Tag Archives: nonfiction

Book review: The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

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The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. Highly recommended.

There is no end to the ways in which human personality types can be categorised. According to Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., one of these categories, comprising about 15–20 percent of humanity, is the “highly sensitive person” (HSPs).

HSPs are individuals whose threshold for overarousal, physical or emotional, is lower than that of non-highly sensitive persons, although it falls along a scale. HSPs may be labeled “shy” or “avoidant” in school or society, when in fact they are really just trying to avoid the stress of overarousal. Aron is quick to point out that, while most HSPs are introverts, many are indeed extroverts. HSPs do not necessarily have better hearing, sense of smell, vision, etc., but their brains seem to process such incoming information at a different level. To a non-HSP, a rock concert or a casino is a loud, fun, exciting place to be. For an HSP, it is a loud, overwhelming, exhausting one that may require hours of aloneness and quiet to overcome the overarousal. According to Aron, the concept of the HSP is not mere psychobabble, but based on both psychological and physiological studies.

In American culture, and indeed in most Western cultures, HSP traits are generally seen as negative (hence, words like “shy,” “withdrawn,” “avoidant,” “inhibited”). Aron notes, however, that, in some cultures, HSPs are highly respected — in China, for example. HSP traits are neither bad nor good, but they have their positive and negative elements. While non-HSPs are warrior-kings, quick to make decisions and necessary to lead and act when such decisiveness and action are essential, HSPs are the the priests-judges-advisers, the more thoughtful group that “often act[s] to check the impulses of the warrior-kings.” Both clearly have an important role.

The Highly Sensitive Person defines the traits (with a self-assessment); asks you to accept yourself and your traits (or your HSP friends and theirs if you are a non-HSP); discusses childhood and provides guidelines for reframing experiences now that you understand your trait; and talks about such things as health, lifestyle, social relationships, work, love and sex, medicine and medication, and spirituality, with advice on how to avoid overarousal, especially unhealthy (physically and emotionally) long-term overarousal. The message is that HSPs are valuable and have a great deal to contribute to a non-HSP world that doesn’t understand us, doesn’t always value us, and sometimes is downright hostile toward us (“scaredy-cat” is something more than one HSP child has heard).

The Highly Sensitive Person is an attempt to help us understand what we need to do to find our optimal level of arousal (which is unique to the individual); manage unhealthy overarousal; and educate our family, friends, lovers, employers, teachers, physicians, etc., about our trait. It is also designed to assist non-HSPs understand their HSP friends and acquaintances. To me, it explained a lot about myself that I didn’t realise I share with others (a heightened sensitivity to loud or repetitive noises that don’t bother others, for example, and a tendency to find social events draining). There are no doubt some who would dismiss this all as self-help psychobabble — but for the HSP, this is invaluable self-help psychobabble. Highly recommended. Companion books are The Highly Sensitive Person Workbook and The Highly Sensitive Person in Love.

6 January 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Pure and the Impure

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The Pure and the Impure by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette with introduction by Judith Thurman. Recommended.

Colette believed The Pure and the Impure was her best work. I can’t judge, not having read anything of hers but a few short stories, but this collection of her observations about human attitudes toward relationships and sexuality is insightful and timeless. It is also difficult and obscure at times, perhaps because of the translation and because there is no real structure to such a collection.

Thanks to her milieu, her position in it, and her willingness to seek the story, Colette could draw upon the most interesting people of her time — the givers and the takers. From the older woman who publicly fakes an orgasm while self-pleasuring in an opium house to gladden the heart of her young, sickly lover to the roué who exclaims of women, “They allow us to be their master in the sex act, but never their equal. That is what I cannot forgive them” to the circle of prominent women who learn the ways of sex from servants, dress as men, and love horses (she calls the most notable of these women “La Chevalière”) to the “happy,” alcoholic, lesbian poet Renée Vivien to the gay men with whom she seems most comfortable, Colette covers a spectrum of sexuality and combinations — including those men and women who play their heterosexual and homosexual relations against one another.

“I’m devoted to that boy, with all my heart,” the older woman tells Colette, a stranger to her. “But what is the heart, madame? It’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating. It accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it’s not very particular. But the body . . . Ha! That’s something else, again.” Thurman believes this sums up Colette’s view precisely, the heart as a slave to the body.

Although Colette apparently wanted to remain an impartial observer, she cannot mask her own feelings and biases. One senses that she could not quite see a woman-woman partnership as “whole,” as passionate, as capable of being the source of tragedy in the same way as other types of relationships. (Anaïs Nin will also hint at something similar in her diaries, at the “incompleteness” of female/female love.) “What woman would not blush to seek out her amie only for sensual pleasure? In no way is it passion that fosters the devotion of two women, but rather a feeling of kinship.”

She is fascinated by the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” who elope and spend several decades living together. During this time, Butler will keep an extensive journal about her life with “My Beloved,” while, to Colette’s consternation and fascination, Ponsonby remains a silent partner. Colette so romanticizes the Ladies that she says they run off together as “young girls,” when in fact Butler was 39 and Ponsonby in her 20s. While there is all kind of detail about their living arrangements, from gardening, sewing, hosting an array of distinguished visitors, and sharing a bedroom and bed, there is nothing known of their emotional or sexual intimacies other than their obvious devotion to one another. They remain a happy, content enigma to Colette and to the present day.

The book concludes on a more personal note — about jealousy, “the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.” She maintains that “a man never belongs to us” and hints at the unique and not unfriendly relationship two female rivals may have — even rivals who wish to kill one another. When one rival tells Colette all the things that had prevented her from killing Colette in Rambouillet (missed train, stalled car, etc.), Colette says, “I was not in Rambouillet.” The relationship between her and her rival becomes more interesting, more revealing, more important, and more affectionate than with the man over whom they duel.

Colette suffered what many turn-of-the-century female intellectuals must have — a society’s fear of “masculine” women who are too intelligent, too outspoken, too knowing. When she offers to travel with the roué (apparently as a friend), he says in seriousness, “I only like to travel with women,” which, a moment later, is softened by, “You, a woman? Why, try as you will . . .” Even today, there are women who have experienced this.

“This is a sad book,” Colette said. “It doesn’t warm itself at the fire of love, because the flesh doesn’t cheer up its ardent servants.” Thurman adds, “This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full.”

The Pure and the Impure is a must read for anyone who enjoys Colette’s other writings; it is the most autobiographical of her works.

1 January 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

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Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf. Not recommended.

Female coming of age. Female desire and sexuality. Feminism. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood attempts to address these issues in the context of Naomi Wolf’s own coming of age in the 1970s. The problem with this approach is that it is too personal (a weakness Wolf admits early on) to offer either much insight or value. The best it can do is provoke clearer thinking in the reader than Wolf is capable of.

The stories are provided by Wolf and her circle of friends, who are for the most part middle-class, urban, and Caucasian. Much of Wolf’s discussion focuses on her childhood/adolescence in San Francisco and her exposure to that city’s counterculture ideas and sex industry — something that may resonate with women of similar backgrounds, but not with this lower middle-class, East Coast, small-town girl whose exposure to the sex industry came at the end of adolescence, not during childhood. (Unlike Wolf, I and my peers didn’t walk past strip clubs every day, see genital fetishes sold in local stores, or know about “sex workers” before hitting double digits.)

Wolf describes in detail such things as her procurement of birth control in preparation for the planned loss of her virginity to a “sweet guy.” She would have you believe she was thinking about when a girl becomes a woman, what makes a girl a woman, the ritual of becoming a woman, and the adult attitude toward teenage sex at this tender age while making this well-thought-out decision. According to her description of the event, which feels meaningless to her because of the way society disregards it, there is no teenage impulsiveness or passion involved — again, something that does not resonate.

Wolf’s primary point is that we were taught to believe, falsely, that females control sexual relations because males have uncontrollable desires, while we do not. Her exception to this teaching is, of course, valid. She hypothesizes that not only do females have tremendous desire, but that we are capable of a higher level of more prolonged desire and that we are nothing short of sexual deities. She illustrates this with a “history of the clitoris” (in which it is forgotten and rediscovered over the millennia) and of the extensiveness and sensitivity of the female sexual skin. She cites ancient wisdom that is no longer in practice or understood about male/female sexuality and relations; they understood sexual relations in a way we do not. Along the way, she occasionally makes valid points, for example, that all too often, parents of the 1960s and ’70s abdicated their adult roles to pursue their own pleasures and that there is no real transition from girlhood to womanhood.

In the end, however, her points rely too much on the personal anecdotes and on selected sources, that is, sources skewed toward her viewpoint. This is not an objective analysis of legitimate issues and theories, but an agenda that has little substance behind it. Wolf does manage to successfully illustrate the muddiness of sexual attitudes with the muddiness of her own thought. She is a barely adequate writer because she is neither a clear nor a deep thinker. Promiscuities is no more than pop feminism that adds little to what has already been written upon the subject other than Wolf’s own narrow perspective and need to be more sexually charged than men — a need that her passionless relationships and anecdotes belie.

If you really want insight into female desire and sexuality and what it means to become a woman, there are surely much more universal, fundamental, and emotionally and intellectually integral truths available than the weak mental ramblings offered here.

6 September 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Henry and June

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Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin. Recommended.

Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin is a portion of the writer’s famous journal from October 1931 until October 1932 — the year in which she met Henry and June Miller and fell for Henry’s sensuality and June’s mystery, a year of writing, lies, deceit, sexual awakening, introspection, psychoanalysis, and “love.”

Nin is an evocative, poetic writer, if not a particularly substantive one. Henry and June, edited from her journal to focus on Miller and his wife, is beautifully written but, in the end, is devoid of meaning to anyone other than the participants. She obscures the truth of how much she writes. If the journal is accurate, then Nin had mastered deception — she lies to her husband, to June, to Henry, to her psychoanalyst, to her lover/cousin Eduardo, to virtually everyone she knows, all seemingly in an attempt to hide herself from them, and perhaps from herself. She writes frequently of costumes, makeup, jewelry, nail polish and how one can put them on to create a new self. It quickly becomes clear that, despite the introspection of the journal, despite the psychoanalysis, despite her complete focus on herself and how she relates to those people in her life, Nin is no more self-aware by the end of the year than she was when she met Miller, and the reader can’t be too sure, either, of where Nin ends and where the self-deception begins. When the obvious is pointed out to her — that she is still trying to find the “love” that she didn’t get from her father — Nin accepts it at first, but denies it as she talks more and more to herself. And while she may grasp that her father’s abandonment was harmful to her, she finds it easy to mistreat her husband, whom she portrays as psychologically simple and refers to as a “child” without relating how he might feel to how she felt about her father. She seems incapable of grasping the importance of another person’s feelings, no matter who that other person might be.

Nin writes of spending entire days and nights with Miller, of going from him to Hugo, her banker husband, with no suspicion on Hugo’s part. Hugo is jealous of Miller, although she repeatedly tells her journal she doesn’t know why he would be. She writes of not wanting to hurt the soft, weak, emotional Eduardo, but continues her sexual relationship with him until he is bound to be crushed by her sudden decision to end it. She tells Eduardo about Henry, Henry about Hugo, and her psychoanalyst about all of them. She writes of having sex with three of them in one day, ending with “What does that make me?” She does not want to know the potential answer to that question. She wants “experience” at any cost. She does not want to be hurt, but she hurts others freely. She believes she has deep insight into others, but does not understand at more than a superficial level what their thoughts and feelings may be. Much of what she attributes to the elusive, mysterious June are the shifting sands of her own personality.

Not having read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the book he was writing during the year of his relationship with Nin, it’s difficult for me to say how accurate Nin’s portrayal of him is. At times, she feels pity for him, for his weak eyes, for the mind-numbing work he does to support himself. At others, she describes him as “monstrous.” The sketch of Miller is less one of the man himself than of Nin’s infatuation with her own perceptions. At one moment he is the ultimate sensualist; the next, he becomes a gentle romantic. She also enjoys him largely for his worship of her as a writer and as a lover. The relationship is less about the dynamics of their interactions than about her ego and her relationship with herself. Miller is never much more than a two-dimensional, ever-changing character — Henry Miller according to Anaïs Nin. While Nin’s journal is certainly more thoughtful than those of most people, ultimately, it lacks the insight and depth that another writer could have brought to such an intense relationship. At the end, Nin and Miller are still strangers to the reader who has spent hours over dinner and in bedrooms with them. Perhaps it is Nin’s amorality that gets in the way of any true intimacy.

Nin has somehow become a model of a woman’s sexual awakening and awareness, perhaps because of the perceived candor of her journal and her desires for the depths and heights of sexual experience. It is as though such desires for such experiences are what should define a woman — a notion that may work for some women, but certainly not all who are sexually awakened in their own ways.

Henry and June is self-indulgent and even occasionally adolescent in its focus, obssessions, and attitudes. Perhaps because I find so little to relate to in Nin, I found her cold, uninteresting, and annoying — perhaps because I don’t like to be deceived. On the other hand, this will be a fascinating read for anyone who is deeply interested in Nin or Miller or anyone, like me, who would like to free themselves to speak freely in their own journals.

9 June 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

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Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle. Highly recommended.

In Trail of Tears, John Ehle (who is, as far as I can tell, non-Native) sketches the people and events that led to the infamous Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee Nation to “Indian Territory” (primarily Arkansas and Oklahoma) where they would “never” be bothered by whites again. The focus is on the “Treaty Party,” consisting of Ridge, his son John Ridge, and his nephews Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie, along with Moravian, Methodist, and other missionaries sent to convert the Cherokees to Christianity and who are caught up in Cherokee/state/federal politics.

Ehle’s bias is evident in the title; the “rise” of the Cherokees is the effort, not wholly embraced by the Nation, of adapting to European-American culture, language, religion, and even livelihood (e.g., Cherokee hunting is uncivilized, whereas the adoption of American farming is preferable). The story begins with some background and the birth of a Cherokee man named Ridge not too long before the American Revolutionary War. The white impact has already begun to be felt, as one of Ridge’s forebears is white, and he and his family are driven into the wilds by the war.

After the war ends, the new Americans have one craving — land and more land. A gold strike in Georgia adds to the fever. The Cherokee, along with the Choctaw, Creek, and other southern tribes, are perceived as “wasting” land that their white counterparts should be entitled to. From this point on, it is clear that the Juggernaut of American expansionism and greed will displace the Native peoples. The question is only how and when.

Meanwhile, Ridge, who will not convert to Christianity but who wholeheartedly adopts many white ways for himself and his children, becomes not only a wealthy plantation owner but a leader of the Cherokee Nation. His son becomes an attorney, while Boudinot becomes the first editor of the Cherokee newspaper, The Phoenix. Both young men marry white New Englanders they meet while at school. Ridge and his family and allies are the first to see the writing on the wall — that the Cherokees will be removed; it is a matter of whether it is “voluntarily” on their own terms in their own time or involuntarily.

The principal chief of the Cherokee, a Cherokee-Scot named John Ross, is portrayed as a man in a state of denial. It is never clear how he thought the Cherokee could overcome the overwhelming tide of white intrusion without bloodshed and without losing. He and his followers blame the Ridge faction for selling the Cherokee out when they sign the Treaty of 1835 that puts the seal on the removal. They feel that they can continue to “negotiate,” not realising that Andrew Jackson has set the tone and the terms — and that the federal government under his leadership has loaded the die. Ehle is no John Ross fan; when the inevitable finally happens and the Cherokee are removed, Ross sends them via the lengthy, dangerous, time-consuming land route, resulting in hundreds if not thousands of deaths (the number remains unknown), while Ross and his family use the quicker, less treacherous water routes.

There are several dichotomies in this history — the Upper Towns vs. the Lower Towns; the full-bloods vs. those with white ancestors/family; the uneducated (mostly full-bloods, according to Ehle) vs. the educated (John Ridge, Boudinot); the federal government vs. state government (a dichotomy that would be resolved violently through the Civil War). A forest/mountain vs. town dichotomy is also evident. In any case, anything that speaks of the way the Cherokee used to be is seen as “primitive,” while Cherokee adoption of white ways is lauded by their neighbors. In fact, this is seen as the heart of the problem; the Cherokee people are pliable, are willing to adapt, are willing to live like the whites — and in the end are treated no better than their Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole counterparts. Ehle includes much contemporary commentary on this particular irony.

This book has been said to be controversial because it shows the wealthier Cherokees, like Ridge, John Ridge, and John Ross, as owning African slaves. The Cherokees tried to marry their own ways with that of the European-Americans; they had always had slaves, usually captives from other tribes. But it is clear that the majority of Cherokees were poor, did not own plantations, and did not exploit slaves.

Trail of Tears is an excellent snapshot of a particular situation and will be eye opening to those who are not familiar with the story of the southern tribes and their interactions with the burgeoning American population. Ehle includes a wealth of primary sources, such as letters, journal excerpts, military orders, and the like, that serve to enrich the story. This history lesson is told in a story/fiction format enhanced by contemporary writings that keep it interesting, lively, and personal. Ehle’s biases are clear but do not detract from this book as a history of a moment in time when the fate of a nation was decided. This is an excellent supplement to any broader history of the Trail of Tears.

29 April 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Angela’s Ashes

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Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Recommended as a good fiction.

Angela’s Ashes is the chronicle of author Frank McCourt’s childhood, first in America, then in Ireland, or purports to be. The sadness, tragedy, ugliness, and despair are laid on so thickly as to become improbable in combination. Bad things happen to good people, but in McCourt’s world, the worst always happens. When the family moves, it is to the worst house on the lane, next to the only outhouse. When it rains, their house is the one that floods. When he develops conjunctivitis, it is permanent (he still has it years later). When other kids’ alcoholic fathers go to England during the war to earn money, his is the only one who drinks his pay away and loses the job. Nothing is ever halfway for McCourt. If there is a tragedy to tell, it will be the most tragic conceivable.

There are inconsistencies, such as time frames that make no sense, as well as improbabilities, like his grandmother making several walking round trips of over a mile, all in one night, months before her death. There is also the issue of whether McCourt could possibly recall such detail (as his lengthy story about the IRA refusing to helping his father out and why) during his very early years without any context. It would be as though you were four years old and heard your father talking about the New Deal, and you remembered everything about it even though you had no idea at the time what all the acronyms represented. Oddly, while McCourt goes into great detail about his early childhood, his timeline becomes increasingly compressed as he approaches adolescence. There is much less detail, and whole months are passed by just at a time when a person would be more likely to remember more — and to be experiencing more. It almost feels like he grew tired of the tale (and fabricating it) and was in a rush to get to the end. Or perhaps, having gone through a sleazy conception, rats, fleas, sewage, open sores, tuberculosis, vomited blood, corporeal punishment, prolonged hunger, his mother’s prostitution, etc., etc., etc. (no horror goes untouched), he simply ran out of material.

So, from early on, I viewed Angela’s Ashes as a work of fiction in which none of the characters is likeable. While many would say the father is the worst, as he is a hard-core alcoholic who cannot and will not support his family, I found him to be far more sympathetic a person than his mother as portrayed. When sober, the father often shows his sons small signs of affection and empathy, but Angela herself is nearly always cold, distant, and unsympathetic toward her children. She is always more focused on herself than on them. I’m not sure how many people could write about their own mothers as dispassionately as McCourt does. If she had one good quality, McCourt is careful not to present it.

As a child, McCourt seems relatively balanced, likeable, and ethical, wanting to do the right thing, but adolescence seems to turn him into a different person. He lies, he steals, he takes advantage of people — and the only guilt he seems to feel is that imposed by the Catholic Church. There is never a sense, even when he achieves adulthood, that he has any deep thoughts about who he is, what he is doing, and how he affects others. Even his agonizing over his belief that he is responsible for a consumptive girl’s descent into Hell because he had sex with her is tainted by the selfishness of his focus.

In the end, I must concur with an author acquaintance who said, “Angela’s Ashes? ’tis as phony as the photo on the cover.”

But it is certainly well written and compelling, if you happen to have a large grain of salt handy.

18 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Flat Rock Journal

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Flat Rock Journal by Ken Carey. Not recommended.

After reading two pages of glowing reviews (and even a comment about Carey being a successor to Thoreau), I was expecting a well-written, thoughtful book centered on nature, the forest, and the life within. Instead, Flat Rock Journal struck me as more of a tribute to one man’s ego.

The book got off on a bad foot for me when Chicago-born Carey buys a clunker car to begin his quest for nature and life in the forest. It struck me that, 100 years ago, this would not have been an option at all and that it seems a strange way to get around when there are alternatives, such as cycling and walking, that bring one closer to the earth. Next, he runs into the woman who will become his wife on the Berkeley campus with whom he makes love on some bleachers. He sees this as a spiritual moment and her as a strong woman with no fears, while in reality it comes across as young people doing what comes naturally to young people. One also wonders why these children of nature did not find some grass under a tree.

Carey and his wife move to an old farmhouse in the Ozarks, where they have few conveniences (although, of course, they can’t seem to get by without a truck and eventually a gas-powered refrigerator). Carey’s day in the forest gives the reader little real feel for life, but does provide insights into his perspectives, which are at best centered around himself rather than the world around him. He says that a day in the forest helps him to rid himself of assumptions, the baggage of the world, what have you. He then describes clouds, storms, lizards, rock formations, birds, trees — everything in sight — in purely anthropmorphic terms as though he can’t grasp that this is part of those unnecessary, irrelevant assumptions.

He talks about the copperheads that live around the long-abandoned house he buys as “intruders” without seeming to understand that it is his family that is intruding on them. He kills them, albeit regretfully, as a danger to his young children, not seeming to understand that this is how humans have always justified killing so-called “pest animals.” When he can no longer take killing them, he pollutes the atmosphere and uses nonrewable resources by driving them elsewhere so they are not underfoot. He is surprised when they return; he doesn’t even seem to know the basic biology of territoriality that man and his fellow animals all have at heart. When he pets them in his lap and they relax, he thinks this is a sign of friendliness (whereas someone a little more in tune with the mind of reptiles — and I put myself in this category — understands how much reptiles like a comfortably warm spot, like a lap). This kind of anthropormophising is a grave injustice to nature, and anthropomorphising is a large part of what we do that disrespects nature and leads to environmental trouble and imbalance.

Carey also has a fair amount of contempt for urbanites who don’t understand the country and nature, and who exploit “cheap country resources” to lead lives that of excessive consumption. He has a blind side to his own consumption and to his own lack of understanding. He does not absorb nature or sit back and appreciate it; he consistently forces his own predispositions onto it.

He believes environmentalists are wrong to assume that man and nature cannot coexist, and that man has the unique capacity to improve the earth, although he doesn’t really explain how. (I would have liked at least one example of a building, structure, or anything that is manmade that “improves” nature, but one is not forthcoming.) He and his wife produce a large family, which, while well within their rights, is unnecessary in this country of low child mortality and long life spans, and surely even Carey can acknowledge that it is a combination of excessive consumption and overpopulation that will be the downfall of nature. He can happily live on many acres in a forest, but doesn’t seem to think that, if all 280 million Americans tried to follow the same lifestyle, basic as it is, there would be no wild left — all would be farms, gardens, and watering systems simply to accommodate the volume of people.

He seems to think that depression is something that one shrugs off with the proper attitude and that too much of depression is blamed on “childhood” or “somebody else.” This reveals only his profound ignorance of clinical depression as well as issues of child physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

His pseudospiritual ramblings are more annoying than enlightening. They are not the type of beliefs that can be universally felt, but are based on his own approach to his own readings, thoughts, and feelings. They are frequently contradictory to both common sense and a sense of wonder.

I was looking forward to a book that would make me feel like I was part of the forest, part of the Ozarks, part of the world. I have read the works of many environmental and nature writers who put their egos in the back seat and channel the beauty of the woods around them with minimal interjections of self, and those are the works that transport me, move me, and help me renew my own touch with my world and with all that inhabits it. This is not it.

Despite the glowing blurbs, which make me wonder if reviewers put any thought into their reviews, this book is not worth the time when there are so many more thoughtful, eloquent writers out there. It is apparently out of print. I can understand why.

29 July 2000
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Recommended.

Bill Bryson is known for his wry humour, and this is my first experience of it. Bryson gets it into his head to walk the famous Appalachian Trail. He is joined in this venture by Stephen Katz, an alcoholic, troubled, overweight friend who’s an unlikely candidate as a hiker/mountain man but who, with his many foibles, adds a much-needed personal touch.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — literally and figuratively. He talks briefly about the birth and history of the trail, hazards that range from bears and lethal viruses to unforgiving weather and deranged murderers, the decline of forest species, acid rain, the maps developed of the trail, its disputed length, the shelters along the way, the Forest Service’s love affair with road building, the National Park Service’s love affair with inefficiency and mismanagement, the people they meet on the trail and off the trail in small towns and tourist trap cities, pack weight, food, and how what you do is walk. We also learn a great deal about Katz that make him both likeable and not at all likeable. I suspect he is someone who is interesting and funny to read about, but who is infuriating in real life. His nonchalance when Bryson is convinced there are bears nearby is a high point.

Bryson is charming, witty, aggravating, and snobbish. If you can see the humorous side of bureaucracy, small-town and rural America, and what was once known as Yuppiedom, you will appreciate his running commentary on The downside of the book is that it hits an anticlimax shy of 2/3 through and never recovers. Perhaps this is symbolic of how walking the trail is.

This is not an Appalachian Trail “how-to” book, nor is it for the serious hiker or nature lover who expects to find out vicariously what it’s like to hike the trail. It’s a dryly funny commentary on humanity that happens to be a walk in the woods.

16 March 2002
Copyright © Diane Schirf

Book review: Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before

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Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. Simon and Schuster Free Press. New York: 2007. 304 pages.

Jean Twenge’s mouthful of a subtitle says it all — after taking a look at her generation and its issues, she finds reams of data to support her assumptions. According to Twenge, “. . . this generation has never known a world that puts duty before self.” This is an astonishing statement given the number of young Americans who have found their way to Iraq and Afghanistan or whose origins lie in cultures where duty remains an accepted obligation, as well as the response to the 9/11/2001 attack on the United States and the natural disasters of the past couple of decades. What Twenge dubs “Generation Me” (“GenMe”) seems to have responded to these crises nearly as enthusiastically and generously as their parents and grandparents.

Perhaps every generation likes to think life is tough compared to that of its predecessors. The Silent Generation endured the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean conflict, while the Baby Boomers lived through the Cold War, assassinations, Vietnam, and Nixon (not to mention the horrors of disco and leisure suits). According to Twenge, GenMe is plagued by the high self-esteem uncorrelated to merit inflicted on them by their elders combined with the concomitant high expectations and the harsh realities of a world in which good jobs are scarce and higher education, housing, and child care costs are high. GenMe, says Twenge, has been taught to think it can do and have anything, but is discovering that getting into and attending college is competitive and expensive; that a typical career path begins with an unsatisfying, low-paying job; and that achieving the lifestyle their parents have — the suburban home with two-car garage and two cars — takes time and lies at some indefinable point in the future.

Twenge and her associates have pored through countless surveys to see how this generation’s expectations, attitudes, and mores compare to those of its predecessors. Because most of these data are from the Baby Boomers, the “Than Ever Before” of the subtitle is debatable. If we had data for each generation of Americans from the entire history of our nation, we might be surprised by how attitudes have not only evolved, but sometimes reverted to a previous state. We tend to stereotype eras, too. When you mention the 1950s, most people envision the nuclear family, Leave It to Beaver, and innocent pleasures such as the Hula Hoop and roller skating. In reality, sex was hot (think Marilyn Monroe and From Here to Eternity); censorship was losing its influence to the changing mores of the masses, especially those of the young; and sexy, antiestablishment rebels like Marlon Brando and James Dean were redefining antiauthoritarianism as “cool.” Note that Monroe, Brando, and Dean would belong to what Twenge calls “Generation Prude” (with GenMe in the role of “Generation Crude”).

Twenge peppers her selected statistics with a generous number of illustrative quotations and anecdotes. While these are entertaining, they’re also meaningless; anyone could find quotations and anecdotes that support a contradictory point of view. Indeed, Twenge contradicts herself on occasion. After asserting that GenMe is more tolerant of gays, she mentions a teenage boy who is afraid of what his classmates would do to him if they knew of his orientation. That doesn’t sound “more tolerant” to me.

Undoubtedly Twenge cherry picks the data, and there’s no way for a reader to know how valid the studies and surveys are. She also doesn’t take into account regional and socioeconomic factors. My guess is that, for example, students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, living and studying in an urban, multicultural setting, are more tolerant than either the parents or teens of the Itawamba County school district in northern Mississippi, now infamous for their treatment of a lesbian classmate who wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom. Like other generations, GenMe isn’t a uniform mass.

The world and the workplace don’t operate optimally for GenMe, so Twenge devotes “Applying Our Knowledge” to her solutions. For example, under “For Employers,” she says, “. . . realize that younger employees may have a very different outlook in life . . . the times that shaped GenMe’ers as children are very different from those experienced by older generations.” Surely she knows that for millennia each generation or two has had a different outlook and that the solution isn’t for the older to adapt to the younger, but for society to evolve as views and values blend and evolve, then change.

At this point, Twenge becomes a self-parody. While deploring the self-centeredness she has tried to document, she exemplifies it by suggesting solutions that require catering to the expectations of GenMe. There is no meeting halfway. Because GenMe doesn’t accept authority automatically (does youth ever?), it’s up to you to earn their respect. And they expect praise, so Twenge says, so you’d better be prepared to deliver it. Note what’s missing — what GenMe, whose members take great pride in their critical thinking skills, can expect and how they can adapt to meet their employers halfway. It’s our way or the highway, it seems.

I’ve seen some of the attitudes and behaviors Twenge outlines and been among the first to shake my head over them. On the whole, however, when GenMe enters the sphere of work, relationships, and family, they do what everyone does — they grow up. They alter what they can, for example, life/work balance, and adapt to what they can’t. In every generation, youthful idealism succumbs to adult pragmatism. In the end, Twenge makes only the case that GenMe is different from the Baby Boomers, who were different from their parents. That they are different, and the ways in which they are different, is hardly a revelation, and that they are “more miserable than ever before” remains to be proven. Twenge’s information and her interpretations are interesting, and some of her concerns may be valid, but don’t be surprised if in 20 years someone is writing about how “prudish,” uptight, and intolerant GenMe is.

22 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. New York: Broadway Books. 2003. 560 pages.

To me, the sciences are fascinating but elusive. The concepts are marvelous and compelling, but the details are difficult and tedious, especially if your grasp of mathematics is as tenuous as mine. I grew up with a love for what I knew of astronomy and the underlying physics, and an interest in such things as geology, paleontology, and meteorology. These subjects are taught badly, if taught at all, and I never understood them well enough for my curiosity to deepen into understanding.

That’s where The Short History of Nearly Everything comes in. Bill Bryson explains much of what we know and how we came to know it through an abundance of examples and similes, not through formulas and theories. Not surprisingly, he’s at his weakest in the most difficult areas. He tries to explain particle physics but is forced to fall back, fairly enough, on, “The fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don’t know . . . The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.” When it comes to string theory, he throws up his hands helplessly, which is understandable since most physicists seem to find it nearly impossible to articulate. Bryson is on firmer ground with Einstein’s theories, which make more sense to me now — gravity is not a force, per se, but “a product of the bending of spacetime . . . no longer so much a thing as an outcome.” Even here, though, he admits, “Our brains can take us only so far because it is nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space to one part time, all interwoven like the threads in a plaid fabric.”

Where Bryson shines brightest is on terra firma, geology and the earth as well as ocean sciences. As Bryson shows in numerous cases, once upon a time, science wasn’t just for scientists. Charles Smithson of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was not just a figment of author John Fowles’ imagination, but representative of a Victorian spirit of scientific interest and discovery. Even Einstein, at the time he published his special theory of relativity, had attended only a four-year course “designed to churn out high school science teachers” and was working in the Swiss patent office — not exactly the type of credentials associated with today’s Nobel Prize winners. The 1800s were an especially fruitful time for dedicated amateurs represented in literature by characters such as Smithson and Roger Hamley of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. There was Roderick Murchison, who “became with rather astonishing swiftness a titan of geological thinking,” or fossil collector and seller Mary Anning, who was the first to discover a plesiosaurus (not, as Bryson puts it, to “find the first plesiosaurus”) and who “could extract [fossils] with the greatest delicacy and without damage.” Lest we think the entrepreneurial spirit of science dead, however, Bryson introduces Reverend Robert Evans, who, from his home in Australia, had as of early 2003 discovered 36 supernovae. To help the reader comprehend the magnitude of this feat, Bryson provides ample context.

Science is often focused on the numbers, but it’s difficult for the human mind to grasp the very large and the very small that are well outside our physical perception. If my teachers had used comparisons and analogies like Bryson’s and his sources, I and my classmates might have understood the significance of all those swirling numbers and formulae. For example, most of us have seen the typical solar system chart neatly tucked into a textbook or displayed on a poster. But the planets don’t come one after the other at “neighborly intervals.” If Earth were the diameter of a pea, “Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway”). Bryson adds that the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be nearly 10,000 miles away at this scale. It’s easier to appreciate the size and wonder of the universe when presented in a tangible way rather than as a bunch of 10s with superscripts.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — astronomy, earth science, oceanography, physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, origins of man, and even the microbes that keep us healthy and make us miserable. Earth and its life depend on delicately balanced systems and processes, with the potential for natural or man-made disaster ever present. The chapter on the Yellowstone supervolcano (“Dangerous Beauty”) would keep any nervous soul up a few nights, while humbling chapters like “Lonely Planet” reveal how much of what we rely on is beyond our control — the molten nature of Earth’s interior, our moon that is just the right size and orbit to keep our planet stabilized, the position of the Earth relative to the sun (five percent closer or 15 percent farther, and we would cease to exist as we know ourselves). Bryson reminds us that we are a hair’s breadth from unpredictable and/or unpreventable disaster, whether from space or from within our own home.

As we live day to day, going to work, shopping, eating, sleeping, spending time with friends, even vacationing with the family at Yellowstone, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of more than a neighborhood, a city, or even a country. We’re also part of the complex systems that sustain us, our planet Earth, and the universe around us. If you have, A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything may help you to recall the wonder and the fragility of it all.

17 May 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf