Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews

Great Discoveries: Explorations That Changed History

It's that time of year! Coffee table book time! I recently received Time's Great Discoveries: Explorations That Changed History for review. It's a large, full-color coffee table book.

 

Less than $20 right now.

While the photos are the quality you'd expect from a nice coffee table book, the difference here is the accompanying text. It's actually interesting. The chapters cover exploring the past, planet Earth, life on Earth and the solar system. I got sucked into reading it for over an hour when I had every intention of just looking at the pictures. This is a good all-purpose book for even the most casual science buff, as the narrative is engaging and written at a newspaper reading level. My favorite bit was about bog bodies.

It's a little large for a bookshelf -- that's probably my only qualm. It's almost a foot square.

The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

I was excited to read Susan Linn's newest book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World, when I was contacted to review it.

I am of the curmudgeon-old-school ways, the type to hand my daughter a huge cardboard box but refuse her a Leapster. I just can't handle toys that tell you how to play with them or books that read themselves to you. That's what parents -- and ultimately, kids themselves -- are for.

So Linn was pretty much preaching to the choir with me. She's worked with Mr. Rogers and makes a convincing case for make believe, backed up by formidable research. It's totally scary how many toys are made to do one specific purpose. Even Legos now come in screwed-up kits that only allow you to fashion them in one way. I can't handle it.

Linn gave me hope for the future, though. She encouraged parents to allow kids to act out their frustrations through play and not get freaked out if the kid pretends to leave the baby doll in the freezer. I admit I used to get completely weebed when my daughter played that the baby had been bad and had to be punished, but Linn posits this play is just kids learning to work through authority structures. I know I eased off a lot after reading this book and started letting my daughter just play what she wanted.

Part of me is just so totally relieved she knows how to play without having it explained to her by a robot.

The Double-Daring Book for Girls

I love just about anything Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz do. I loved The Daring Book for Girls, and their follow-up, The Double-Daring Book for Girls, built on the first nicely.

 

There's not a great detraction from the first book. The Double-Daring Book for Girls is a hodge-podge of instructions, definitions and recipes for everything from sailing phrases to calligraphy to optical illusions to The Nobel Prize. It's an old-school looking hardback with that awesome 5th-grade-textbook font and thick pages that smell like the second floor of your childhood library. I'm excited my daughter is getting older and will be able to crack the spines on these books soon. They make me feel like a girl again.

A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges

Michelle Hernandez is a former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College. In her book, A is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, she describes in intimate detail the algorithm used by the Ivies to rank students based on class rank, class type, extracurriculars, test scores, and oh, yes, G.P.A.

 

I'll admit I didn't read this book cover-to-cover, because it's a reference book. I think if I were really interested in getting into an Ivy League school, I would've been fascinated. When I agreed to review the book, I was thinking it would be more narrative than it actually is, so as an intermediately degreed 35-year-old, I was bored. I'm not planning to get a PhD, and I'm not planning to encourage my five-year-old to start taking advanced placement journal writing in kindergarten to woo Yale. However, I know if I did want her to go to the Ivies? I might consider starting now.

The book discusses sports, legacies, financial aid, communication between schools and other -- frankly -- insider topics. Hernandez does a good job -- she's startlingly transparent -- but be prepared for a very dense and statistics-filled tome that will probably depress you and your little Ivy-tastic kiddo just a wee bit. They don't call it the Ivy League for nothing.

Insatiable

Having experienced eating disorders in high school and college, I immediately agreed to review Insatiable: A Young Mother's Struggle with Anorexia, when it appeared on the e-mail of upcoming titles.

Erica Rivera's memoir is very raw, surprisingly raw, considering she describes leaving her two young daughters alone and sleeping in her house while she went on pre-dawn, 90-minute runs. Brave, but necessary, because without that level of detail, it's hard to appreciate how this mental illness -- for that's what eating disorders really are -- can distort reality for those who suffer from them.

Rivera describes chewing and spitting, binging and starving with self-deprecating prose both disarming and disturbing. Her recollections brought back a lot of my own memories, and I was surprised at how similar our inner voices were.

The ending left me wanting follow-up, but that's how eating disorders work -- you're never really sure if they're gone forever. You just keep eating and hope for the best.

WalkingFish Fishing Journal

Blondie loves to fish and has been talking about teaching the little angel to fish for a while now, so when WalkingFish Books contacted me about reviewing their Fishing Journal, I said what the hey?

Let's just get this on the table: I don't fish. So I'm not really sure what's important in a fishing journal. However, this seems pretty thorough -- leaving spaces to document who you fished with, how many you caught, released, kept, weights, tides, moon phases -- crazy stuff.

I also really liked how at the bottom of each page is a little picture and description of different kinds of fish, including their scientific names. I imagine that could be pretty entertaining while you're waiting for the fish to bite.

So Blondie, come on down. We're all ready for you.

Child Care Today

I'm just going to come right out and say I'm not going to do Penelope Leach's new book, Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone, justice.

Child care is one of my political pet projects. I believe every parent should have access to quality child care if America wants to compete on a global level with its own workforce. The financial and mental burden placed on parents to locate and finance child care good enough to feel comfortable leaving kids and going to work is insane. It's the most difficult thing I've ever dealt with, and I have the means to afford quality care. I don't work weird hours or swing shifts. I have a vehicle that I can use to drive to my child care provider's location. I'm one of the lucky ones -- and I still think it's horrible and it sucks and I've never been more terrified than when my daughter was in what I considered to be a subpar facility as a baby because there were no other options.

I didn't make it through Leach's incredibly well researched book. It was much more academic than I expected it to be, but that's fine -- it's an amazing resource and one that I intend to go to when writing on this subject in the future. Leach digs through crazy volumes of research in the U.K. and the U.S. and talks about child care on a global level -- giving me insight into how other countries handle child care and how we might improve things in our own country.

So, I apologize to you, Ms. Leach -- you really killed it with this book, and I did not have the mental energy to get through it, but I'm very happy to own it and intend to use it as a resource to make me smarter in the future.

Evolution Rx: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing

Ever since I read The Moral Animal, I've been interested in how evolution has shaped human behavior. Enter Dr. William Miller's book, Evolution Rx, which I got recently for review.

Dr. Miller, who teaches a related class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes our bodies are mostly equipped to heal themselves, with the exception of dangers that weren't around in the caveman games (such as burns, smoking, and eating too much food). Too much food, indeed, seems to top the list of dangers.

Some of Miller's advice I liked, such as the idea that sun exposure and a little wine are actually good for you. Other ideas, such as Miller's description of morning sickness, made me want to dismiss all his ideas completely, because he was clearly guessing about the morning sickness.

As I've seen in my patients, an understanding that her discomfort is good for her baby -- along with sticking to easily assimilated foods -- eases symptoms without medication, in most cases.

LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE

Anyway.

Overall, Miller's book is an easy and entertaining read, but it seems, like most of these books, to be too generalized. True, flitting about in the sun worked for our hairy, coarse-skinned forebears, but they didn't have to deal with air pollution or holes in the ozone layer. They may have survived toxic food, but they probably didn't do it easily or painlessly. We don't know. They didn't have Flip Video. And since they didn't, it seems flippant and overreaching to assume just because they were adapted to their environment that it -- like morning sickness -- was anything but suffering.

Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife

Think this is a regular cookbook? Think again.

In Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife: All the Dishes You'll Need to Make from the Day You Say "I Do" Until Death (or Divorce) Do You Part, Nava Atlas uses old-school photos and illustrations to accompany recipes that include very little real food and a whole lot of emotion.

The book includes instructions like "preheat lust until too hot to handle, then cover until it has cooled down enough for you to realize desire alone is not enough to sustain a relationship (though it can often make it more agreeable)."

My favorite was the recipe for "Way Too Much on Your Plate," which instructs the modern wife to "combine children in a house or apartment and stir together, losing temper every so often."

My one complaint is that it's a little depressing at first glance. The wit is very dry. I probably wouldn't give it as a gift until the bride has passed her five-year anniversary and can appreciate that marriage is a whole lot more than a sum of its ingredients.

The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America

Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of Celebrity Rehab, and Dr. S. Mark Young, a social scientist, are calling the kettle black in their new book, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America.

 

I can't begin to review this book (which I really liked) without wondering how Dr. Drew Pinsky, reality TV star, can pass judgment on America's celebrity culture, particularly reality television stars. WTF, Dr. Drew? But that said, I'll put aside my gaping astonishment surprise and look at Dr. Pinsky's thesis.

Dr. Pinsky thinks celebrities are more narcissistic than your average Joe. And he's proven it, by doing a statistically relevant study with social scientist Dr. Young. Narcissism, in clinical psychological terms, is apparently not self-love but self-loathing and the inability to form a sense of self without input from others.

It gets pretty interesting then, going into the different aspects of narcissistic personality disorder and how you might go from being a normal kid to a narcissistic one. The book ends with the same test the celebs took, which of course I took with relish. I ended up with a score of 12. You'll have to read the book to know where I fall on the scale, I guess, 'cause I'm not telling.

It's fascinating if you can get past the hypocrisy.