Lift Up Your Hearts!

I Like Birds is a video story created by my cousin, D.B. McLaughlin.  The words, music, and photos are all his.

Think of this video as a children's book, read on a tablet by a caring adult to someone who is hungry to know more about their world. Pause the video or mute the music as you wish.

I hate to think of tablets replacing printed books, but that being said, this is great.  Perhaps some of his first cousins once removed would enjoy it.  (Update:  I see I wrote "once removed"; I had meant to say "twice removed," but no doubt the parents will enjoy it, too!)

DragonBox is just one of the reasons I feel myself being dragged inevitably toward the tablet world.  My reaction upon seeing my first tablet was that it was too big to be a phone but too limited to be a computer.  How can it be a real computer with what passes for a keyboard on a tablet?  Or without all my favorite software?  Who would want one?  But that's where all the cool new software is.  :(

Stop the presses!  The GeekDad article doesn't mention it, but DragonBox is now available for Windows!  (Linux coming soon, they say.)  And for only six dollars.  (Twice the price of the iOS and Android versions, but there's more to it.)  I already know algebra, but it's tempting to check it out.

I've been saying for years that educational software producers need to get together with gaming experts.  The potential for computer-aided learning is enormous, but most games are not written for their potential to educate and enighten, and most educational software is barely beyond the flash-cards-with-glitz stage.  Not that Joseph doesn't love my PowerPoints, of course.  :)

Jean-Baptiste Huynh is a Vietnamese Frenchman living in Norway, who taught math for several years and was frustrated with the way math is taught in schools. He wanted his kids to learn algebra in a way that made sense to them, and with tablets and gamification of education he thought that there must be some way to create an app that would make algebra easier to learn. So he started up a company called We Want to Know, aimed at creating some user-friendly educational games that are (1) really educational and (2) really games. If DragonBox is any indication, he’s on the right path so far.

[Huynh] sees tablet computers as a truly disruptive technology that can change the way we teach and learn.

Thanks to DSTB for the tip.  I can't wait to see what's next.

A Year with G.K. Chesterton:  365 Days of Wisdom, Wit, and Wonder editd by Kevin Belmonte (Thomas Nelson, 2012)

How can you go wrong with Chesterton?  How could I pass up the opportunity to receive a free copy of this collection of a year's worth of his wisdom?  So I didn't, despite my complaints about overflowing bookshelves and not enough time to read.

Since I had an obligation to review the book for its publisher, I couldn't really spread the readings out over 365 days—not that I would have exercised that much self-control anyway.  Still, it was a delight, mostly.  The selections themselves are fully delightful, mostly unknown to me, and interspersed with quotations from the Bible and quotations about Chesterton.  My only quarrel with the book is the lack of sources.  Who can read a good quotation and not want to see it in context?  Many times Belmonte tells us the origins of a particular selection, but as many times he does not, which I found very frustrating.

Google came to the rescue.  Many of Chesterton's writings are in the public domain and available online.  This made finding the context of most of the passages easy, and should have saved much time in providing samples for this review, since all I had to do was copy them.  Alas, I'm not sure that there was any savings at all, since finding the context inevitably meant I spent more time reading than I would have spent typing.

Be that as it may, here are a few treasures, mostly from the book, but some encountered through my online meanderings.  Remembering the Golden Rule, I have provided the sources. (More)

A comment made by Janet to my Quick Tourist's Conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius post inspired these thoughts, and it seemed better to give them their own post rather than to comment on that one.:

The Orlando Sentinel of January 31 contained an article by a pediatrician, highlighting the efforts of those in his field to combat illiteracy. It included the following sentence:

One in four children grow up without learning how to read.

I have grave doubts about that statistic.  If true, there should be rioting in the streets on behalf of the 25 percent, who, under our compulsory education system, have wasted at least ten of the most important years of their lives in school.  True, there are a few (very few) children who have handicaps that keep them from learning to read, but there is absolutely no excuse for confining children for most of their young lives if they can't read when they come out.  As certain as I am that the institution of school has serious problems, I simply don't believe that it can be doing that badly.

On the other hand, true literacy is more than the mere ability to read words on a page.  Understanding, and the ability to reason, are necessary for making sense of writing.  That we fail one in four school children that way is still unbelievable, but reading comments written to news websites and blogs (especially those where the subject is political, or controversial in any way) has made it a more credible failing.

I can't get out of my mind the question someone, alas long forgotten, once asked:  Is there any material difference between someone who can't read and someone who doesn't?  It's not surprising that the mantra among teachers and parents has long been, "I don't care what they read as long as they're reading."  But comprehension and logic are skills that must be honed with practice.  To that end, what we read is critical:  Garbage in, garbage out.

Simplicity Parenting:  Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids by Kim John Payne with Lisa M. Ross (Ballantine Books, 2009)

This review was interrupted so that I could write the Things Dr. Spock Won't Tell You post, simply so I could reference it here.  When I get around to updating my list of favorite childrearing books, Simplicity Parenting will be there.

Insert here the usual disclaimer:  I don't agree with all the author says.  But there is so much of value here; I'd recommend it to all parents and parents-to-be.  Grandparents, too, and even those without children in their lives.  Because the book is as much about simplicity as it is about parenting.

I won't be able to do justice to the content of the book—and I sent it back to the library in part because I knew that if I had it I'd take too much time trying to do just that.  But I'll attempt a one-line summary:  There are incalculable advantages to a child's well-being to be found in simplicity, rhythm, and clutter-free living. 

Most of the ideas in the book are not new to me.  Perhaps one reason I like it so much is that it resonates well with theories I'd already encountered (and appreciated) over the last thirty-odd years.  Simplicity Parenting connects the dots, and its strength lies in its comprehensiveness, its gentle encouragment, and above all in its practical suggestions.  No matter how hurried, harried, stressed, and cluttered your world is, Kim John Payne convinces you that the benefits of simplicity are possible, taken in small steps and beginning exactly where you are. (More)

Guitar Zero:  The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age by Gary Marcus (Penguin Books, 2012)

Hooray for our library for ordering this book after I requested it!  Janet has written a great review already (which is why I wanted to read Guitar Zero in the first place), so this will be short.  For what the book's really about, read what she has to say; I'll just mention a few of my impressions.  I have 36 Post-It flags marking sections that especially interested me, but have neither time nor energy to type out more than a few.

Guitar Zero is a much better book than Kluge, also by Gary Marcus.  A bit of the professional arrogance I talked about in my review of that book comes through here when he's talking about the brain, but it's much less, and I might not even have noticed it had I read this one first.  Now I understand why Janet perceived him as very humble:  His first serious attempts to tackle playing the guitar, at nearly 40 years old, with no musical background except listening, and the handicap of an extremely poor sense of rhythm, took place during a two-week stay at the family's summer cottage, where he practiced for several hours each day, for two weeks, where not only his wife but also his in-laws could hear every painful note of his miserable beginnings.  To me, who with few exceptions won't sing or play a note unless I'm completely alone in the house, Marcus's behavior speaks of humility at a level I can't even imagine.  He also makes no attempt to hide his musical ignorance, though his musical learning is very impressive.

It was fascinating, in reading, to learn just how vastly ignorant I am of the kind of music most people love and know best.  I've kept myself consciously and deliberately ignorant of rock 'n' roll and its spawn, ever since my sixth-grade art teacher inflicted on us every day in class the music of an oddly-named British group called the Beatles.  So it was with a kind of perverse delight that I read Marcus's careful, meticulous explanation of the parts of music I've known since elementary school while tossing around names of bands and singers and musical techniques with the assumption that of course they needed no explanation.

Just a few quotes:

By around six or seven months, infants start to become sensitive to the shapes of melodies.  Given enough exposure, they can detect when a note has changed, recognize a short melody even when it has been transposed upward or downward in pitch, and sometimes remember melodies for weeks.

And maybe even younger.  I think of two different instances I've read about:  one where the sibling of a young Suzuki violin student clearly recognized, after birth, the Vivaldi concerto she had heard her brother practicing during the previous nine months; the other the newborn baby of a professional cellist, who responded similarly to the works her mother had practiced while pregnant.

The process of forming chords [on the guitar] is further complicated by the fact that one's fingers don't naturally move independently.  (Try, for example, to bring all of your fingers together, with your palm facing down, and then slowly move your pinkie back and forth; your ring finger, and possibly your thumb, will be tempted to go along for the ride.)

I have no trouble doing this, but it's easier with my left hand than with my right, the legacy of my very-long-ago violin playing in school and some teenaged efforts on folk guitar.  I never got above the barely-capable level of playing, but the circuits for the necessary independent finger movement are still imprinted on my brain.

Marcus spends a lot of time analyzing the differences and similarities between music and language.  Most of it makes sense, but I do quarrel with some of his reasoning.  He makes much of the fact that nearly every child learns to speak, and easily, whereas music is difficult to learn, not natural.  My point is that children are naturally and constantly exposed to language from before birth, have great incentive to learn to talk, and are constantly encouraged in their efforts.  What if they were similarly exposed and encouraged in music?

[Speaking of a master teacher] The single point that Michele was most adamant about was a rule for when parents should correct a child's mistake:  never, ever until the child had made that error at least three times.  [P]arents who corrected their children could easily wind up destroying their kids' motivation.

Many people probably imagine that kids are simply quicker learners, but laboratory research suggests otherwise.  In the few direct comparisons of "procedural" learning in children and college-aged adults, adults actually tend to be quicker learners than children. ... If kids outshine adults, it's probably not because they are quicker to learn but simply because they are more persistent; the same drive that can lead them to watch the same episode of a TV show five days in a row without any signs of losing interest can lead a child who aspires to play an instrument to practice the same riff over and over again.

I figured out one of the reasons why music had always been such a struggle for me:  rhythm turns out to be deeply tied to the balance-tracking vestibular system.  Since I was a child, my vestibular system has been lousy.  I could never bear to ride on a swing, despised being bounced up and down, routinely became nauseated when sitting in the back of the car, and opted out of roller coasters altogether.  A new study showed that electrical stimulation of the vestibular system can directly affect rhythmic perceptions, and in retrospect it is easy to see why rhythm has always posed a challenge for me.  It's a pretty safe bet that Jimi Hendrix enjoyed being bounced as a baby a lot more than I did.

Guitar Zero is almost enough to make me pick up an instrument again ... if only I could be humble enough to let someone hear me.  And who am I kidding?  Marcus proved (as John Holt did before him) that it's never too late to learn, what would I give up in order to find the hours and hours I'd need to practice?

The second goal I set for this project was not foundational in itself, but a subset of the fundamental goal of purposeful and deliberate reading:  To read through A History of the Medieval World by February 14.  The third was to read through the entire Bible, chronologically, in a year.  Unlike my bedtime goal, and the exercise goal below, both of these are amenable to getting ahead, and to catching up when behind.  The latter worked well when I started the Bible-reading goal a week into the year, but generally I prefer the former.  I try to stay just a little ahead of the “on track to the goal” graph, so that small distractions, such as a busy weekend, don’t put me behind.  On the other hand, I don’t want to get too far ahead, either, because that would indicate that I am probably neglecting other duties.

As you can see, I’m doing well with both of these goals.

Finally, there’s exercise.  It required a lot of cogitation to create a metric that accomplishes what I want it to, but I finally did, and I’m still very pleased with it.  At my level, the key is simply to get moving, and I’ve done that consistently and well ever since I started keeping account.  I can’t tell you the number of times I got out the door with my sneakers on for the sole reason that I couldn’t face entering a zero in the record.  At some point I added another line to the graph, representing a minimal requirement higher than zero; my intention is to raise it periodically as I get in better shape.

For a long time all I did was walk, but recently I’ve added activities that tackle core and upper body issues, along with balance and flexibility.  I quickly discovered that my initial “difficulty multiplier” of 10 was too high; 2 seems to be more realistic, though I may feel differently when I get to running, which I don’t expect to manage for quite a while.

This is another winner, and again I thank Porter, and others in my family, for their support.  The art of encouraging without nagging is a tricky one, and you’re doing it well.

So, on the one hand, I’m feeling good about my successes.  On the other hand, it’s discouraging to realize I’m already one month into the year and my “foundation” has only four stones.  And despite the above-mentioned efforts not to let myself get too far ahead in the reading, focusing on these four areas has still led to neglecting important duties.  (Don't ask about my inbox.)  How am I possible going to fit everything in?  How could I have hoped to add more to my schedule when I was already overwhelmed?  My not-very-confident hope is that as the foundations are laid and become part of life, I will become more efficient.

In any case, I need to press on.    Part of the problem is that I want the next goal to be in the area of healthy eating, and it’s too big a topic.  I’m struggling to break it into manageable pieces, and, as I did with exercise, develop a workable metric.  I’m to the point of deciding just to do something, to get started, to put up a sail, so to speak, and worry later about adjusting course.

But that’s another post.

I am exceedingly well pleased with the first month of my Foundations 2013 project.

The first foundation stone was a regular, 10 p.m. bedtime, and I’m happy to report success for the first month:  an average of 10 p.m. with a few deviations each way, but not many and only one as much as an hour.

I’m even happier to report how much better just a month of this practice has made me feel, both physically and mentally.  Unfortunately, I can’t say that I’m getting all that much more sleep, as I’ve been waking up earlier, but it’s generally better sleep.  How lovely it is to fall asleep within a few minutes of turning out the light, instead of lying awake with my mind whirling, being unable to avoid the thought that if I can’t sleep, I could at least be up accomplishing something, but staying in bed because I know I’m really tired and need the sleep.

I suspect there are several factors involved here, only one of which is the hour, though I’ve discovered through experience that 10:00 really does work best for me.  Another is the sheer regularity of the time:  as the month progressed, both my body and my mind learned to recognize when bedtime is approaching and begin, unconsciously, to prepare.

Unmeasured and undocumented, but significant, is a deliberate effort to “wind down”—usually reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to a course lecture—in the later evening hours.  I found out the hard way that rushing around trying to finish last-minute jobs and beat the 10:00 deadline does not work:  the one time I did that, I was so hyped I lay awake for two hours.

My general practice, though it’s not honored with any rigidity whatsoever, is to have the computer off by 9:00, and I find getting away from the close screen helps a lot.  If I’m watching something, as opposed to reading, I will bend the rule and keep my computer on my lap.  Without it, I will more often than not fall asleep, or get frustrated—I seem to need to do something else when watching television (and I don’t knit). That seems to do less harm—as is true of the movie itself, though it also is "screen time"—than the intensity with which I usually work at the computer, and allows me to do small, tedious, but important jobs that take time but little attention.   (For example, there are tasks that require a few clicks, then a wait, then a few clicks, then a wait—and doing them while distracted by a movie keeps me from being frustrated to tears by the delays.)  It also helps to get ready for bed (both myself and the house) before doing the winding-down activities.

This Foundation Stone is a keeper, and I am so grateful to my husband for supporting it.  When you're married, making a significant change is nearly impossible if your spouse is opposed, and passive resistance or even indifference can quickly derail all but the strongest commitment to a difficult project.  But encouragement is the lubrication that keeps the whole enterprise from seizing up.  Thank you, Porter!

There's a lot more to cover in this first-month review, but I'll take a break before moving on.

Here are a few more quotes I pulled from Half the Sky before relinquishing it to the library.

Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately grabbed national attention there. ... [The Rapex] resembles a tube, with barbs inside.  The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.  When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely:  "A medieval device for a medieval deed."

There's a certain poetic justice in the device, for sure, though I believe the inventor is slandering the medieval era.  One can only hope the women survive the mens' reactions.  Though rape is famously the "fate worse than death," I'm not sure the victims in Darfur would agree.

In Darfur, after interviewing several women who told of having been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question:  "If women are raped when they get firewood, then why don't they stay in the camps?  Why don't the men collect firewood?"

"When men leave the camp, they're shot dead," one of the women explained patiently.  "When the women leave they're only raped."  In almost every conflict, mortality is disporportionately male.  Bult whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.

 (More)

Extra!  Extra!  Congressman cuts his own budget!

I know there are those among my readers who are inclined to disbelieve anything that comes from Fox News, but this story is confirmed by the left-leaning Orlando Sentinel as well.  U.S. Representative Daniel Webster has done what all politicians should do until the country is back on sound financial ground:  cut his own salary, and slashed his office budget, returning $360,000 to the Treasury.  And this isn't the first year he's done that.

“I learned as a father of six children and a small business owner how to live within my means by prioritizing my spending and doing more with less during tough times,” said Webster in a statement. “Washington needs to embrace the same approach by spending less rather than simply borrowing more, and I believe that starts with me.”

"If we're going to fix government it's going to have to start in our own house," he said.

Congressman Webster said if all 435 members of Congress would be a hawk about each dollar, it would save tens of millions of dollars each year.

"If it's appropriated, the rule is spend it. I don't believe that. I believe we ought to look at it as every dollar is important."

I've liked Dan Webster since my first contact with his office back in 1990.  It was he who was largely responsible for the bill that clearly legalized homeschooling in Florida, so I'm forever grateful, even if we have some points of disagreement.  He also eschews negative campaigning, and has a reputation for statesmanship, civility, and true bipartisanship.

Granted, his pay cut of $4700 is only 2.7% of his $174,000 annual salary, but would you voluntarily pay an extra 3% in taxes?  Anyone who considers that a triviality is welcome to try to out-do him.

It turns out that our own representative, John Mica, also returned appropriated money ($150,000 in the last two years), and another Florida congressman, Bill Posey, has given back money and also held his own salary to the level he earned when he was elected in 2008.  This kind of action ought to be bigger news than it is.  No, it's not going to solve our problems, but it's a step, and more than that, it's an important symbol.

If Americans must suffer to bring about a sane and stable economy, then those who have taken on the mantle of leadership, be they politicians or business leaders or entertainers, should ... LEAD!

Once upon a time, we gave normal baby shower presents, like everyone else.  You know, crib sheets and diapers and cute little outfits....  As time went on, and as we became more experienced parents, we began to change:  we started giving books.  I suppose a copy of Dr. Spock would have been considered a normal gift, but the books we gave were different, the kind that most people might never run into.  They were chosen from a mental list of books, accumulated over the years, which we had found to be especially helpful in the adventure of childrearing.  I had quickly become fed up with all the popular parenting books, which seemed to be describing ... well, I don't know who they were describing, but it certainly wasn't our children.  These books, taken in toto, did a much better job of understanding the little ones in our care, and of addressing our own particular needs and concerns.  I hoped by the shower gifts to spare other parents my own long and confusing journey.  This was pre-Internet, remember, and information was harder to come by than anyone born after 1975 can fully imagine.

After a while we learned to be more cautious in our giving, as we discovered that not every new parent is excited about getting books, let alone ones that are ... odd.  But I kept the list, calling it The Things Dr. Spock Won't Tell You; over the years, it grew and changed a bit in content, though not in philosophy.

The version I'm publishing now is old, having not been updated since 2005.  There are other good books I should add, and perhaps one day I will.  It should probably get a new title, too:  Does anyone read Dr. Spock anymore?  But it is what it is, and I'm only posting it because (1) the blog is a good place to tuck away old writings, and (2) I want to reference it in a later post.

One thing that will become obvious to anyone who reads the books is that they contradict each other in places.  So what?  I don't agree with everything in any of them; the path of truth is strewn with paradox.  The point was never to push any particular view of childrearing, but that in each book we'd found something of great value.  Take what is useful, and leave what is not.

Despite their differences, these books tend to have two things in common that undergird our own childrearing philosophy.  One is a great respect for children, and a conviction that we as a society have underestimated them in many areas, from the physical to the intellectual to the spiritual.  The other is a great respect for parents, the belief that "an ounce of parent is worth a pound of expert." (More)

Alasdair Neale guest conductor
Sarah Chang, violin

Gioachino Rossini:  Semiramide:  Overture
Samuel Barber: Concerto for Violin, op. 14
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64

As much as I like music, it's not often a "happiness moment" coincides with a concert.  (Mostly because the particular kind of happiness I'm documenting is rare.)  But Sunday was a bright exception.  I had been particularly looking forward to the afternoon concert, because we've loved Sarah Chang's violin playing since she was playing on a quarter-sized violin.  But Ms. Chang's lovely performance was not the most memorable event of the concert.

Wow.

How often does the orchestra outshine the soloist?

We love the Barber Violin Concerto and we love Sarah Chang.

But hands down the best of the concert was the Tchaikovsky.  Porter called it, "possibly the best I've ever heard the Orlando Philharmonic play."  I don't care much for the modern habit of giving standing ovations so often that ordinary applause makes musicians think, "What did we do wrong?"  But this one was truly well-deserved.  The music came alive, it was meaningful, it was powerful—and what's more, it looked as if the musicians were enjoying themselves.  This is hardly an obscure piece—and yet I can say that I've never heard a performance of Tchaikovsky 5 that moved me more.

Plus, it really helped that the concert was at 3 p.m.  I'm far from my best and most appreciative when I'm struggling to stay awake.  Not to mention the earlier time is safer for the drive home.  :)

If I'd known, I'd have mailed a package to Switzerland last week.

The cost of mailing packages overseas has gone up—a lot.  The Priority Mail Large Video Box (O-1096L), about which I raved in Great News for Those with Family Overseas, is now a whopping $23.95.  How can the government keep pretending inflation is low when the price for this governmental service has nearly doubled in two years?

It's still cheaper than a flight overseas, but not nearly so much fun.  Good thing Vivienne's birthday isn't a week later!

You may wonder, considering how disappointed I was by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, why we decided to go see The Hobbit Saturday night.  But we had a free movie pass that was about to expire; moreover, I was feeling more kindly toward the LOTR movies, having watched my nephew spend much of his Christmas vacation devouring the books—which I doubt he would have done without having been inspired by the movies.  So last night we ventured into our local theater for the first time in nearly five years.

Yes, we were disappointed.  Peter Jackson is consistent, and so am I.  I could very nearly simply quote my review of The Fellowship of the Ring for The Hobbit.  I fault it for the same lack of attention to the basic nature of the characters (though not as badly as in LOTR), the same gratuitous rewriting and addition of scenes, the same modern-action-film-with-swords emphasis on battles and chase scenes.  In the middle of a fight that wouldn't end, Porter and I looked at each other and said, "b-o-o-o-r-i-n-g."  So sad to feel that way about a movie made to honor one of my very favorite books, one I can read over and over again without coming close to boredom.

I'd read that The Hobbit movie was not intended to simply tell the story in the book, but would have some scenes added to include some of the backstory and tie it in more directly with LOTR, and I was okay with that.  That's not at all the same thing as directly contradicting the book, which, for example, the eagle rescue scene does in spades.

As in the previous movies, this one does hobbits and the Shire best:  believable, beautiful, noble, inspirational.  The other races are more caricatures and too alien.  The character of the dwarves (that's the way the word is spelled in the book, complete with explanation) is downright maligned.  Radagast is played as a drug-crazed hippie; elves are wrongly cast as vegetarians.  The trolls, goblins, orcs, and wargs are over-the-top in their ugliness and puerility, so that they come across as more disgusting than evil.  On the other hand, Gollum, though not the character as I imagined him, is very well conceived and acted (as he was in the other films).

There are some good lines, and some funny ones, though too much of the humor is of the snot-in-the-soup kind.

I've said before that an important key to good fantasy is that if you want the audience to accept an outlandish premise (e.g. magic), the rest of the story must be down-to-earth and believable (minus the magic, Hogwarts is a normal English boarding school).  Watching the credits, I commented that it sure takes a lot of people to make a movie.  With all those folks, couldn't they have sprung for two more?  A physicist and an EMT come to mind.  When big things fall or are thrown they look too much like models (with modern CGI there's no excuse for not doing better), and even dwarfs, to be at all "realistic," can't fall a few hundred feet, have massive timbers land on top of them, then get up and go about their business with no more than a brief groan.

Would I recommend The Hobbit movie?  Only for those who aren't likely ever to read the book.  I definitely wouldn't recommend it for grandchildren.  The PG-13 rating is well deserved (and frankly I don't think anyone, of any age, can benefit from so much violence).

Still, it has its good points, and I have to keep in mind how much stronger it is, even in its weaknesses, than most contemporary fare.

The best of the movie?  Bilbo and the Shire, the music (though it owes a lot to Braveheart), and the awesome New Zealand scenery.

Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Inspired by the PBS documentary and the recommendation of a friend, I put myself on the library waiting list for Half the Sky.  As usually happens, it became available at an inconvenient time, and I had to return it to the library in a hurry.  That was back in October, so I'm trying to craft this review from my hastily-scribbled (typed) notes and quotes.

The book is better than the television show, if only because it features fewer American pop-culture icons and more real people.  It also, of course, gives more detail, though there is something to be said for the visceral effects of seeing and hearing the people behind the words.  Both left me with two distinct reactions, neither of which is probably what the authors had in mind.

When reading (or watching) these stories of unbelieveable brutality and oppression of women, the first, and no doubt intended, reaction is, "What are we doing to our women and girls, to the majority of the population of the world, to half of the very image of God?"  Particularly since the authors relate all these horrors while barely touching on the problem of sex-selective abortion.  And yet my lasting impression followed almost immediately:  What have we done to our men and boys?  Not everyone will agree, but I say that there is something even worse than the atrocities committed upon these women, and that is being the kind of person who commits such acts.  Ultimately, no solution to the problem of violence against women will succeed unless the rehabilitation of men is also addressed.

Not that women, as a sex, are innocent:

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains.  But it's not true.  Granted, men are often brutal to women.  Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters' genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take thieir sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.  One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war.

But by and large, men have the power, and they use that power in ways that hurt women, even their own wives and daughters.

Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men.  it is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito net and then find the child's father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. ... Roughly 7 percent of the total spending of the poorest people in Indias's Maharashtra State went to sugar. ... [I]n much of the world even some of the poorest young men, both single and married, spend considerable sums on prostitutes. ... [A]t least in Udaipur, the malnutrition could in most cases be eliminated if families bought less sugar and tobacco. ... If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do in beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries.  Girls ... would be the biggest beneficiaries.

Or, as my son-in-law succinctly put it, "Men can't be trusted to bring home the bacon rather than eating it on the way home."

Why not?  Why is it that when women in poor countries get jobs, they use the money to feed and educate their children, but men spend their incomes (and their wives', if the money isn't hidden from them) on beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes?  It was (is) not always thus:  men used to be proud to support their families, and many still are.  Perhaps in this country one can cast some blame on feminism, which robbed men of the assurance that their own sacrifices were essential to their families' survival.  But in many poor countries little of the bread ever made it to the children's mouths until their mothers began earning it.  Here's one theory:

[Quoting David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian] The economic implications of gender discriminaion are most serious.  To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men.  One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.

(On a side note, while I applaud the movement in some Christian circles to encourage boys and men in chivalry, graciousness, and love, I cringe when I see how often this is taught through the idea that boys are superior to girls—sometimes even to the extent of being stronger and wiser than their mothers!  As Landes said, this is not only harmful to their mothers and sisters, and future wives and daughters, but to the boys themselves.  Here's an article I ran into recently that addresses a related problem, and has the lovely title, Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him.)

On the bright side, as men see the economic potential and power of their wives, they often come to respect them more, and then see the value in educating their daughters.  On the other hand, there's a clear risk that they will only see the economic value, and women will find themselves further enslaved, working at a job, running the household as usual, and funding their husbands' bad habits as well.

Half the Sky rightly celebrates the efforts of women worldwide to address the problem of their own oppression, but it will take both men and women, working together, to address the heart of the tragedy.

I'll leave my second, and quite different, take-away from Half the Sky for another post.  I was going to add some more quotes, but as they, too, are on a different subject, so that will make a third post—a record for one book review, I think.