Imagine the Power of Habit: The science of science-y self-help

Probably the two books I was most excited about reading this summer were Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit and Jonah Lehrer's Imagine. I borrowed the Power of Habit ebook from the library, but I had bought the Imagine ebook off the Barnes n' Noble website -- and was then quite disappointed when it turned out that Mr. Lehrer had fabricated some of the quotes in his best-selling book and subsequently resigned from his position at the New Yorker. So in the end, I didn't read Imagine (and eventually managed to get a refund).

But why were these my books of choice? I had never really thought about it, beyond the superficial -- they were bestsellers and they sounded interesting. Doesn't that seem like enough? But then I read a really interesting critique of Imagine on the New Republic website, and it flipped my whole perspective of these intellectual, science-y self-help books that have become immensely popular the last couple of years. In his review, Issac Chotiner of TNR writes, "Imagine is really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in 'studies' and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty."

I saw another article about Lehrer, post-scandal, that was discussing this same issue. Eric Garland essentially says on his blog that we, the reading public, have become enamored with these sorts of easy answers to difficult questions, which is what has funded this trend. I personally thought The Secret was a little ridiculous -- believe away your cancer! -- but when you add scientific studies and whatnot to the mix, it suddenly seems like these books will allow you to grasp creativity, success and your habits, and even better, grab hold of them. When I think about it, this too sounds a little ridiculous -- these concepts are not that simple -- but I suppose we all want some easy solution, myself included.

Interestingly, when I look back at my blog posts on both The Secret and Outliers, I noted that both books seem to ignore the hard work that has to take place in order to be successful. In discussing Outliers, I wrote, "While [Gladwell's] theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day." And about The Secret, I said, "I think my biggest issue with [it] is that it ignores the work and actions that have to take place for anything to happen, much less to achieve success. I mean, I can visualize a best-selling novel all day – I can believe it with every fiber of my being – but I can't attract those 80,000 words. Maybe I can attract an agent and a good review from Michiko Kakutani and an appearance on Oprah, but I can't attract the creation of a book – I will actually have to sit down every day and write it and there's no magical formula for that." And even The Power of Habit downplays the work changing a habit takes.

 

Hmm, so where does that leave us? Still struggling with the complexity of trying to be great, creative and successful. Alas. I suppose this is why everyone wants the magic pill.

Power of Habit: Why we do what we do (#15)

The title of the Power of Habit says it all – habits are powerful, and  author Charles Duhigg explores how habits affect individuals, companies and societies, and how they can be changed. “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, [they] have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security and happiness.” (p.11) While a lot of Amazon readers found the book to be redundant and many were disappointed that it’s not actually a self-help book, I found all of the anecdotes and research about habits to be fascinating. So  fascinating, in fact, that I’ve already repeated a number of Duhigg's anecdotes to others.

In the book, a habit loop seems a pretty simple thing, composed of three things: a cue, a routine and a reward. What separates a habit (a must-do) from a routine (should-do) is a craving. The person has to want the reward badly enough so that when he/she sees the cue, he/she will act automatically in terms of the habit that’s already been created. So, for example, you may not actually want the donut in the break room, but when you see it, your mind automatically associates it with the reward (sugar high!) and the craving drives you to eat it. If you want to change this habit, you have to really look at your behavior and figure out the cue and reward. (All of this is pretty hard work, which I thought was understressed -- in the appendix, one of the researchers notes that some simple habits, like nail biting and stuttering, can be changed using this Simplified Habit Reversal, but those with more serious habits, like smoking, gambling and depression, need cognitive behavior therapy, which requires more a intensive intervention.)

The first section of the Power of Habit was the most convincing -- it was pretty easy to understand and recognize how an individual's habit loop works. I thought the book went a little off the rails in the second section -- which examined a company's habits -- and I was completely unconvinced in the third section, about social movements. I didn't buy that the things he called habits were, in fact, habits. (In regards to companies, he talked about how truces between departments allowed them to get on with work, but it seemed to be more about relationships; in terms of the civil rights movement, his examples seemed more to reflect relationships and peer pressure.)

But the book ends on an interesting note, about how the brain activity of, say, compulsive gamblers and people who suffer from sleep terrors (or those on certain medications) look the same, and yet we don’t hold them equally accountable for their actions. Is that right? On the one hand, we have this socially accepted view of the individual, who is completely responsible for his/her conscious choices – but the point of the book is that the primitive parts of the brain take over when it comes to habits. It made me think, which is all that I really ask. So, despite some flaws, I can say that I did enjoy the Power of Habit, and I would definitely recommend it.

Not Without My Daughter: Scary, very scary (#14)

When I was in elementary school, an unremarkable woman named Betty Mahmoody was married to a crazy person. He also happened to be Muslim, originally hailing from Iran. For reasons that aren't explained until nearly the end, this man convinces Betty that he, she and their young daughter should take a trip to Iran to see the family, and when they get there, he goes through a complete personality shift and tries to keep them there, as his chattel, forever. This is the basic premise of Not Without My Daughter, the bestseller published in 1987.

It's a pretty scary book -- and not one to read right before you get married, as I did. Betty goes on what she thinks is a two-week holiday to Tehran, only to learn once the two weeks are up that her husband plans to keep them there. Since women have absolutely no rights there, there's nothing she can do about it -- she doesn't have the right to travel without her husband, she doesn't have any rights to her daughter, and her husband has the right to do whatever he pleases with the both of them, including beating them in the street if he so chooses. As she says early on, "I tried to deal with the realization that I was married to a madman and trapped in a country where the laws decreed that he was my absolute master" (68). Betty decides that she will get herself out of Iran, somehow -- but only if she can take her daughter, too, providing the title of the book.

It was a quick, enjoyable read, though more than once I found myself looking at my fiance, thinking, Do I really know this man? Because that's the real issue in Not Without My Daughter. My impression was that Mahmoody primarily blamed Iran and Islam for what happened to her and while I understand it, given what she went through and how personal it felt, I thought this blame was a little heavy-handed in the book. Because let's face it, there are people being held against their will in America per directives from so-called religions -- just last week, there was the Vanity Fair teaser about Scientology auditioning wives for Tom Cruise and the punishment Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi suffered when she failed to please him. Then there are the FLDS people. My point is, these things can actually happen to you in America, too; Mahmoody's problem wasn't that she was married to a Muslim, it was that she was married to a crazy person. And she knew he was crazy long before she ever agreed to go to Iran with him. It's just that the problem spiraled way out of control when she went to a country where he was legally and culturally allowed to be that crazy, and hopping a fence in the middle of the night wouldn't cut it as an escape. But I often felt that in the novel, Mahmoody wrongfully blamed the religion and the country more than she blamed the individual, her husband, who had been severely depressed and acting strange when they were living in the US.

I haven't seen the movie version of Not Without My Daughter -- released in 1991 and starring Sally Field (who, incidentally, I once saw in a drugstore in Vancouver). And I probably won't -- the trailer looks horribly dated, and according to Wikipedia, the film got mixed reviews and was criticized for its racist characterization of Iranians and their culture. There's apparently also a 2002 documentary called Without My Daughter, telling the husband's side of the story.

The Diary of Anne Frank: A classic and yet not literature (#7)

Sex, drugs, tulips and Rembrandt: Those are the words I had always associated with Amsterdam, and not being much into prostitution, pot or the art of the Dutch Golden Age, I had never had the urge to visit. But then I had a very straight-laced friend who went there and absolutely loved it, and I began to reassess my position. I resolved to go, one day -- but it never came near the top 5 on my travel list, so there Amsterdam stayed, as a one-day-I'll-go trip, joining locales like India and China, places I seriously intend to get to, but someday. (And cue the Black Eyed Peas...)

Fast-forward about a decade: One day, someday, arrived. This past spring, during tulip season, we took a long weekend and journeyed to Amsterdam. Our goal was to see all the major sights, which included, of course, the Anne Frank House.

Like all good American schoolchildren, I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a kid, though I don't remember anything specific about the experience, just a generally favorable impression. So, I decided to read the book again. Now I realize why you should read it when you're a kid, and only when you're a kid: You can appreciate her experience without question. Because as an adult and a more critical reader, the diary presents some icky issues.

Anne Frank was German, but her family had moved to Holland when she was quite young to escape the Nazis' growing influence. Her father gifted her with the famous diary on her 13th birthday, in June 1942, shortly before the family went into hiding. She decides to call her diary Kitty -- she declares that it will be her one true friend, which she feels she doesn’t have. But for that, she seems to be a pretty carefree kid, and she doesn't hold much back in her writing. The family went into hiding in early July; they were shortly joined by another family, the van Pels (van Daan in the diary), and a dentist friend, Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel). Anne spent the next two years chronicling their time in the Secret Annex. Her last diary entry comes on Aug. 1, 1944; the police came to arrest them three days later.

That description sounds very serious, and the situation  of course was very serious, but the truth is, the diary for the most part is not. In fact, as I was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I couldn't help but think of the opening moments of the film Eat, Pray, Love. In voiceover, the character Elizabeth (Julia Roberts) says: "I have a friend, Deborah, a psychologist, who was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees, boat people, who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah was daunted by the task. These Cambodians had suffered genocide, starvation, relatives murdered before their eyes, years in refugee camps, harrowing boat trips to the West…how could she relate to their suffering, how could she help these people? So guess what all these people wanted to talk about with my friend Deborah, the psychologist. It was all, I met this guy in the refugee camp, I thought he really loved me but when we got separated on the boat, he took up with my cousin, but now he says he really me, he keeps calling me, they’re married now – what should I do? I still love him. This is how we are."

And this is how the diary is.

As a piece of history and a record of what a certain group of people went through during World War II, Anne Frank's diary is irreplaceable. And yet, the diary is hardly at all about the war or the Secret Annex. Rather, it captures this unique moment in time of this young life. While it's well-written, as a piece of literature, it's not great -- it's childish. Which is not surprising as it's the innermost thoughts of a burgeoning teenager. In truth, Anne has a bit of an attitude, and I didn't find her to be terribly likeable. She's constantly complaining about being reprimanded, and she goes on and on about how she doesn't love her mother and how much she dislikes the van Daans and Dussel. The diary eventually shifts to her sexual awakening, which, being without any options, manifests as a growing attraction for Peter van Daan, who was a couple of years older than she was. As a teenger's diary, it's all fine, but it's hardly War and Peace.

But the thing is, Anne Frank's diary was never supposed to be literature -- and this is where it starts to get icky. Anne Frank wrote her diary for herself,  and it was obviously VERY personal; while she intended to publish something after the war, it wasn’t this. But she didn't survive the war to write the novel she intended; in the end, her father, the only survivor of the group, decided to publish her recovered diary. And it begs the question: Should we be reading it?

I don't know what the answer is.

Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: a real-life Hunger Games (#1)

It took me a good three weeks to read this book -- and I was forced to hurry things up because the library automatically grabs e-books back -- but that was mostly about work. I quite enjoyed Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, so much so that I put his other book Devil in the White City on my 2012 reading list.

While I don't read many World World II-era boooks, I feel like most of the general interest tomes (along with movies about the time) tend to concentrate on the actual war (Pearl Harbor, Atonement, Inglorious Basterds, Slaughterhouse-Five, The English Patient, Band of Brothers). But In the Garden of Beasts takes a different tack: Larson concentrates on an overlooked period of time, that of 1933-1934, the lead-up to the war. The book is a biography of William Dodd, a professor and historian from Chicago, who unexpectedly ends up as the ambassador to Germany, even though he's not really qualified for diplomatic service, especially to a nation undergoing such significant changes. Although his wife and son accompany him, the book is really about Dodd and his 20-something daughter Martha and their experiences in Berlin their first year out of four. As Larson writes in the first page of prologue, "That first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.” The story of the Dodds is really the common story of innocents entering the lion's den and having to figure out how to survive -- in that respect, In the Garden of Beasts ain't all that far off from Harry Potter or The Hunger Games...except that they were real people facing actual evil.

But, as Larson points out, there are very few heroes in non-fiction, and neither Martha nor Dodd get anywhere near that label. When they get there in 1933, Hitler has just been appointed Chancellor because President Hindenberg and his political allies think they'll be able to keep him under control. As we all know, that was a really poor calculation, because in the end, it turned out he was the one in control -- because he was the one willing to go to extraordinary and brutal lengths to maintain power. Hitler and his party spend those early years getting the German people in line, condensing their own power and bit by bit dismantling the rights of Germany's Jews. While other countries express "concern," especially when their own nationals are assaulted in Germany by fanatical youth, no one really appreciates the true nature of what is happening -- except for Dodd. But because he's a poor man in a rich boys' State Department and no one wants to take on Germany's "national" problems at this point, Dodd basically gets pushed aside. That actually makes for In the Garden of Beasts' biggest flaws -- in some respects, I felt like the novel never moved past an introduction, or to use film parlance, into the second act. He spends a lot of time observing but never really does much.

Martha, on the other hand, is a doer, but she's not the most likeable of girls. She is self-absorbed and naïve (but felt herself to be worldly); she seems to be someone who cannot be content with what she has, and she likes trouble and being the center of attention, which is why she flits from lover to lover, including Gestapo head Rudolf Diels and a KGB agent named Boris. Apparently she liked being with the married Diels because she enjoyed being known as the woman who slept with the devil -- I think that says it all.

In the Garden of Beasts essentially ends with the Night of the Long Knives, a deadly purge in 1934 that really consolidates Hitler's power. Although Dodd and his family stay in Berlin for a total of 4.5 years, the book basically jumps from this point to 1937, when Dodd leaves his position and without having accomplished much. In that respect, it's sort of a sad ending -- Dodd wanted to be an ambassador, hoping he'd have a lot of free time in which to finish his masterpiece, the Old South, but he doesn't get that in Germany and he doesn't live long enough to really even see the war. 

Despite my feeling that In the Garden of Beasts never really started, I quite liked the in-depth look into 1933-1934 Germany. Those years laid the foundation for what would happen later, and besides being an in-depth snapshot of a certain place at a certain time, it's important look at the poor decisions and apathy that would lead to the deaths of millions of people across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Malled: could've, should've been a lot better (#36)

When I went home over Thanksgiving, I checked out Caitlin Kelly's Malled from the library, even though it wasn't on my revised 2011 reading list. For some reason I'd really wanted to read this book - it was about a freelance journalist who ends up working at a mall when the global financial meltdown slows her business to a trickle, something I can relate to - but I didn't want to buy the e-book, mostly because the reviews on Amazon weren't kind. This might actually be the first time I've ever seen a book have more one-star reviews than five-star reviews. I probably should have listened.

Malled had so much potential (and apparently a lot of hype to go with it) but the result wasn't great – mostly because the author made a massive mistake in focusing the book on herself when it was supposed to be about the plight of the American retail worker or even the experience of working in a store. The more I think about it, the more I realize this book is a complete mess. It’s repetitive, contradictory, filled with ego and doesn’t seem to know what kind of book it is.

The author is clearly looking for validation, but interestingly, she only sees one level of it. In the book, Kelly talks about wanting to work in the mall, hoping that after her freelancing disappointments, she'll find people who appreciate her skills. This is an obviously stated purpose. (Though it doesn't happen, which seems to be her main gripe about retail.) But as you read, you also see that Kelly herself is looking for validation by writing this book, and she doesn't seem to be aware of it. She appears to be a woman with a massive chip on her shoulder, who thinks the world is against her - she often talks about her rich upbringing, the famous people she's interviewed (Queen Elizabeth, omg!), and her journalistic skills...but then there are also these moments when she tells about getting fired from her last job (for not being productive), that her former coworkers weren't interested in socializing with her, that people often find her cold and standoffish, or that she feels unappreciated (and then slighted) when she should be totally appreciated. It was hard to reconcile and as a result, I thought she was hard to like as a narrator. In this respect, in the disconnect between what someone says and what they seem to do, I thought this book resembled Marina Pasternak's The Best of Friends, the tell-all book about her longtime friendship with Martha Stewart.

Usually by this point in a review, I've already talked about the plot. But Malled really has no plot; I don't know what to say about it other than it's the tale of a 50-year-old woman outside of New York City who decides to go work at the North Face in an upscale mall. It's not one of those true-life experiential career books like Waiter Rant or Kitchen Confidential where you walk away with a good idea of what it's like to work in that profession - despite the subtitle "My Unintentional Career in Retail." I don't know anything more about the day-to-day work involved in retail after reading Malled. (And perhaps Kelly doesn't either, not really - she only worked one shift a week for a little over two years.) The book jacket (and the author's obnoxious Amazon biography, which I would bet good money she herself wrote) suggests Malled is going to be a little more hard-hitting, exposing the inner workings of the retail industry, but frankly, it's not that either. And that's because she relies on a lot of anecdotes, from maybe 30 fellow workers, to prove her "facts," but as a journalist, she should already know that anecdotes do not prove anything. With the millions of retail workers out there in America alone, you could pretty much find anyone to say anything. A lot of the anecdotes are sort of stupid, too – boiled down, it’s “retail is hard,” “the economy made professionals go into retail and they’re sad about it,” and “working for the right company can be great.” I've never worked in retail, and I think I already knew that.

I could keep going, detailing the many contradictions in this book, but I think I've trashed this book enough. It was most disappointing because it could have been and should have been better.

Jamestown Residents Ate One Another (and other tidbits from The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown, #25)

I read Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith's account of Sea Venture shipwreck at Bermuda in 1609 and its effect on Jamestown at the end of June, and thoroughly enjoyed it. For the most part, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is pretty readable - it's stuffed with facts but with the exception of a slightly slow first chapter, it rolls along well.

I read this book as part of a larger research project that I'm still working on, and feel like I could probably recite the details of every page for you - but I'll resist the temptation. The basic story is that in 1609, the Jamestown colony is floundering, and after a massive PR campaign, the Virginia company puts together nine ships filled with new colonists and supplies. During the trip, the ships get caught in a hurricane and the lead ship, the Sea Venture, gets separated and eventually hits upon Bermuda. Although it was known as the Isle of Devils, the passengers and crew soon discover that the uninhabited island can more than meet their needs. In the end, the shipwreck survivors manage to build two new ships and about a year, they reach Jamestown, much to everyone's shock, and find the settlement on the brink of devastation. Things had been so bad that during the previous winter, the colonists had resorting to eating their dead - hence the title of this post. Essentially, through a series of coincidences - or miracles, as the colonists believed - they survive and then manage to save the colony...which of course is very important for those of us later born in America. (OMG, without the shipwreck, I could be Italian! Or Dutch!)

But all kidding aside, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is a pretty good book. It could totally give Cleopatra or Unbroken or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the other historical non-fiction tomes I was planning to read this year (and haven't yet) a run for their money.

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

Sorry, I lied when I said we were talking about Sweet Valley High next. I forgot about these two books, both of which I mostly enjoyed when I read them at the beginning of the summer but now am grasping to remember.

I read Michelle Moran's Nefertiti first, inspired to check out her other books after the fabulousness which was Madame Tussaud. I don't know why I chose this one, her first, of all her Ancient Egypt-set books though it may have been the only immediately available at the library. Nefertiti, as the name implies, is about the famous Egyptian queen and fictionally explores her cunning rise to power through the eyes of her younger sister Mutny. Nefertiti becomes a second wife to Pharaoh Akhenaten and then basically struggles to outwit and overcome Kiya, his first wife (and the presumed mother to King Tut), and keep Akhenaten's outrageous ideas under control; Mutny, on the other hand, would just like out of the palace intrigues and to live a peaceful life tending her garden. Although some Amazon reviews criticized it for having thin characters, I found Nefertiti entertaining enough for a summer read, though clearly Moran's writing style has, not suprisingly, significantly improved since this first book.

After Nefertiti, I tackled Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd had on my bookshelf for ages. I'd wanted to read it after my mom had told me about hearing him speak at a business conference; the topic had apparently been on the part of the book that explores the hours of practice (10,000) it takes to be successful in any given field. Based on that, I expected that the book's message would be about the link between hard work and success, but that's not really what it was about at all. It was more about how people are randomly, statistically chosen for success and it doesn't have all that much to do with talent. For example, if you want to be a successful hockey player, you'd better have been born in January because kids are filtered into gifted programs at an early age and the hockey cut-off is December 31 - meaning that the January kids are likely bigger (being older) and from there, the advantages of being in gifted programs accrue and once you're slated into a track, it's hard to get out of it.

I think the premise is supposed to be uplifting in that there's no such thing as extraordinary individuals (uplifting for those who are not) but rather success is a combination of various societal factors that you have no control over. But personally, I found the whole thing depressing. If success is based on uncontrollable random elements and things set in motion before you were born, why bother trying? While his theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day. Still though, the anecdotes were fascinating, and I've repeated one or two in conversation.

Admittedly though, I was hooked to Outliers from page one, mostly because of a random (!) personal connection. The first story is about immigrants from Roseto, which is the little town in southern Italy that my great-grandfather was from. In the book, Gladwell tells how a bunch of Rosetians moved to Pennsylvania, to a small town they appropriately named Roseto, and a couple of researchers discovered that in the 50s and 60s they had an abnormally low rate of heart disease, which ended up being because of strong community bonds. Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, he chose to emigrate to a different Pennsylvania town, Philadelphia - where he died of a heart attack in the mid-1950s. :(

The Bible as Literature (#12)

In my ever-ongoing quest to catch up this blog, we're yet again discussing a book I read months ago. Usually I've skipped blogging about the books I read with my ninth-grade English students, having already talked about them to death, but this concept of the Bible as literature has stayed with me and I am still kinda awed by what was in there.

Admittedly, I had dreaded reading Genesis with them - I am not at all religious (though raised Christian) and I just had no desire to wade into this pc minefield. I also just didn't know anything about it...what was I supposed to teach them? Some of the books I was able to choose this year but Genesis (with an Exodus option) was one of the three required texts, so there was no squirming out of it. So instead, I put it off as long as possible. :)

But in the end, I found it to be really incredible - and like The Odyssey, probably appreciated its brilliance far more than my students did. Because for a book written some 2,500 years ago, it's pretty darn sophisticated...and actually gets more sophisticated as the text goes on.

At the beginning, you can clearly see that Genesis was not written by one person and the text contains inconsistencies, as there are two different accounts right off the bat (chapters one and two) describing how God created an as-yet-unnamed man and woman. I know there are some people who believe that the Bible is literal truth (and have developed convoluted explanations dismissing these inconsistencies), but these issues don't bother me. Although Moses is traditionally credited with the authorship of the first five books of the Bible, scholars now usually attribute the writing of Genesis to three main different sources so discrepancies makes sense.

More than anything, what I was impressed with was the structure. The original book didn't have chapters and verses (those were inserted starting in the 1200s) and yet there's still a really clear order. Despite 50 chapters, there's only six main stories in Genesis - Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph (although I think you could argue that Isaac doesn't deserve star billing). And each of these sections is a mini-story, the rise and fall of the character/situation, and ends fairly clearly with a genealogy to wrap things up. It's really quite clever.

Then between these stories are a ton of parallels, for the most part establishing a character's worthiness. Because it's interesting - despite the fact that there are some 2 billion people theoretically being morally guided by this book, a lot of characters aren't terribly moral, at least by today's standards. Look at two of the three patriarchs - Isaac is an incredibly passive characters who seems to have a penchant for worldly pleasures in the few chapters he's alloted while Jacob swindles his brother out of his birthright to become patriarch. So instead, the writers use parallels to establish a character's worthiness. Despite his flaws, Isaac is worthy of being a patriarch simply because he is like his father Abraham, or so he is portrayed in chapter 26. In contrast, Lot is generally unworthy because when put in a similar situation as his uncle Abraham in chapters 18 and 19, he fails to make the same decisions. It just struck me as so sophisticated for a text so old (and I have to thank Robert Alter's Genesis for pointing a lot of things out).

I could go on and on...with the repitition of theme, the use of the turning point, and the tentacles Genesis has in our culture...but I'll stop boring you now. Sadly, my students weren't so lucky - I ended up liking this unit so much that I made them read the first half of Exodus and Moses' death in Deuteronomy too.

Still, I tried not to torture them too much. Should learning be all work and no play? During some classes, we looked at the awesomely fun Brick Testament, where this guy has built more than 4,500 Lego scenes to illustrate various books of the Bible. It's both an accurate telling and irreverant interpretation (occasionally involving naked Legos, ahem Er and Onan) and worth a look for the humor value alone.

The Accidental Billionaires just like The Social Network (#11)

I don't have much of an opinion on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires because I read it about a week after seeing The Social Network on DVD and they're pretty darn similar. But I quite like Mezrich's work so I'll have to give him a pass on this one.

For those of you who've been living under a rock (not to be mean but I feel like I'm about to state the very obvious), the book/movie chronicles the rise of Facebook, focusing on Mark Zuckerberg's relationships with his original partner Eduardo Saverin and the Harvard guys who might have given him the idea, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, and how all that played out. The big question in both is did Mark Zuckerberg take advantage of others on his quest for success?

I preferred The Social Network, mostly because of the decision to intersperse the "present-day" courtroom scenes with the building of the website at Harvard and later California. I thought it added drama to the relationship between Mark and Eduardo - because they're best friends at Harvard, partners in crime, and yet obviously something is coming down the pike to pit them against one another. The Accidental Billionaires, on the other hand, presents events in chronological order so there was less intensity to the scenes.

The other significant difference, I thought, was in Mark's motivation. In The Social Network, it's seemingly about the girlfriend who dumped him and his need to both prove something to her and be liked. There's no girlfriend in The Accidental Billionaires. While he does seem to have have a need to be generally liked in there too, it seemed to me that as presented, Mark more than anything needed to prove how much better, how much smarter, he was than everyone else. And as a result, he becomes obsessed with creating Facebook and he seems more at home there, in front of the computer, than in the real world interacting with ordinary people. To me, he came across as a brilliant asshole. And after reading/watching both, I kinda wanted to cancel my Facebook account.

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)

#9: Stealing Athena, Karen Essex

As you can see, I skipped number eight, which was Shakespeare's Henry IV. While not my favorite of his plays, I recognize the genius to say I liked it well enough. But since I discussed it ad nauseum with my students, I'm done with it - and thus moving on to number 9...

...Karen Essex's Stealing Athena. I had high hopes for this book since it features one of history's most interesting ladies - the indomitable Mary Nisbit, Countess of Elgin - but unfortunately I had a hard time getting into it. The novel actually centers on the Parthenon and weaves together two tales - that of Aspasia, Perikles' lover, who was alive when the Parthenon was built and may have posed for the its Athena statue, and that of Lady Elgin, who funded her husband's removal of the sculptures when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The text shifts back and forth between the two tales and what they have in common, besides the building itself, is both women have these spirited, overcome-it-all personalities.

I think the problem was that while the two female protagonists were strong, the secondary characters (i.e. everyone else) were pretty flimsy. In Aspasia's story - which constituted most of the second half of the book - it didn't matter all that much because it was really about her...navigating her tenuous relationship with Perikles, achieving success as a philosopher, and later defending herself in court against the establishment who felt she'd overstepped her bounds. But Mary's tale is different because it has everything to do with her husband - and he was such a thinly painted ass in Stealing Athena that it was hard to see why she put up with him.

Historically, Mary and Lord Elgin marry in 1799 - they may or may not have been in love, but she was endowed with an enormous fortune and said to be quite charming, while he had a title and was thought to have a great career ahead of him. They immediately head off to his new post in Istanbul/Constantinople and while there, they convince their hosts - who had ruled Greece since the 1400s - to let them take the Parthenon marbles back to England. [The Turks don't care for the wonders of Ancient Greece and had let the Acropolis buildings fall into ruin.] This becomes Elgin's great passion but he doesn't have the money, so Mary's fortune ends up funding the lengthy and complicated endeavor. But then the tides shift, Elgin becomes a political prisoner in France and Mary spends a lot of years on her own, and it eventually leads them to a very scandalous divorce.

It's a fascinating story - much more complicated than my abridged version - but I didn't feel like Stealing Athena did it justice. The history was all there, but it was hard to get sucked into it because Essex relied on action more than emotion. As a result, I had a hard time figuring out for most of the novel whether or not Elgin was supposed to be the good guy or bad guy - was he a noble collector or a thief of both Mary's fortune and the Parthenon? Was he a loving father and husband or a mean and spiteful man without a nose? (Seriously, he loses his nose.) I found it hard to empathize with Mary's plight because I couldn't get a grip on how I was supposed to feel about Elgin, since his characterization shifted back and forth. So overall, I found Susan Nagel's Mistress of the Elgin Marbles (which Essex mentioned in the acknowledgements) to be much more captivating.

So as you can probably tell, I am a wee bit obsessed with the Elgin Marbles and so the next post is a photo gallery...

#6 and #7: Room and Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (meh)

I read Emma Donoghue's Room and Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress back-to-back in February. Both books had gotten good word of mouth but personally, I wasn't really into either of them (which is perhaps why I put off blogging about them). Warning: A few spoilers in the next paragraph.

Room is the story of a little boy named Jack and his mom, who if I recall correctly never gets a name. Jack is this really happy-go-lucky little kid with boundless enthusiasm for the world - except that he doesn't realize the "world" is a little room, because Jack's mom was kidnapped by a guy they call Old Nick, who keeps them prisoner in a garden shed. To five-year-old Jack, his world is amazing, which we hear as he (torturously) baby-talks his narration; his mom just wants to escape. And eventually they do (too easily, I thought) and Jack and his mother go through all kinds of readjustment issues. And I know I was supposed to think it profound, the contrast in perception and happiness and fear, but I just didn't feel it. (Apparently most Amazon readers did - it has 475 five-star reviews.) Which was too bad - I really enjoyed Donoghue's Slammerkin, a novel that could not be more different in subject or tone, which I read in 2008.

I started Mennonite in a Little Black Dress back in November and put it down probably six times to read other things. In theory, the memoir is about the author's discovery that her husband is gay, quickly followed by a terrible car wreck, which causes her to flee for her parents' home to recuperate. Except that she grew up Mennonite, so she has to go from being big-city sinful back to innocence-ish religious ways - which is supposed to provide much comic fodder and the heart of the book. But in truth, I never really caught onto the storyline because it really jumped around (and admittedly, my lack of attention didn't help) - it was hard to keep up with the chronology and minor characters, like the brothers and sisters-in-law, who weren't well fleshed out. Despite the premise, I don't think I learned anything significant about the Mennonites - in fact, I'm not sure what the book was really about. In the end, it seemed to be more about relating individual witty anecdotes (which were individually funny) but as a whole, I don't think the memoir came together. It simply lacked an overarching story.

So that was my February reading, fairly disappointing...which is perhaps why I didn't finish another book until the beginning of April. :(

Three Cups of Tea: True or False?

I've been pretty fascinated by the brouhaha over Three Cups of Tea since the controvery hit about 10 days ago but I've resisted posting because I don't know what to believe. Anyone else with me on this? But I'm starting to doubt Greg Mortenson's intentions, mostly because his new explanations aren't holding up either - and if that turns out to be the case, I'm angling for my $10 back, to spend it on a piece of fiction that actually says fiction. [Full disclosure: I personally know all the Outside people mentioned herein as I used to work at the magazine.]

In a nutshell, author Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes go after Greg Mortenson on two main points: that he fabricated significant events in Three Cups and that he has mismanaged his charity's funds, both refusing to document expenses and using the charity's dime to promote his books and then pocketing the proceeds. The first charge, that he made up events - including the origin story of how he wandered into the Pakistani village of Korphe and discovered his life's mission - appears to be true. In an interview with Outside editor Alex Heard, Mortenson blames his co-author David Oliver Relin, saying that he synthesized events to create a stronger narrative and no one cared when Mortenson complained. To the second charge, Mortenson acknowledges in the same Outside interview that he did use charity funds to charter a jet for the sake of time management, that people are misreading the charity's tax records, and that an independent law firm has established that they've done nothing wrong.

I think I've fairly synthesized both sides of the argument...and it's still hard to know what to believe. In a lot of ways, it's a he-said-she-said involving a very remote part of the world. Add in a heap of commentary from everybody from the New York Times to your ordinary blogger (hello, world!) and the water just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Interestingly though, Mortenson's side has remained mostly quiet in the face of some pretty damning financial evidence. (If you read Alex Heard's interview, you'll see on pages 4 and 5 that Mortenson doesn't deny using the charity's funds or refute Krakauer's main argument; rather, he justifies it in the way that many of his Internet defenders have, that the ends justify the means.)

I think it's fair to say that Greg Mortenson had good intentions to change the world but he lost them in the hustle-and-bustle along the way. The mismanagement of the charity seems pretty well documented. Whether he absentmindedly misplaced those intentions when things got too big or discarded them when he became a millionaire remains to be seen.

Personally, I'm leaning toward the "changed by fame" interpretation - but then, I was never a big fan of Three Cups of Tea. As I said at the time, the text struck me as manipulative, like a very long PR manifesto. But the biggest issue now, it seems, is that Mortenson's new and improved explanations don't seem to hold water which in my opinion is the thing that makes him look the most guilty.

Take the debate of the origin story, how he got to Korphe and how long he stayed there. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably irrelevant if Relin condensed the incident. But the fact remains, as the 60 Minutes mash-up (start at minute 1:30) adequately proved, that Mortenson repeats Relin's version of the story on tour as truth. Now, he blames Relin for the inaccuracy and says he voiced concerns - but if that's true, why keep repeating an inaccurate tale? (Interestingly, in an interview with the University of Oregon's Etude in 2008, Relin gives a remarkably different account of how he and Mortenson came to work together, compared to Mortenson's version in the Outside interview.) But now it seems that the revised version of the Korphe tale - which Mortenson provided to Outside - isn't plausibly true either. A second Outside article posits that geographically, the facts don't line up.

What can I say, I have a hard time having faith in someone whose story keeps being disproved. I don't know what the truth is, but it's not looking good for Mortenson.

#20: The Best of Friends, Mariana Pasternak

The Best of Friends is an interesting, troubling, strange book. As author Mariana Pasternak details her fractious friendship with (former) longtime pal Martha Stewart, she claims to be meditating on the bonds between females, hoping she will "inspire other women to take a close look at the intimacy of our friendships," as she writes in the final pages. But c'mon, we're all smarter than that! Really, The Best of Friends is a nasty tell-all marketed toward people like me who want to know more about one of the most famous/fascinating/vilified women in America. And it's written by someone who is nowhere near as famous - an oh-so fabulous Eastern European emigree/victim who will benefit by becoming just a little bit famous for writing said tell-all. These sorts of books are always strange, and hypocritical, and it's an icky strangeness and hypocrisy that the author and the reader participate in together.

Interestingly, I left the book feeling sorry for Martha Stewart, which was very much not Pasternak's point. (I gathered the ultimate point was to take revenge on Stewart for involving her in the ImClone scandal.) I felt sorry for Martha Stewart mostly because my biggest pet peeve is when people blame others for their own choices - which is what Pasternak spends the entire book doing. She is a grown woman who barely acknowledges the fact that she made an ongoing choice to stay in an allegedly damaging friendship. And reading between the lines, you start to see why Pasternak put up with this for 20 years: She liked what she got from the arrangement. Friendship with Martha brought prestige, introductions to famous people, trips, invitations to amazing events and dinners, and opportunities for her daughters. And that's cool, but she never recognizes that she used as much as she feels she got used.

In a nutshell, the two meet as young, recently-ish married women. They hang out with their husbands as a foursome, then as a threesome as Andy Stewart departs the scene. Then Stewart and Pasternak become a twosome since Martha's post-divorce needs put too much of a strain on Mariana's marriage. Over time, as we all know, Martha becomes incredibly rich and famous - and it turns out that a wealthy Martha likes to take fabulously exotic trips. Mariana can't afford it but apparently feels like she must keep up with the Joneses, so she accepts a loan from Martha and is then shocked when she receives a carefully calculated bill post-trip. She doesn't say anything, feels bitter, and yet accepts the same offer again, multiple times, restarting the cycle. And it's not just about exotic vacations: Generally speaking, the women compete with each other over things like money/clothes/men, Martha does something, Mariana doesn't like it but doesn't say anything and loses out, and so the disturbing dance continued.

Reading the book, you see that for Mariana, money is about friendship, and for Martha, money means business. And really, either viewpoint is acceptable - the problem becomes expectation. And that's really what this book made me think about: how you don't ever get to control others' actions, and the only thing you are truly entitled to is your own reaction. Mariana never addresses the problems in the friendship and yet seems incredibly bitter that Martha didn't perform to her specifications (which is ironic, considering one of the chief complaints lobbed at Martha is that she expected others to do exactly this). On page 319, she writes, "That was a lot of effort for Martha to make for someone else, and it impressed me when she gave Charlotte the champagne wedding brunch at Skylands, but having it done for me could only mean that Martha was finally beginning to be the kind of treasured friend I had always wanted her to be."

That's what The Best of Friends is really about: Martha Stewart was not the friend that Mariana Pasternak expected her to be. And instead of confronting her friend at the time or acknowledging her own free will in the situation now, Pasternak wrote a blame book, blaming Martha Stewart for everything. And in this, The Best of Friends is fascinating.

#12-15: Books in Review

I've hit a crisis point with my blog. In fact, with my life. I don't know what I'm doing with it, what I want to do with it, or why I'm doing it and the basic lack of traffic depresses me (not that I started this for the traffic, but, well, it's depressing anyway). So, on the blog-front, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on. I need to reevaluate before I drown in this existential muck.

But since I haven't totally decided what to do, I thought I'd at least note the books I've read in the last month, even if the noting is only in brief:

#12: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
I had been considering teaching The Red Tent next year so I thought I would re-read the book and make sure it was what I remembered - which was fantastic. (This is one of the few books that I consistently recommend.) Based on just a few lines in the Bible, The Red Tent focuses on Dinah - the only daughter of Jacob - and her journey as she goes from beloved daughter to wife to widow and mother, and from Israel down into Egypt. It's an exceptional book but in the end, I realized, perhaps not the best choice for semi-innocent/awkward ninth graders. They will have to read The Joy Luck Club - another fantastic book about mothers/daughter and journeys - instead.

#13: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas
I read about this book on Jezebel.com at least a year ago - at the same time I heard about Fashion Babylon - but it took me awhile to get around to it. This well-researched book is essentially about how, as fashion houses have moved from being owned by individual designers (often the company's namesake) to a few large companies, the shift in fashion has moved from quality and clothes to $$$. Thomas did an INCREDIBLE amount of research for this book, traveling to France to smell perfumes, Italy to visit designers, and China to visit factories (where a chunk of clothes are made, even if some houses rip out the labels and replace with "Made in Italy.") I was never one for spending thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing or a purse but if I was, I would certainly think again after reading this book. The only downside to Deluxe, really, was that it was published in 2007 - it's the kind of book that would benefit from an update. (And I'd totally read it again.)

#14: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
I had also been considering Highsmith's classic for a spot on my students' syllabus next year and wanted to re-read it to make sure it was what I thought it was. I hadn't read The Talented Mr. Ripley since spring 1996, the semester I took a law/jurisprudence class on murder at my liberal arts college.

Since my upcoming class is focused on the heroic journey (starting with The Odyssey), I thought The Talented Mr. Ripley might be a nice, end-of-the-year book to look at what happens when the hero - who is on a classic quest, like Odysseus or a Knight of the Round Table - turns out to be the villian. Because Tom Ripley is absolutely the villian - he is a poseur who convinces a man named Mr. Greenleaf to send him to Italy to convince his son, Dickie Greenleaf, a man-about-town of independent means, to come back to America. But then Tom decides he wants to lead the kind of life that Dickie has, and is willing to do anything to get it.

On my first reading, I don't think I really saw how much Tom's paranoia contributes to the out-of-control spiraling of events - how there's what Dickie says/does and then how there's what Tom says Dickie says/does...which are probably two completely different things. It reminded me quite a bit of Revolutionary Road, a book I appreciate more and more as time goes on, in how you can't be certainly what April has said and done because most of her speech/actions are relayed by someone else.

In (not-so) short, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a fascinating book - both in the plotting and in the icky feeling you have as the reader that you kinda, sorta want Tom to get away with it. (Apparently Ms. Highsmith herself was quite the unlikable character/sociopath - before the end of the year, I'm hoping to dive into Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.)

#15: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
I have been quite the good employee this June; I also managed to read my students' assigned summer reading book, Hurston's classic, which I never had to read myself in school. I really loved this book - I don't think it's perfect (and apparently Hurston wrote the entire thing during a seven-week working trip to Haiti) but it's a captivating story about one woman's quest for self-awareness. I think Hurston had roped in me in by page 10, when she sets 16-year-old Janie's awakening under a blossoming pear tree. "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her." If you haven't read Their Eyes Were Watching God, run to the bookstore now! Really, it's incredible. I'll probably come back to this one in the fall, as I go over it with my students - there's so much more to say.


Alright, so there you have it. Even if I am conflicted about all things blog, I am mighty pleased to point out that I have reached Book 15 at the halfway point of the year! I think I might actually reach the finish line this year. :)

#10: Waiter Rant, The Waiter

I finished Waiter Rant about a week and a half ago and while I liked it, I didn't love it. And, because I'm not much in the mood to blog (is it the humidity?) but want to return books to the library (I'm purging), I'm just going to go over it quickly.

The book is ostensibly by an anonymous waiter – author of an apparently popular blog of the same name – who sheds light on the ugly side of the restaurant business. (I say he's ostensibly anonymous because that's what the book jacket says; the Internet has just told me that The Waiter is a guy named Steve Dublanica, who was outed in 2008.) The parts about the actual restaurant business I enjoyed, and Waiter Rant is certainly well-written; it's also made me think twice about how to tip.

But then, at some point, the book starts veering into confessional mode as the Waiter's blog grows in popularity, he gets an agent, and freaks out about the writing of a book. I found those parts to be so self-indulgent – I think it's hard to feel invested in an anonymous story – and fairly annoying since for all the whining, it clearly worked out okay, since I was holding the book in question. I wanted to read a book about restaurants, not about some guy's existential crisis, and as Waiter Rant went on, it focused more on the personal travails of the Waiter and less on the biz.

Still, it was a quick read, which was a plus. He's a talented writer and it was easy to get through. It would be a good book to take on vacation (vacation!).

#8: The Blind Side, Michael Lewis

As I think everyone in America knows by now, The Blind Side tells the story of Michael Oher, a homeless kid from a rough Memphis neighborhood who was taken in and "saved" by a rich, white family when he was in high school. The world had sort of given up on him but as it turns out, Michael is genetically predisposed to play left tackle - and becomes a high-school football star, eventually moving on to Ole Miss and the Baltimore Ravens. I hadn't seen the movie and decided to read the book first, before it came out on DVD, after hearing that the film version left out the contributions that other Memphis families made and instead chose to focus on the Tuohys, his main support system.

But, as it turns out, the book version isn't that much different than the movie - it simplifies some details and situations (because of time constraints, I assume) and leaves out pretty much all the football history, but the personal story is more or less the same. The Tuohys are pretty much the stars of the book too - and from what I've seen since of real-life clips, it seems accurate that they did indeed become Michael's family, with now five members instead of the previous four.

Where the book differs, really, is in the football analysis. I didn't realize The Blind Side would be quite so much about the game of football - which seems silly in retrospect as the subtitle of the book is "Evolution of a Game." Lewis spends multiple chapters explaining how the left tackle became the second-most important player in a football game - and went from anonymous grunt to high-paid star. I like football so I did enjoy learning that perspective, but I think if you're looking for a simple, heartwarming story, those chapters will seem endless.

Generally, I liked the book but I did think that it portrayed Michael Oher unfairly. For being the heart of the book, he's a pretty absent figure. Apparently this is because he was reluctant to speak with Lewis for any significant period of time but in the book, I think it comes across as condescending. The book is supposed to be about football - and how this one particular player sheds light on a greater trend - but I think it's just as much about how this family opened their generous, white hearts and saved this kid who was going nowhere. It's all about what they did for him; it's very little about what Michael Oher did for himself. And while I doubt he could have done it without them, it's also a little ridiculous to suggest, as The Blind Side does, that nothing was done with his own agency. (Which, incidentally, Oher seems to agree with in this Sports Illustrated article, even though he hasn't read the book or seen the movie.)

A lot of that was certainly the author's choice. In using dialogue, Lewis chooses to record the characters' manners of speaking - and as a result, all of the black people in the novel sound so uneducated. I also thought that Lewis manipulated perception with his use of metaphor. For example, on page 259, he likens Michael to an animal: "Like a zoo director discussing a crazed rhinoceros with its trainer, he said, ‘You got to get down here and find him.’” His (white) football coach is the zoo director and his (white) guardian is the trainer, but he's an animal.

But, on the bright side, it was announced at the end of April that Michael Oher will publish a memoir, I Beat the Odds My Amazing Journey from Foster Care to the NFL and Beyond, with the help of co-author and SI editor Don Yaeger. So in February 2011, he'll get to tell his story his way.

#7: The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

I feel conflicted about The Secret...on the one hand, I knew what I was getting myself into (fantastical self-help mumbo jumbo) but picked it up anyway and on the other, I'm kinda thinking Rhonda Byrne might be onto something. I have no doubt that there's some validity to the ideas within – it may have already worked for me – but at times, I think The Secret just takes it too far.

The book has been around for a couple of years – it even had a little cameo in the first Sex and the City movie – but I think I was inspired to pick it up after watching the first episode (and only the first episode) of E!'s Pretty Wild. The mother in that show homeschools her three teenage girls and she bases the curriculum off the teachings of The Secret movie version. The Secret is all about using positive thinking and visualization to bring the things you want to you – but ironically, in the reality show, middle daughter Alexis Neiers has misdirected the Universe and gotten herself six months in jail for being linked to a Hollywood burglary ring. I guess I just became a little curious (and a little scared) by the whole thing, by the idea of substituting math and English for a New Age philosophy and having it sort-of work.

The basic premise of The Secret is that you need to figure out what you really want in life, in all areas of your life, and then you use the Creative Process to ask, believe, and receive – and if you do this properly, the Universe will deliver all of it. The key is that you have to go beyond wishing – you have to be completely in tune with those desires and act like you've already received, since the Universe is proposed to be a type of mirror that reflects back to you whatever you're putting out. After that, you don't have to worry about how it's all going to happen – you're just supposed to believe and let the Universe work out the details.

Writing that, it sounds a little ridiculous. I think my biggest issue with The Secret is that it ignores the work and actions that have to take place for anything to happen, much less to achieve success. I mean, I can visualize a best-selling novel all day – I can believe it with every fiber of my being – but I can't attract those 80,000 words. Maybe I can attract an agent and a good review from Michiko Kakutani and an appearance on Oprah, but I can't attract the creation of a book – I will actually have to sit down every day and write it and there's no magical formula for that.

The Secret definitely delves into the ridiculous, so much so that I can't list it all. For example, the book suggests that you should be able to cure your own illnesses – because if you have a disease and you talk about it too much, you will have actually caused more diseased cells to grow. If you're fat, it's because you allowed fat thoughts into your mind – not because you gorged yourself on McDonalds. (Really, I'm not making this up. From page 59: “The most common thought that people hold, and I held it too, is that food was responsible for my weight gain. That is a belief that does not serve you, and in my mind now it is complete balderdash! Food is not responsible for putting on weight.”) For all the talk about positive thinking, there's actually a lot of blame in this book – it’s like, if you die of cancer, you obviously failed to send out the right signal. And what kind of a message is that?

But, on the other hand, I can't deny that positive thinking is a good thing. Getting clear about your goals, visualizing them, believing that they're going to happen – surely that can only help you to get closer to what you want. And even if you don't get there, you've no doubt had a better journey along the road of life because you believed happy thoughts, feeling sure that good things were on their way.

I also must confess that it's maybe already worked for me. The backstory is that my boyfriend broke up with me last August - it was very sudden, out-of-the-blue, and then he just disappeared without another word. I got two short emails at Christmas, but that was it in the space of 8 months. But then the morning after I started reading The Secret? An email. And another few emails since...with some talk on his part of reconciliation. Now, I think you could argue that this is all total coincidence (and the real secret is to run the other direction from the spineless jerk), but it's still weird.

So maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I think the real secret of The Secret is to perhaps just absorb the worthwhile parts and ignore the looney-tunes bits, and through it all, put a smile on your face.

#6: The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

The odds are good that I never would have picked up this book if I hadn't joined a new book club - and that would have been a true pity because The Botany of Desire is a fascinating read. It took me a little while to get into it - people kept telling me to at least read until I got to marijuana - and indeed by then, I was hooked.

Author Michael Pollan chose four different types of domesticated plants - the apple tree, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato - and gave each of them their own section to look at how the plants have evolved to gratify human desires and how we have made them evolve to gratify our desires. Throughout, Pollan combines history, travel, and research with his own experiences as a gardener.

In Apple, Pollan primarily looks at the myth of Johnny Appleseed, the American hero who may actually have been bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontiersmen. Along the way, he also discovers how big (apple) business has whittled down a consumers' choices down to just a few types of apples - out of all the millions of possible varities, since apple seeds produce independent trees that don't resemble their parents - and how this narrowness might actually endanger the apple's future.

In Tulip, my second-favorite section, Pollan mostly talked about how, for a short period of time in 19th-century Holland, a tulip became the most valuable thing in the world. In Marijuana - which was actually my least-favorite part, despite the promises - Pollan remembers his own short-lived attempt to grow his own crop while also investigating the motives behind the U.S. drug war, how the purpose of gardens has changed over time, and maybe even how great creativity and the world's great religions have sprung from this sort of intoxication. (Summarizing it, this section sounds fascinating, but for some reason, I just got bogged down here.)

The last section - the most fascinating and the scariest - was devoted to the potato. Pollan looks at the ordinary spud from two perspectives, from the Irish potato famine and the new genetically engineered crop. How is this scary, you ask? Monoculture, or the farming of a single crop. In both situations, monoculture - whether from necessity or corporate pressure - leads to a situation where one event (be it a bug infestation or frost) can kill the entire yield. In Ireland, an eighth of the population died because they relied on a single type of potato. Today, farmers generally either grow a single type of potato for the McDonalds crowd and flood their fields with pesticides or they opt for the predator-resistant NewLeafs, whose true cost in the end may be much higher than their value. I found this section so interesting that I've already repeated the details to someone - and I just finished the book yesterday.

There's no way I'll be able to remember all of the factoids and anecdotes, since The Botany of Desire is just chock full of them. So the main lesson I'll take away is this: Plant your own food. (And if that fails, eat organic.)

As Michael Pollan writes, at the end of the book: “The NewLeaf marks an evolutionary turn that may or may not take us somewhere we want to be. Just in case it doesn’t, though, we’d be wise to follow Chapman’s example, to save and seed all manner of plant genes: the wild, the unpatentable, even the seemingly useless, patently ugly, and just plain strange. Next year in place of the NewLeaf I plan to plant a great many different Old Leafs; instead of one perfect potato, I’ll make Chapman’s bet on the field. To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution’s possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us.”