic book Malcolm Gladwell might make more popular by turning its critical analysis of the making of privilege into a between-the-lines instruction manual for business-class tiger-parents.

It could be a chapter of Outliers 2.

In Privilege, Khan argues against the popular understanding in the United States that elites are people who are entitled - that is, that they simply were born into their privilege. Entitlement might have described the elite 100 or 50 years ago.

Today, however, he suggests that the "new" elites themselves share at least an ideal and rhetoric of having had to "work for" their privilege. Privilege has become not what you were fortunate enough to be born into, but what you were clever enough to "earn."

Up to this point, readers of Gladwell will be happy to recognize themselves - members of the new elite - in the pages of Privilege! However, Khan's point is that the new elite is as troubling as the old elite. There is no nostalgia here for a ruling (white) class based on exclusion, but Khan is equally skeptical of the current embrace of so-called meritocracy - a term that I was surprised to learn had been coined in Britain in the 1940s to criticize "the cold scientization of ability and the bureaucratization of talent" (Khan 2011:8). In fact, the new elite is based on assumptions that could prove to be even more insidious:

With "merit" we seem to have stripped individuals of the old baggage of social ties and status and replaced it with personal attributes - hard work, discipline, native intelligence, and other forms of human capital that can be evaluated separate from the conditions of social life. And the impact of the adoption of this approach has led to rather contradictory outcomes. It has undercut nepotism. It has been used to promote the opening of schools to talented members of society who previously were excluded. But it has also been used to question policies like affirmative action that taken into account factors other than performance on select technocratic instruments. It has been used to justify the increased wages of the already wealthy (as their skills are so valuable and irreplaceable). And most important for me, it has obscured how outcomes are not simply a product of individual traits" (Khan 2011:9).

For whatever reason, reading this passage called to mind a moment in "The Osbournes"* when Kelly describes how hard Ozzy worked for everything that he has today. I found it jarring to hear the tribute to hard work paid by a young woman who I got the impression has not had a lot of personal experience with it.

*I know. A dated reference to a TV show that I watched back when I watched TV! Sigh.

Khan argues that hierarchy remains as entrenched under the new privilege as it had been with the old entitlement. Hierarchy under the old elite represented ceilings. Under the new elite, it has become a ladder to climb: You just have to make the right choices, and do the right things.

Enter the guru, Gladwell, and other prophets of privilege and hard work: David Brooks, anyone?

The new elite purports to include the "best of the best" regardless of class or race / ethnicity - at least in theory. A point that Khan makes is that inequality persists even with growing awareness and acceptance of "openness" and "access."

As exploration of privilege, Khan's book is revealing about the state of the American Dream today.

I think about how many of us have a stake in the hope of "hard work." I stop short of calling it a myth, which reveals how high a stake I have in it, too.

Or as Khan observes: "Students learn to emphasize hard work and talent when explaining their good fortune" (Khan 2011:15).

Khan tells us that his own story is "familiar": A tale of immigrants who find opportunity and success in the United States and then give their children more and better than they had themselves. I think it would be worth telling his story in terms of how and why Pakistani doctors and Irish nurses were brought to the United States in the early 1970s.

Or for that matter, I could tell my own story as a tale of the sacrifices that my parents made and the hard work that bought our family a house in the suburbs and elite educations for my brother, sister, and me: Or I could tell it in terms of an American embrace of Koreans as anti-communist Asians and of a shortage of doctors and nurses that brought guest workers to the United States.

None of us arrives on our own merits only.

Love your library

This is a shout out to the public library, which serves us all intellectually and spiritually with a wealth of books and other materials; fairly and justly by making its materials available and accessible to everyone in the community; socially by providing us with a place to be; and sustainably.

Responding to a question about e-readers, Susan Cosier writes in her Green Guru column in the January-February 2011 issue of Audubon magazine:

A book made of recycled paper requires two-thirds of a pound of minerals (primarily gravel for road construction), whereas an e-reader uses 33 pounds for its electronic components and infrastructure.

She cites a study that suggests that "e-reader owners have to read 40 to 50 e-books to break even on most of the environmental costs."

(As an aside, I read in The New Yorker a few months back that the Kindle, which uses so-called electronic-ink technology, uses less energy than the iPad. By how much, it did not say.)

So, I want to start 2011 with a reminder to myself and a call to my friends to show love to your library: Use it. Support and defend public funding of it.

For those on campus, this includes your college or university library: Make time to play in the stacks! I always walk away with a ton of titles that inspire me.

***

The "break" between semesters for me is typically slower, saner, and just as filled with work. (I know the other academics are looking at this while they are not writing that paper or revising that article they planned to - so get back to work!) Slower and saner means that I allow myself to read the piles of back issues that have accumulated in the magazine basket that I keep in the downstairs bathroom. (Which is supposed to tell you not about my toilet habits, but about the near-guilt that I feel when I do not put my month's worth of The Nation and The New Yorker out of sight. Blurgh.)

So, on a note related to my soap-box moment on the library, I want to draw attention to another public good that is much too much taken for granted: The United States Postal Service.

As John Nichols wrote in The Nation (in the April 26, 2010 issue! - I think this must have been lost behind a Title Nine catalog - because I have a weakness for outdoor performance wear and the life it might represent):

Americans do not often talk about the Postal Service as a crucial underpinning of the democratic infrastructure, but we should. At a time when 35 percent of all Americans and 50 percent of rural residents have no broadband Internet access at home, the Postal Service is universal. Its 596,000 career employees travel more than 4 million miles to deliver more than a half-billion pieces of mail each day. It goes to extraordinary ends to assure that no citizen or community is neglected; it contracts commercial planes to move parcels across the country in a matter of hours, yet it still sends bush planes into Idaho's River of No Return Wilderness Area and organizes mule trains to deliver mail, food and supplies to the Havasupai Indians on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

The Postal Service maintains a network of more than 35,000 retail outlets--the largest in the world, with more locations than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined--which are visited by more than 7 million Americans each day. The postal workers they encounter in these offices and on their doorsteps are reflective of their communities, as the service has historically been and remains one of the surest sources of employment for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, women and the poor. In short, the USPS forms a vital network of service, connection and community that provides the steadiest link between Americans and their government. As Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) chair Ruth Goldway puts it, the service is "part of the fabric of the nation."

In 2011, how about we all rethink (and rephrase in our talk) what the post office is all about? Not a business, but a public service that not only treats people with fairness - I am dumbfounded by the extraordinary reach of the post office (bush planes and mule trains?!) - it also makes fairness possible in the form of absentee ballots. The measure of its success ought not to be its profitability.

Buy some stamps today?!

Feeling bookish

Final exams begin today. In other words, I will be underwater in grading for the rest of the week.

Still, could not resist browsing blogs and such that I have no business reading right at the moment. I found this post on Inside Higher Ed today really interesting: All the President's Books.

I appreciated author Eric Weinberger's reflections on the small, but good things (I think) that he did in his treatment of books sent to the president of Harvard University: "In all this, the important thing was that books were objects to be honored, not treated as tiresome throwaways, and that everyone in the building knew this."

As I, a pleased kindle owner, find myself constantly saying: Books and paper are perfectly wonderful technologies that they do what they do effectively and efficiently. Also, meaningfully. No need to get in a hurry to rid ourselves of them, either in the abstract or the particular.

Free?

Disquietly quiet here - I actually applied my bottom to my seat for enough uninterrupted time to eat my lunch (Kashi Lemongrass Coconut Chicken) while it remained hot from first to last bite!

So, I took the bit of time to catch up on the blogs I "follow." This post on Savage Minds caught my eye: "Are pdf's immoral?"

I hope not. I could say I think not, but that might just be me justifying what I will characterize as a practice that is rather familiar to me.

I will add that in the past, I tried instructing students on how to run their own searches on JSTOR - esp. for recent articles that were not found in edited volumes or readers that I might have required them to purchase - and download the PDF's as individuals.

It was kind of a disaster: I had students claim to me that they "could not find" the articles I had assigned or that the instructions were confusing or that they had a hard time reading the article on their computers or that they had run up their print quota. Blah blah blah.

***

Call me naive, but I think when students do not purchase their books (and when they do, they do not retain them, but resell them to the used book sellers...), it is simply b/c they do not value them (i.e., they do not consider them worth buying). I know: Duh. Frankly, as I look at some of the textbooks and readers and their price tags that I have even in my own office, I find it hard to argue. Some of the books just are not that good and almost all of them are cost far too much for what they are. I doubt that students see themselves as paying for CD ROMs or Web content or so on, which I think they value even less.

The contrasting example is when students really come to admire, even love, a book: In previous semesters of ANTH 100, I assigned Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which it seems like every semester, at least one student tells me that they "loved it so much" that they are "keeping it." When I assigned Emily Martin's Bipolar Expeditions, a student told me me bought an additional copy of the book for a friend whom he thought should read it.

***

So, I do not think it is just that PDFs being "free" devalues the worth of scholarly publications. I think it is the context in which the PDFs become circulated: If a student is taking ANTH 100 b/c it seems like the least worse class to take for a gen ed requirement need to graduate at the end of that semester, then I probably should not be surprised that being required to purchase books, or even go through the rigamarole of having to locate and download PDFs from JSTOR for myself, might seem like a colossal waste of money, time, and effort for that student. I think we reasonably could expect the student to skip it. In which case, making PDFs freely accessible also seems a reasonable response, from the perspective of a professor...

Keeping up with The Times

As though in answer to my post yesterday on The Wellfleet Oyster Diet, the Times today is previewing a book review of Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Reviewer Sam Sifton, the Times restaurant critic, on his blog, also poses the question of what fish should we eat, given the concerns both that overharvesting in the wild and farming fish both pose.

Four Fish sounds like a terrific read that I plan to load onto my kindle. Featured at the tales of tuna, cod, sea bass and salmon. In book publishing parlance, it sounds like a Michael Pollan treatment, but Pollan himself, in The Omnivore's Dilemma, acknowledged the significant contribution of anthropology to thinking about what and how and why we eat as we do.

Sifton's review itself resonates with me:

In a bite of that absolutely fresh tuna from New Jersey, I experienced a taste of truly wild food, a majestic flavor, something incredibly rare.

And as it melted on my tongue and receded into memory, I felt guilt and doubt and fear. Will my children, who demurred in eating the fish that day, ever have a chance to eat bluefin tuna? Will their children? Will anyone? Should they? What are we really to do with these fish?

I still have the taste of Wellfleet oysters fresh in my mouth. It is indeed an experience that I hope Beanie and Bubbie can come to savor also.

About a teacher

A friend on Facebook posted this obituary for Clara Claiborne Park, who wrote two memoirs about raising a child with autism - The Siege and Exiting Nirvana. Her daughter today is an acclaimed painter.

Professor Park, which is how I remember her, taught a class on Dante that I took as an undergraduate. I remember that she talked with feeling, but also articulately and precisely. I think I must have said hardly a word in the class. At the time, I had some vague knowledge that she had written a book about her daughter. Years later, I bought a copy of The Siege, which was published originally in 1967, long before there was "autism awareness." I started to read it several times, but never could continue, due to some distraction or another. After learning about Professor Park's passing, however, I retrieved it from the shelf and sat down with it.

Just like in her Dante class, I think I must have felt out my depth the first few times that I started the book. This time, it has caught me completely. The book describes with feeling, articulately and precisely, what it is like to be a mother, including the fears and misgivings, which in Professor Park's story become confirmed. "It is hard to remember the first stirrings of doubt about a baby, but I remember a day when I took Elly to the supermarket," she writes, describing how, as she watched a friend's child, also 19 months old, point to a box of candy, a realization comes to her: "I thought then that I had never seen Elly point."

To point is so simple, so spontaneous, so primary an action that it seems ridiculous to analyze it. All babies point, do they not? To stretch out the arm and the finger is, symbolically and literally, to stretch out the self into the world - in order to remark on an object, to call it to another's attention, perhaps to want it for oneself. From pointing comes the question "What's that?" that unlocks the varied world. To point, to reach, to stretch, to grab, is to make a relation between oneself and the outside. To need is to relate (6).

The book, then is, about more than autism or a mother and daughter. It is about the needs and encumberments that after all make us who and what we are. Professor Park describes Elly's autism as a perfect kind of "aloneness" that has been created, sought, and guarded, and that requires dismantling:

She dwelt in a solitary citadel, compelling and self-made, complete and valid. Yet we could not leave her there. We must intrude, attack, invade, not because she was unhappy inside it, for she was not, but because the equilibrium she had found, perfect as it was, denied the possibility of growth (12).

Disquieting as it seems, I think Professor Park quite deliberately chose the images of the citadel and of intrusion - the book is titled The Siege. She acknowledges that there is something aggressive, even hostile, afoot:

We had not demanded; now we must. We had accepted; now we must try to change. A terrible arrogance, for what had we to offer her? Which of us could call ourselves as content as Elly was? The world we would tempt her into was the world of risk, failure, and frustration, of unfulfilled desire, of pain as well as activity and love.... Confronted with a tiny child's refusal of life, all existential hesitations evaporate. We had no choice. We would use every stratagem we could invent to assail her fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce here into the human condition (12).

What this story calls to our attention, then, is that to be and become human is a struggle. It is not a condition to be taken for granted. This is a lesson that we can learn from the poetry of Dante, from anthropology, from our mothers and fathers and our children, and from the passing of a teacher.

Hello, Ephs

From That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo:

She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges where she and Griffin's father had once hoped to secure jobs. "Safety schools" was how she now regarded them. "Dear God, not Williams," she told Laura. "Do you know the kind of people who sent their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that." Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. "Their kids aren't smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams."

What you can learn from books * and * reviews

David Brooks: How I love to dislike him. He will start with an observation that makes sense to me - then blow it. Like in today's column, "The Medium Is the Medium."

Brooks begins the column by reporting on a study that found that disadvantaged kids who received books at the end of the school year - in other words, the kids typically affected by "summer slide" as measured in tests and grades - maintained higher reading scores than the kids who received no books. The results held even when they did not read the books. How and why? Here is the bit of sense:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

After this point is when Brooks blew it, at least for me.

I do not disagree entirely with the observations underlying a statement like this: "The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students." I teach college students, and I lament the fact every single day that too many of them are not better readers. I believe that were they better readers of books, they also might be better citizens and - gasp - better users of the Internet.

However. Brooks' exposition on the "culture" of the book versus the "culture" of the Internet makes me cranky as an anthropologist. Here again, "culture" or rather "cultures" become talked about as bounded and singular and consistent. Books and the Internet emerge from and coexist (and might or might not compete) in what we might call the one and the same "culture." In a book that I currently am perusing, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, linguist Dennis Baron reminds us:

The World Wide Web wasn't the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words - mere shadows of speech - couldn't adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents (Baron 2009:x).

"Culture," and history, aside, Brooks' description of books as representing "a hierarchical universe" with "classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom" is exactly not the buzz that reading deserves or requires, esp. for the disadvantaged kids who likely already understand themselves as the beach reading of society.

His primary objection to the Internet is this:

Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

I have to wonder whether or not Brooks has any self-awareness of his own position in the old media - on the "important" and "prestigious" editorial page of the Gray Lady - because this sounds like his own crankiness as a columnist in a snit about the respect that he believe he should be shown?

However. Now I have placed my own snittiness on display.

I do not think there is anything inherently anarchical about the Internet. (In its own ways, it is also hierarchical.) It is a technology, like books are a technology, and it is what we make it to be.

***

While there might be nothing like reading Brooks to raise your (my) ire in the am, but I esp. learned much from reading this recent essay on "The Death and Life of the Book Review" in the June 21 issue of The Nation.

In it, John Palattella considers the past and present state of newspaper journalism and of the book review in particular:

Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can't earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.

.... In a news context, "anti-intellectual" does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can mean that too. I use the word "anti-intellectual" to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.

So, in Palattella's perspective, there is more at stake in book reviews than a particular book or even books and reading at large. As, dare I even suggest, Brooks also contends, it is "culture" and history.

Learn from book reviews, Part Tres

Pain in childbirth had been considered inevitable until the 19th century, when chloroform came into more common use during labor. Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist, wrote a history on the use of anesthesia and analgesia titled, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, itself a declaration attributed to Queen Victoria.

Interestingly, the idea that childbirth need not be painful also spurred others to consider alternatives to medication, which itself presented problems, not the least of which included serious side effects and consequences for women's own experiences of childbirth. An early proponent of "natural" childbirth in the mid 20th century was Grantly Dick-Read, an obstetrician who cited examples of painless "primitive" birth from late 19th century anthropology in his book, Childbirth without Fear.

This story has been told before, but a book review in the May 31 issue of The Nation suggests another dimension that seems well worth exploring. The review, by Paula Findlen, discusses Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. As Findlen explains:

The objective developments in science of the preceding century gave way to subjective reflection about the meaning of understanding nature. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats marveled at the new vision of the world wrought by science. At the same time, the British astronomers, naturalists, chemists and experimenters of their generation developed a conception of the world that was, in its own way, profoundly poetic.

One of the developments of Romantic science was nitrous oxide:

In spring 1799, Humphrey Davy invited a circle of friends to experience the giddy effects of laughing gas. He was inspired enough to write a poem about it. Davy's celebrated self-experiment, in which he inhaled six quarts of N2O on May 5, 1799, led to a loss of consciousness, feeling and memory.... The psychosomatic effects (to borrow Coleridge's term) of Davy's discovery fascinated his contemporaries. He invented a new pleasure for which they had no name.

If Romanticism began as an exploration of the enhancement of the senses, at the height of its success it grappled with the novel sensation of feeling nothing at all.

It makes me wonder what we want today - to feel more or to feel less or both at the same time - and what that means.

What you can learn from book reviews

During both the six-hour flight there and back, StraightMan sat across the aisle from me, with the two kiddos and a portable DVD player. (Mind you, he owed me, after three weeks away at his NEH seminar...) This allowed me the luxury of catching up on back issues of two of my weekly reads, plus reading half of a novel on my kindle. I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night, and this afternoon downloaded The Girl who Played with Fire, which by all accounts is even better. Both Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire are page-turners, with commentaries on financial journalism, Swedish society and politics, and gender, which become issued as blocks of discourse from the mouths of the characters. Rather awkward, but the commentaries themselves can be interesting. As a lapsed fictionista who has worked in journalism, I admit that I am hooked. The books are a bit of change, too, from my usual fare in non-fiction.

I admit that sometimes I never bother reading the books themselves, but I enjoy reading the reviews of them: Not just thumbs up or thumbs down, but essays that contextualize the book and its subject matter and the author's approach, or read them alongside other books. I sometimes feel that academic journals ought to look more to The New Yorker and The Nation for models on the kinds of book reviews that they themselves might publish.

In fact, The Nation published a cover story, "The Death and Life of the Book Review," in its June 21 issue (which I have not finished reading), which suggests that the state of the book review today is linked not only to the Internet and the book publishing industry, but also the future of newspaper journalism. It seems also to me that the significance of the book review today is that it is arguably one of the few remaining public outlets of ideas - not as punditry or man-on-the-street opining, but to paraphrase The Nation, with "scrutiny, the deliberate, measured analysis of literary and intellectual questions without obvious or easy answers."

Which brings me to something I learned from a book review in the May 10 issue of The Nation: A review of two books about the conservation movement, its origins and its present, one being Mark Barrow's Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, and the other being Caroline Fraser's Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

I confess that I am considerably less interested in the latter than the former, being skeptical, even cynical, about naive do-goodism, of which the title smacks. Indeed, the review confirms that I am not wrong: Do-gooders especially ought not to be naive, especially about their history.

The review begins with a vignette, borrowed from Barrow, about Thomas Jefferson's scientific and philosophical interest in the woolly mammoth, which he believed had not become extinct, but survived somewhere beyond, possibly in the American West: "For Jefferson the patriot, America's natural advantages counterbalanced Europe's prodigious cultural patrimony. So in picking a fight with the Old World, he no doubt found it prudent to recruit a massive beast like the mammoth to his side." So, the reviewer, Ari Kelman, introduces us to the political history of American conservation efforts, in particular endangered species protection, which Barrow traces in his book through the 1970's. "This high-water mark lingered until the mid 1990's, when Congress, under Newt Gingrich, began rolling back environmental regulations."

Part of the history is the embrace of animals (albeit endangered) simultaneous with the rejection of other people. Kelman notes Barrow's examination of naturalists at the turn of the 20th century, a number of whom were interested in "positive eugenics" and drew parallels between the fate of animals and of people:

For many concerned onlookers, steeped in Jeffersonian and Turnerian intellectual currents, the West served as a synecdoche for the United States, and the imperiled bison served as a synecdoche for the West. If the rugged bison died out, then so too, they worried, might America, a nation they felt was being feminized by an economy that alienated workers from the land; radicalized by labor activists preaching class warfare in exploding cities; and mongrelized by ostensibly unassimilable immigrants (Catholics, Asians and Jews).

In 1886, the response, as Kelman describes, was to "embark on a scientific expedition to shoot or capture some of the remaining beasts." The bison were treated not much differently than the human population of the Great Plains - hunted first, then "saved" and collected. It is worth remembering that salvage anthropology, as well as salvage zoology, was practiced at this time in history.

Others better versed than I might be familiar already with this history. As a novice, I think as often as not, such causes as endangered species protection become presented as self-evident: Ethical and moral values that are irrefutable in any time and place. So, I think it is significant to be reminded that the sentiments now rallied around extinction and conservation themselves have histories. Knowing these histories, and making them known, will not undermine the impulse - to create the kind of nature that we think we ought to have - but hopefully lead to asking the questions that ought to be asked and producing better-informed answers.

If, indeed, the continuance of species is at stake, then it seems to me that we need to take the long view, both into the future and the past.

Henrietta Lacks

This weekend, I finally finished reading science journalist Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The only reason that it took me so long to read it - over the course of two months - is that I taught three courses during the semester, have two kids (ages 3 and 6), and a spouse away at a three-week-long seminar.

It is rather serious a subject, but the narrative has such a pull, that you might need to take the book to the beach. It deservedly has received a number of excellent reviews, which can be read at Skloot's own Web site.

Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cancerous cells, removed from her body during a biopsy, became the basis of tissue culture research in the late 20th century. "HeLa" cells, as researchers refer to them, revolutionized medical research, contributing to scientific understanding of the basic biology of cancer and the development of chemotherapies. The story is about how and why the cells could be taken from Lacks - a poor black woman seeking care in the charity hospital at Johns Hopkins during the 1950s - and used for research with her consent or knowledge, or that of her husband or children.

Along the way, the book is also about medical research ethics and their development during the last 50 years, following the Nuremberg trials and the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, two grim "milestones" in science. As Skloot writes in her Afterword, the issue is less about compensation - and concerns about the commercialization of tissue culture research are discussed throughout the book - and more about consent. Henrietta Lacks reads as an argument for why individuals ought to be informed at least of the possibility that their tissues might be used for research, even have a say about what kind of research. This book describes the damage that can be done when there is no information and no consent.

As important, the book is also about what happened to Henrietta's family after her death at age 31. While the cells became celebrated as a miracle of science, her children became abandoned, essentially, by their father. When they finally learn about their mother's "contribution" to science, they are ill prepared, emotionally and otherwise, to understand what this means, let alone "appreciate" the good for science and society. For example, one of Deborah's brothers refers to the "rape" of their mother's cells, which they learn - after a lifetime of their own neglect and abuse - have been exposed to nuclear radiation and fallout, HIV, scores of toxins, and other extremes in conditions to "test" their effects on humans.

Knowledge of the HeLa cells esp. devastates Deborah, the fourth of her five children and the only surviving daughter. Deborah becomes the central figure in Henrietta Lacks as she struggles to understand how her mother's cells could have done so much "good," when she herself has suffered so much from her mother's absence. Over and over again, Deborah decries the fact that no one ever bothers really to explain to her what is happening to her mother's cells. Although Skloot admits her occasional impatience with Deborah, she also never condescends to her: Is it any wonder that Deborah is under the impression that clones of her mother are walking around London, given the sensationalism of headlines in the media?

I found gripping, poignant, and difficult to read the chapters that detail the journey of discovery that Skloot and Deborah undertake. They visit a laboratory, at the invitation of the researcher, where Deborah and one of her brothers see their mother's cells under the microscopes and hear from a scientist who has dedicated his entire career to working with "HeLa" cells what they mean to him.

Then Skloot and Deborah look into whatever happened to Deborah's older sister, Elsie, who had been institutionalized as a young child, then forgotten by the family after their mother's death. I found Elsie's story even more disturbing than Lacks' own story. Deborah herself had come to be convinced that Elsie might have been deaf, as she and her brothers also had degrees of congenital deafness, which might have accounted for her apparent "slowness" (not responding to speech) that led to her being certified as an "idiot." Most of the medical records at the institution where Elsie lived and died had been destroyed, but Skloot and Deborah uncover her death certificate, with a rather gruesome photograph attached. Skloot pieces together a story in which it is likely that Elsie, who never reached her teens, had been a subject of medical experiments that might have included surgeries. The news, of course, is almost too much for Deborah to bear.

I can imagine that writing about the breakdown and the ritual of "soul cleansing" that follows were a challenge for Skloot, who rises beautifully to the occasion - I think because she so clearly feels compassion and affection for Deborah and for the other members of Henrietta's family. Indeed, as a cultural anthropologist and a former journalist, I so admired that throughout the almost 10 years that this project took to complete, Skloot respected the fact that this is not her story and that she does not control it. This is critical to how and why she, a young white journalist, gains Deborah's trust.

Initially, I had been thinking I might assign this book in Medical Anthropology or the Anthropology of the United States, but now I am thinking that it just need to be read and discussed widely. Period. It might be ideal for a "Big Read" on a college campus because it addresses important and meaningful concerns about research ethics and science as well as about race and poverty, all of which are not just coincidentally interconnected.

I want to compare this book with Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in that it boasts careful reporting, clear and compassionate writing, and a story that catches you and knocks you down. I know any number of anthropologists who teach Fadiman's book in their classes. It also is read in book clubs, in community "Big Read" programs, and in classes on "cultural competency" in nursing and medical schools. Henrietta Lacks ought to become required reading in the life sciences.

Enjoy the silence

No, this post is not a tribute to the band that dominated my life's soundtrack in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside Erasure, The Smiths, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, and other Screamers of the Week featured on WLIR.

As I was preparing dinner, I was listening to an interview on "Fresh Air" that considered the importance of silence. The interview was with George Prochnik, a journalist and author of a new book titled In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise.

This is from the article posted on NPR:

Prochnik says that on trips to a Quaker meeting and a monastery, he learned that absolute silence doesn't exist but that quiet spaces are essential because they "can inject us with a fertile unknown: a space in which to focus and absorb experience."

"What surprised me is degree to which the monks don't associate silence with gloomy overhang," he says. "There's sense of joyfulness of turning themselves down to be conscious of greater things."

Calgon, take me away!

Or at least, I think I need to get this book on my Kindle.

By the by, dinner was farfalle with asparagus sauteed lightly in olive oil with garlic, then tossed with black olives and corn (both leftovers in the fridge from separate occasions) and with fresh tomatoes and basil and a crumble of grey sea salt. I know, I know - how bougie, but I love grey sea salt. I even love to spell it "grey."

Naturally, Beanie and Bubbie had farfalle with butter and Parmesan cheese, with carrots and ranch dressing on the side.

Add to the list

Looks like a book I want to read when I have nothing else to do.

Why you wish Adrienne Martini was your friend, too...

Because when she signs your copy of her new book, she writes in it:

"Keep blogging! (& learn to knit)"

By the by, her new book is called Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously and it is oh-so-good! You need not knit to enjoy it.