Ordinary People by Judith Guest

Ordinary People is the story of a young man who is returning to his life from a suicide attempt. His family is an upscale 1970s clan that firmly believes such things don't happen to them. Thus, while all parties involved want to return to normal, it's absolutely impossible, and trying only makes the issues worse

Our young man, Conrad, flounders all over the place until he meets a new therapist, Tyrone Berger. Dr. Berger wants Conrad to do what his family can't--face the issue that drove him to be suicidal in the first place.

While Conrad is told he must address the past in order to move into the future, his parents continue to pretend that nothing is wrong. Except that his father wants to cheat on a wife he may no longer love and his mother can't deal with the idea that she has no emotional attachment to her family.

This book could not have a more appropriate title. Everyone in the book is similar to anyone you might have met. They're all ordinary people, living lives that we all face, and in the end we either deal with the problems or we fall apart. That's Guest's lesson for the reader, and it's a good one.

As a book about how a family approaches their issues, this book is very we done. The reactions of the parents to Conrad feel natural based on their personalities. Conrad's school mates sound realistic (for a thirty year old book) and some of the issues he has to face--exams, his future, girls--are timeless. Dr. Berger is ahead of his time in relation to the material presented (mental illness) and it's nice to see that Guest feels his approach--while probably flawed by today's standards--is the right one.

Guest firmly rejects the idea of burying a family's problems as a relic of a past age. It's the age my parents lived in--one where things looked good on the outside but held demons on the inside that were forbidden to talk about with anyone who was not part of the inner circle. I'd be a fool o think that we have moved past that as a society, but I think we're better now than we were then.

In that respect, Ordinary People is a valuable tool for exposing the hypocrisy and damage that hiding things can do. I think we can all learn a lesson from this book in terms of truly expressing ourselves, even if it might cause some hurt in the short run. Even if the message is a bit dated, there's nothing wrong in having it reinforced.

Where this book has a problem, however, is that the family involved is anything but ordinary. They are definitely well-to-do. These are folks who golf and play tennis and can afford to go to Europe to run away from their troubles. It's hard for me to have sympathy for them because I cannot relate to them as people. I may understand the struggle a family has with mental illness in the family, but to really care, I need people who can't just run off to another country on vacation if they need a break. I want to care about Conrad, but I have a feeling his dad will get him a job somewhere if it comes to it, and that means my concern for him is diminished.

(Is this a bit classist of me? Probably. But I'm from a family of people who never could afford to stop looking over their shoulder, so I just can't relate to those whose idea of cutting back is less dinners at a five start restaurant.)

I also feel like things proceed just a bit too neatly. Plot elements work just a bit too neatly for my taste to get to Guest's desired conclusion. Conrad just eventually falls into Dr. Berger's line and then his life is better. I just don't see real life working like that, and since this is a book that's supposed to relate to real life, I found that to be a flaw I couldn't quite shake.

Ordinary People is not a book I'd normally read. I read this in one of my many failed attempts to be a part of a reading group. ( It's weird that while I read all the time, reading something someone else asks me to is sometimes really hard for me.) However, I can see its appeal, even if the work is definitely dated. Guest's characters are struggling to admit there's an elephant in the room, just like we all do. And just like the rest of us, how Guest presents this issue is flawed but she does the best that she can do. Overall, I think she does a pretty good job.

At this point, I think Ordinary People only has a limited appeal because the people portrayed are very much products of the time in which it was written. If you like books that deal with real problems, however, I'd give Ordinary People a try. It's definitely a relic, but a useful one, I think, for the right reader.

Teaching Books: What Great Teachers Do Differently by Todd Whitaker

[I'm not going to try to review the books I'm reading as part of my transition to becoming an educator. However, I do want to at least do summaries, both for myself and if anyone's interested. Consider these mini-reviews, if you will.]

Another book recommended by my former boss. Mr. Whitaker puts the focus on 14 areas that he feels a teacher can have an impact on in his or her classroom. Instead of stressing the negative, Whitaker talks about what the teacher personally can do to make things better. This includes shunning those who only are pessimistic/sarcastic in the faculty lounge and meetings, never letting students feel like you are negative, and approaching things from a constructive, rather than destructive perspective.

While acknowledging the challenges teachers face, Whitaker argues that looking internally rather than blaming externally, can lead to positive change. There is a strong sense of personal responsibility, from dealing with students and parents to setting expectations in the classroom. Approaching problems with a "how can I make this better for all" rather than "what can I do t make this easier on me" attitude is the key, Whitaker says, to being a great teacher.

Last point of note is Whitaker argues for teaching to the best and raising everyone up, rather than just teaching to average. He also mentions being careful not to single out students, even for good things.

Teaching Books: What's Worth Fighting for Out There by Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan

[I'm not going to try to review the books I'm reading as part of my transition to becoming an educator. However, I do want to at least do summaries, both for myself and if anyone's interested. Consider these mini-reviews, if you will.]

Recommended by my former boss, this book discusses the need for schools--and in particular, teachers and principals--to reach out into the community and partner with parents, students, and others to make education work. It argues that the more a school isolates itself, the harder it is to make sure that learning is happening, and the easier it is for outside sources to make decisions that ultimately do not help make teachers better or schools more effective.

There is a strong emphasis on making learning student-centered, bringing hope to those who need it, and refusing the idea of doing things just because that's the way it's always been done.

Part of a series of books by the same authors.

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

A long, long time ago, I started listening to this as an audio book and remembered wishing I'd have finished it. I took advantage of a business trip to read the hard copy I picked up a little while back.

Krakauer is best known for his work on outdoors books, and if this book is any indication I can see why. Turning his sights on America's best known home-grown religion, Krakauer weaves a modern story of incest, polygamy, and murder with the founding of the Mormon religion. The former is tightly linked to the latter, as Krakauer makes clear.

Mormonism, founded on the imagination of a dubious man with a large sexual appetite, Joseph Smith, has always had a violent history as it tried to find a niche in American society. Moving from New York to Missouri to its eventual home in Utah, the fledgling Mormon religion fought its neighbors constantly and used a patter of lies to stay alive. Only when it became obvious that it could not survive alone, Krakauer notes, does the Mormon faith try to mainstream itself.

But those roots of individuality that set the Mormons apart never left the religion permanently, and splinter groups try to carry on under the old ways. The trouble with a faith that allows you to talk directly to God is that anyone can get their own revelations.

This is where the murder case comes in. The perpetrators of the crime took to the extreme views of hard-line Mormonism and used them to exact revenge against a woman who scorned them and her infant. Similar tales pepper the pages of this book, as various self-proclaimed prophets use the voice of God to do terrible things to other people. Krakauer uses interviews, news reports, and historical sources to tell the stories, many of which would not reach outsider ears otherwise.

The modern murder case is by no means new. Krakauer goes back into time to show us the series of conflicts the Mormons had at almost every stop, with the largest being the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Mormons, disguised as Native Americans, butchered a party bound for California and then scapegoated one member for the crime. As per usual, this was all done in the name of God, though clearly it was the act of selfish, evil men trying to hold on to their claims.

There's a song whose title I can't remember that talks about "do it in the name of Heaven" and that's very appropriate here. Smith adds polygamy to cover his adulterous affairs and starts getting revelations about those who oppose the idea, right down to his wife. Ron, the co-killer of the main murder story, gets all sorts of revelations telling him to "remove" those who oppose his decisions. Dreams telling people to get spiritual wives who can't even drive a car abound. It's sickening to read at points, and Krakauer is unflinching in his presentation. All in all, the history of the Mormon Church doesn't have a lot going for it.

But before you start to dismiss Mormonism as a crock, consider this--how many radical Christians twist the words of the Bible for their own ends and claim to hear god? Is Pat Robertson and his insane proclamations representative of protestants everywhere? Krakauer warns to be cautious before passing judgment, as the belief system of just about every religion can be seen as fanciful to those on the outside.

Krakauer brings up a further point on this score--Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad have the advantage of starting their faiths before the age of extensive written records. Would they be just as derided if they started in the 19th Century, as Smith did?

This is not to say that Krakauer finds the Mormon origin story credible--it's pretty obvious he does not--but I appreciate how he takes care to remind people to be be careful how they are judging those who follow a different belief path from themselves.

In the end, Krakauer's book is a condemnation of all extremists in any religion. He just uses the mirror of a few radical Mormons to do it. This theme would be the same if he were writing about Jerry Fallwell or any other fundamentalist from any other sect. After all, is the desire of the Mormons to conceal their cloudy past any different from that of the Catholic Church?

What makes Mormons so fascinating, both to Krakauer and those on the outside, if its habits are not so far off from other religions? I think it's partly because of the way the religion is still evolving. We can't go back and see the meetings at Nicaea, but we can watch as a bigoted church opens its doors to African Americans. Flawed or not, it gives us a window into the ever-changing nature of faith. After all, millions join the Mormon church--it's one of the fastest growing sects. There has to be an appeal, and perhaps its the idea of structured individuality that appeals to so many and that keeps those harmed by the religion coming back for more.

It's also true, however, that that support of individual faith is exactly what causes Ron and Dan to kill, allows eighty year old men to take teenagers as brides, and puts those at odds with true believers right in the cross hairs. As with America's peculiar culture in general, the Mormon faith has limitless potential for both good and evil--it's all in how its used.

Maybe that's why we're drawn into learning more--by analyzing Mormons, we can analyze ourselves at a safe distance, whether it is about our faith, our independence or our capacity to harm.

If you are looking for a history of the Mormon church that is more than names and dates and gets into the heart of the matter, or if you like reading true crime stories, you'll find Under the Banner of Heaven to be a great fit. It may not be written on golden plates, but at least you don't have to read it out of a hat!

Stirring the Pot

I haven't done anything with this blog for awhile, partly because I haven't been reading a lot of what I like to jokingly refer to as "book books." I'm planning to change that here in 2010, so I wanted to let anyone who's still reading know that The Book Stew is back on the burner!

Look for some new content soon!

Amerigo The Man Who Gave His Name To America by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

This was something from the days when I was reading the New York Time Book Review every week, that I just got around to fairly recently.

There's definitely a trend towards writing contemporary-style biographies of figures from the past, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Jesus. They feature modern scholarly research, which is good, but also an annoying tendency to try and place the ancient world in modern terms, a trend that might help sell a few more copies but frequently jars on my nerves when I'm looking for facts rather than analogs.

As a result, I almost gave this book right back to the library when the first words from the author's computer (I started to say "pen" but no one hand-writes things anymore) were describing how Vespucci "was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity." It's a very provocative opening to a book that is startlingly conservative once it gets past the introduction, trying hard to stick to the limited facts of the subject's life while also providing enough material to fill a roughly 200 page book.

As far the research goes, there is nothing at all wrong with Fernandez-Armesto's work. He has taken great pains to exhaust all possible stores of knowledge on Vespucci and does not shy away from saying when the record is incomplete. His biographic detail of the books supposedly written by Amerigo during his lifetime is simply amazing and make this worth the read to anyone interested in the subject of early European literature.

But where the book falls down a bit, at least for me, is in the biography of Vespucci himself. He's a shadowy figure at best, who appears to have gotten really lucky and managed to find a way to sail to the New World, then come back and write some things convincingly enough that a publisher turned him into a scandal-free Christopher Columbus. Soon, people are naming continents after him and the rest is history. Except that, as Fernandez-Armesto notes by the end of the book, history has mostly forgotten Amerigo, and it's now too late to try and put the pieces together comprehensively.

As a result, this book ends up failing as a true biography because there simply is not enough material to go around. Fernandez-Armesto does the best he can with what he has, but the bold claims of Vespucci being both pimp and magus ring false in the text itself, where the cautious scholar takes over from promotional author and the book tries to sluce out the details of Vespucci's life, such as can be found. I am actually greatful for the lack of speculation and do not wish to fault him for it. But because the facts are slim, we end up with a lot of suggestions to think of Amerigo as a modern-styled man looking to climb the business ladder, a philosophy I don't think held as much sway in the 15th Century. I'd have rather let the facts, such as they are, speak for themselves and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

The real reason to read this book, and I'm pretty sure this is not the the author's main intention, is to show just how messed up the literary industry has always been. As book publishing grew in popularity, the desire to fictionalize the accounts of explorers grew. Fernandez-Armesto skewers travel writers in general (take THAT. bill Bryson!) for embellishing on the truth, but he is particularly hard on the early publishers for adding accounts of cannibalism, demon-like women, monsters, and all sorts of other fabrications to help the books move copies.

The chapters about Vespucchi's books and their probably inaccuracies fairly sing in comparison to those about the sketchy facts of the subject's life. Fernandez-Armesto is completely in his element dispelling the myths found in the travel writings of Vespucchi, including at least one fictional voyage, which is probably cribbed entirely out of poor Columbus's works.

If there's a problem with "Amerigo," it's that by the end, I came out convinced that Vespucchi himself is a charlitan fraud who happened to be a part of the merchant group that backed Columbus and used his knowledge of the voyages to forge accounts of his own derring-do. I do not see any compelling evidence that Vespucchi ever left Europe. While I do agree that he wrote at least some of the material in his books, I just don't see anything distinctive enough to be original. What I do see is a lot of plot summary, just like when I took a class with a Professor whose idea of a "test" was to see if you could re-write a 200 page book in 10 pages.

It is unlikely that we'll ever know the truth about Amerigo Vespucci. Fernandez-Armesto tries extremely hard to help us, but there's just not enough to go on. As a result, I'm left a bit cold about the subject at hand, especially since there appears to be so much deception (both publically and perhaps personally as well) in Vespucci's life. Unlike "Galileo's Daughter", which had similar factual scarcity but two believable protagonists, "Amerigo" features a man who never truly succeeded and ended up President of the United having his name applied to a land that really didn't belong to those who claimed it. And if that isn't proof that America was actually named accurately, I don't know what is.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

This is a book that's probably better known for its author, who died at the hands of the Nazis, than the plot, which was to be a huge, five volume undertaking about the Nazi occupation of France. Why a biological Jew was writing a book about life in occupied France instead of getting the hell out of France is a mystery, one that probably will never be answered. While her husband, who was also killed, tried desperately to save them, Nemirovsky seemed fated to passing away.

Ironically, her last, unfinished book, uncovered after decades, seemed to be more favorable to the Germans who would kill her than her own countrymen. This is probably partly due to hoping to stay alive and partly because she was not a native of France, and probably had some resentment of the natives.

At any rate, this book is really two books--an introduction to all the characters she'd intended to use, and also a second book, more readable than the first, concentrating on a small part of them, and in particular the relationship between a German officer and a French woman who does not particularly care for her missing husband or mother-in-law.

The main problem I have with this one is that, in wishing to respect the dead author, the editor made no attempt, especially in the first half, to make the book more legible. There are a lot of places where "he said" and "she said" dominate, and with so many characters passing through, I frequently had no idea who was speaking.

Even in the second part, this was a problem. There are also a few times where it's clear there was placeholder sections, and even a few, "this is what I'm going to do with X" passages. For some people, this makes it an impossible book for them to read. That's a fair argument, and I don't fault them for it. I fumbled with the first half for quite awhile, and considered giving up myself. The dense text and obvious need for revision do tend to make this something you read more for historical purposes than for pure enjoyment.

It also doesn't help that Nemirovsky appears to be a tell, don't show type of writer. There's a lot of times where a lengthy piece of text stands in where dialog or a short scene could have done better. I haven't read any of her other work, so I don't know if this is a trait or just a quirk of being unedited, but for someone who really prefers the characters to just talk a lot, her endless scenes of telling us what her cast was intending, doing, or failing to do really just didn't grab me.

All in all, I feel like this is a book better suited for those looking for a historical oddity than a good story. It seems like the popularity of the work derives more from the tragedy of the writer's life than the quality of the work itself. Though I know it got a lot of buzz at the time, I just don't think this one is worth it unless you are looking it at from a cultural standpoint instead of a literary standpoint.

I appreciate those who want to read it as such, and I am glad Nemirovsky's family was able to get some closure with its publication. But it's obviously not something that was intended in this form for publication. I just don't really enjoy reading work that wasn't meant for/ready for publication--that's not what I want out of my fiction as a general rule. I read far too much non-fiction to analyze my fiction from a cultural standpoint. If you read fiction for fiction's sake, I think you're probably best served elsewhere. If you want to see a writer struggle with writing a narrative that expresses her frustrations but tries to keep the "winning" side happy, then give this a shot, but be prepared to read a story that wasn't even at workshop quality by the time it had to be abandoned.