Category: Books

NurtureShock: A book review in two parts (Part 1)

Back in early 2007, the blogosphere was a-cackle over an essay that appeared in New York Magazine. The gist of it, from what I could glean, was that we were over-praising our kids, and that too much praise was a bad thing. I never did get around to reading the source article, but I frothed in more than one blog’s comment section about how ridiculous I found the concept. Too much praise? No such thing. After all, I was raised on a steady diet of affirmation and praise, and I think it was one of the factors that most strongly contributed to the best parts of the adult I am today.

In the last week or so, I started hearing buzz about that theory in the background noise again, and found out that the authors of the original article had expanded it into a book that was getting a lot of interest. The book is called NurtureShock, and the general idea they posit is that we’ve been ignoring some of the most important scientific discoveries about children, learning and parenting. They propose to “use the fascinating new science of children to reveal just how many of our bedrock assumptions about kids can no longer be counted on.”

They were on CBC’s The Current last week, and although I missed it, the buzz reminded me that I wanted to check out the book. I was 104th in the queue when I requested it from the library, but lucked into a copy on the two-week “express reads” shelf the very next day.

I had the blog post half-written in my head as I walked out of the library. I was going to do a thorough, scholarly analysis and discount the theory on a point-by-point basis. I was going to tear it to pieces. I could hardly wait. I still had 20 minutes left to kill in Tristan’s skating lesson when I pulled out the book and started reading, pencil and notebook at my side. I was on page four – FOUR! – when my jaw dropped open in shock and dismay.

They were describing Tristan. To a perfect T. I did a 180-degree about-face. They were — gasp! — right!

The chapter starts with Thomas, a child whose IQ test scored him among the top one percent of the top one percent of applicants to his school:

“Tristan Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.'” With no more than a glance, Tristan Thomas was dividing the world into two — things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

In the last year, I’ve seen this pattern a LOT in Tristan, in everything from riding a bike to drawing to math problems. Most things are easy for him, but the things that aren’t make him want to quit immediately. He’s reluctant to try, in case he might fail.

I read the rest of the chapter with avid interest. Turns out, their theory is not so much that praise itself is detrimental, but that gratuitous, insincere and non-specific praise is. They review a scientific study in which two groups of students were asked to do puzzles well within their ability. One group was given the single line of praise “You must be smart at this” while the other was given the single line of praise “You must have worked really hard.” The students were then offered the choice between two puzzles. One choice was a more challenging puzzle that researchers told the kids they’d learn a lot from attempting and the second choice was an easy test, just like the first. The results? “Of those praised for their effort, 90 per cent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The ‘smart’ kids took the cop-out.”

Carol Dweck, the researcher who engineered these studies, was surprised by the magnitude of the effect of praise on the students’ choices. She theorizes that praising the effort gives the child a variable he or she can control, while praising an innate characteristic like intelligence “takes it out of the child’s control, and provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

The chapter goes on to discuss the culture of self-esteem building that has been inherent to parenting advice for the last three or four decades, following the publication of Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem. The authors note that the idea of promoting and preserving a child’s self-esteem has become “an unstoppable train [where] anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned on. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.”

Another researcher, after reviewing 200 scientifically-sound studies on measuring self-esteem and its outcomes found that “having a high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.” In fact, he believes that “the contiued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that ‘when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.'”

Ouch.

And yet, the more I read, the more “Aha!” moments I had. One of my pet rants is the ‘culture of entitlement’ we seem to be living in right now. No wonder “failure is not an option” in Ontario schools… and small wonder that adults bring the same attitudes into the workforce.

I was so gobsmacked, so excited by what I read, that I couldn’t wait to talk to Beloved about it. I stood in the kitchen and talked about how clearly I saw Tristan in the examples. He scores quite well in just about every subject, and yet he is so obviously reluctant to try things he won’t immediately excel at. He is very risk-averse when it comes to trying new activities, but loves to do the things he does well.

Beloved was obviously listening to me, but he was regarding me with an expression on his face so curious that I eventually stopped in mid-sentence. “What?” I asked.

“You don’t see it, do you?” he asked, and I blushed. I did see it. “It’s not just Tristan, it’s YOU!” I skulked out of the kitchen muttering, “Stupid book, stupid praise, stupid husband thinks he knows me so well, what does he know, grumble grumble grumble…”

Of course he is right. He’s so right. It is me. My name is DaniGirl, and I am a praise junkie. I need to be validated. This blog exists because of my fundamental need for external validation. From the time of sentinence, I have made choices that would please my parents and those around me. And, I hate to fail. Really, really hate to fail. My ongoing struggles with French are a case study in my unwillingness to take the necessary risk of possibly making a mistake in public and looking foolish in the name of learning. If I can’t figure something out practically immediately, I lose interest.

Now, I also believe that the strong sense of self that my parents instilled in me from birth has practically everything to do with the fact that I am a happy, confident and successful adult who has achieved by age 40 just about everything I set out to do in life. In the grand scheme of things, I’d rather be a vaguely needy praise junkie with a successful career, loving husband, stable environment, lovely children, supportive family and terrific friends than an independent and persistent homeless crack addict. But I have to say, the first chapter of this book has given me lots to think about.

When I got to the end of that first chapter, I turned the page and realized the subject had moved on to an examination of whether kids getting, on average, an hour less sleep is causing ADHD, obesity and lost IQ points. Another interesting theory, perhaps, but I was anxious: where’s the rest? Where’s the answer? I want more on the subject of praise, please. Twenty-six pages hasn’t covered this in nearly enough detail for me. I need a roadmap, and a checklist. I need a work sheet. What if I fail?!

In all honesty, I’m not sure I can dial back the praise. It is too deeply ingrained in who I am, and in how I raise my boys. It is fundamental to who I am. I will, however, be more selective in my praise, and try to praise what the boys can control over what they cannot. I like the idea presented that the brain is a muscle that grows with each mistake made and learned from, and I’ll definitely be incorporating that into my mothering repetoire.

I’m almost afraid to read the rest of the book. What other deeply-held and fundamental tenents may be toppled like the Berlin Wall by the time I’m done? I’ll come back and let you know whether I can even look myself in the mirror by the time I’m done.

In the interim, as always, I’m curious as to your thoughts. Can you praise a child too much? Have we as a culture become self-esteem junkies? Is there any hope for an inveterate praise junkie like me, or should I just focus on saving the boys from praise addiction?

Book review: Hell is Other Parents

Okay, I’d admit it, the title of this one sucked me in. It made you look, too, didn’t it? When the rep from Hyperion/Voice offered me this book to review, she pitched it as a series of funny non-fiction essays from a New York City mother of three navigating the new world of helicopter parenting. Seeing myself as a free-range-parenting kind of girl, it caught my attention enough that I said “Yes please!” to the offer of a free review copy.

Despite my interest being piqued, I was somehow prepared to dislike this book. Would it be yet another snide, snippy book written by a Lululemon-wearing yoga mom, aching for her lost figure and trying too hard to be hip? Turns out, not at all… despite my first impressions.

The author and I have a lot in common — we both have three kids and, erm… *sound of crickets* …yeah, well, I guess that’s all we have in common. She’s a Vespa-riding apartment-dwelling resident of New York City, a stage mother to the kid who played “Young Spock” in the latest Star Trek movie and who turned down a small role for her son on Lost because it would be too disruptive to the family, and a former Emmy-award-winning TV producer and war photographer. No, really! And I am — none of those things, although I do like to take pictures and watch Lost religiously.

Anyway, despite my initial misgivings and the lack of shared life experiences, it’s a testament to Deborah Copaken Kogan’s lively writing style that she totally sucked me in, and I ended up hooked on the loosely linked vignettes that form the chapters in Hell is Other Parents, And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion. From the very first essay, where she tells the story of her youngest son’s birth and sharing a hospital room with a teenaged new mother with a potty mouth, I was endeared. Writing with equal parts humour and pathos, Kogan has an easy and amiable intimacy in her style that makes reading her essays feel a lot like reading some of my favourite bloggers.

The pitch from Hyperion/Voice was a little off the mark, though, in my opinion. The book shares its title with the second essay, and does paint a picture of mothering in Manhattan that bears no resemblance whatsoever to mothering in suburban Ottawa. She writes:

I read No Exit, Sartre’s famous existentialist play, in my early twenties, and I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting on a conceptual level but not a literal one. Hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone every actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape.

Then I became a parent.

And I realized that anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist, and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spend an hour at a Mommy and Me class. Or killed a Saturday afternoon in the children’s shoe store in my neighbourhood, with its sign-up sheet thirty kids deep and shoe projectiles flying across the aisles. Or been forced into any seemingly innocuous but secretly agenda-laden interaction with the parent of your child’s peer.

And she goes on to enumerate some truly wretched interactions with other parents, including one mother who is aghast at the mention of Cookie Monster in her toddler’s presence, “yell-whispering, ‘Sam has never eaten a cookie!'” while slapping her hands over her son’s ears. So, despite an early connection to Kogan’s writing, I found it hard to relate to her on an level of shared experience. The other parents I know in real life seem to be, for the most part, as perplexed by parenting as I am, but generally willing to share the journey amiably.

It was this paragraph, buried deep in another essay called “La Vie en Explose” that made me realize that even though she was dancing on the edge of celebrity, leading a life I could only imagine in terms of movies I’ve seen, maybe Deborah Copaken Kogan and I weren’t so different after all. Stuck in a hospital ER for hours with undiagnosed appendicitis, an editorial deadline overdue and no backup childcare, she writes:

Here in the United States… where our social safety net seems limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner, family life can often feel as if it’s stacked like a house of cards, with one small gust of air — an absent babysitter, another day off from school, a medical emergency — knocking the whole structure to the ground. One can plan theoretical contingencies in the event of each occurrence, but life doesn’t always offer a single gust at a time. Sometimes the perfect storm blows into town, and then your left, in triage limbo, with a bum appendix, a dying man at your feet, three kids scattered to the four winds, your sitter in Manila, and only your wits and whatever karma you’ve accumulated back on earth to save you.

I think that line about “social safety net limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner” is just about perfect, don’t you? And the rest of the paragraph just gets better from there.

I have to say, my only caveat about this book is that occasionally, it seemed less like real life and more like reading what would happen if Carrie from Sex and the City grew up, got married and had three kids — but in a good way. Reading about Kogan’s life is like reading science fiction, a world that bears little resemblance to ours at first glance, but where parallels become clear in the details. In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, so much so that I’m going to search out a copy of her first book, Shutterbabe, a memoir about her years as a war photographer.

Stay tuned, and later this week you can have a chance to win my very own slightly worn but well appreciated copy as part of another giveaway!

Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog (a book review)

About a million years ago, I used to do book reviews here on the blog. I think it’s been more than a year since I’ve put one up. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been at least six months since I’ve read anything other than a photography book (but man, I’ve read a lot of those!) or a trashy detective novel from my mother’s endless stash.

Also a million years ago, I was a co-presenter with an amazing panel of writers and bloggers at the Association for Research on Mothering’s (ARM) Motherlode conference. Have you heard of ARM? This is how they self-describe:

The Association for Research on Mothering, at York University, Toronto, houses the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Demeter Press, and Mother Outlaws. The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood.

These bits of ancient history intersected in a recent e-mail I received from ARM. Earlier this year, they released a book called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog. I received a review copy a week or so back, and I couldn’t wait to dive into it.

The book is a series of essays, ranging in tone from scholarly papers to personal narrative, all centred around the experience of “mommy” blogs. The essays also range in perspective from the blogger to the reader of blogs to, in the introduction, the relatively uninitiated.

I have to tell you, I didn’t read every word. Some of the essays appealed to me more than others. Of course, I devoured every word of the contributions from my friends and Motherlode co-presenters, Ann Douglas and Jen Lawrence.

In “Web 2.0, Meet the Mommy Bloggers” Ann Douglas, esteemed parenting writer and a long-time friend and mentor, writes about the darker side of the “mamasphere” — how the influx of marketers and marketing, as well as human nature’s baser instincts, make mothers compete against each other for a slice of the pie. The pie is not just financial recompense, though. She notes,

…social networking sites are able to attract hundreds of thousands of members who are willing to accept popularity — or even the promise of popularity — in lieu of cash payment for the content they provide to these sites. […] This can, in turn, create an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation between mothers.

Jen Lawrence, a blogger I credit as one of my first favourites and a blogger I’ve tried to emulate over the years, submitted a reworked version of her Motherlode presentation. In “Blog for Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations” she discusses how the advent of the monetization movement circa 2006 completely altered the dynamic between bloggers and readers, and among bloggers themselves. She includes one of my favourite analogies of all time, with respect to marketing and bloggers. She says,

I think that blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to building community, even if there are blog ads running down the sidebar. […] But I don’t want blogging to become just another guerilla marketing technique. I don’t want to be invited to a friend’s home, only to discover I was really invited to a Tupperware party.

I didn’t just love the essays in this book that happened to be written by my friends, though. I was completely sucked in by Melissa Camara Wilkins’ “Beyond Cute: A Mom, a Blog, and a Question of Content.” Her essay examines why she blogs, and the satisfaction she derives from being a part of the online mothering community. She perfectly surmizes one of the reasons I so love mommyblogs as a whole: “I’m not narcissistically writing about myself; I am recording my personal narrative and contributing to a collective, descriptive understanding of contemporary motherhood.”

Also on a personal note, I was drawn in by May Friedman’s essay, “Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz: Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs.” Since I cut my teeth reading those same infertility blogs, I found Friedman’s perspective (as a “quite fertile” reader of infertility blogs) rather intriguing. And I read with a sort of openmouthed wonder Jennifer Gilbert’s “I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood.” She explains, in witty detail, how reading mommyblogs convinced her that “mothering was a thankless, Sisyphean exercise that involved prying jellybeans and loose change out of a child’s nose from sunup to sundown” (*snicker*) and simply not the life she wanted to live.

When I first started reading this book, I cringed at how dated some of the references felt. I don’t know a lot about the publishing industry, but it must be hard to get out a book that’s cutting edge when references to things that happened less than two years ago seem like ancient history. Then again, there have been a lot of pixels posted about the nature of mommyblogging again this summer, so like every other fad in motherhood, whatever is old is new again… the cycle is just a lot faster now!

If you’re at all interested in how mommyblogs are shaping our mothering conversations, I highly recommend this book — or at least, big chunks of it. And the nice thing about such varied styles and perspectives is the fact that the chunks that appeal to you are likely not the same ones that appealed to me. Like the mamasphere itself, it offers an intriguing range of voices and opinions, some contradictory and some conciliatory, some vexing and some inspiring, some educated and some entertaining. In this case, as in the mamasphere, the whole is as intriguing as the sum of the parts.

BBC Books meme

(I filched this meme from a couple of friends’ Facebook pages. According to the original meme, the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 important books here. Thing is, I went looking for the original source of 100 books, and couldn’t find it anywhere. There’s this BBC Big Reads list from 2003, but it’s not the same. But hey, since when do we allow a little thing that factual sources stand in the way of good blog fodder. On with the meme!)

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
Continue reading “BBC Books meme”

Stephen King disses Stephenie Meyer

Y’all know I pretty much worship the pages Stephen King writes upon. And I’ll admit that I got pretty well sucked in by the first book of the Twilight series, while gradually losing my enthusiasm through the next three. But I found the idea of a Stephen King smackdown of Stephenie Meyer particularly delicious. Apparently he loves JK Rowling and thinks “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” To date, Meyer has not responded. I hope she does, though. It’d make for some great literary spectating!

Celebrity sightings?

I’m pulling this conversation out of the comments from yesterday’s post, which has turned to minor (and major) celebrity encounters. Share your celebrity sighting (or, erm, stalking) stories here!

Margaret Atwood was mentioned in the last set of comments, and I have a story of my own to add – one that nicely straddles the line between sightings and stalking, in fact!

It was the late 1990s, maybe 1998 or so, and I was attending a Margaret Atwood reading at the National Library. I had a small collection of autographed Canadian literature, and I was clutching my hardcover copy of Alias Grace, hoping for a signature. I stopped off in the washroom about fifteen minutes before the reading was scheduled to begin and – gasp! – there she was! Margaret Atwood! In the bathroom!!

She stepped into a stall, and I froze. Would there be a public book signing after the reading, or would this be my only chance? If I slipped the book and a pen under the side of the stall, she’d be comfortably seated and able to sign at her leisure. In less than a second, the realm of possibilities played out in my head, and finished with me being escorted out of the library by security with neither my book nor my dignity. In the end, I decided to wait, and got my autograph by standing in line with the rest of the world. “The time I almost stalked Margaret Atwood in the ladies room” doesn’t play out for laughs quite to the extent that “The time I stalked Margaret Atwood in the ladies’ room,” but I didn’t know about blog fodder back then.

Do share! What’s your best brush-with-celebrity story? (And, only a couple of days left to vote to send me to Chicago. Just think of the potential for minor celebrity stalking at BlogHer!!)

On bad dogs and vampires: or, how hype influences your reading life

How does hype affect how you approach a book? The last two books I’ve read have been ridiculously overexposed and analyzed half to death in the last month or so, probably not coincidentally because they were both made into movies that were released in December.

Just before Christmas, I read most of John Grogan’s Marley and Me, the sweet story of one family’s life with the world’s worst dog. My dad gave it to me, after a friend loaned it to him. He has personal experience with the world’s worst dog, which is really a post for another day, but let me say this: at least Marley never ate anybody’s dentures. Twice.

Anyway, the book: I read it, but I didn’t get sucked into it. It took me more than six weeks to get through it, because I kept picking it up and putting it down again. I felt like I had to read it, partly because my dad had given it to me and my dad has never recommended a book to me before, but partly because it’s a story about a big yeller dog and my heart has endless space in it for big yeller dogs, especially ones with a mischievous streak.

I laughed out loud a few times, especially in the parts that brought me back to the days of wrangling my own impossibly stubborn golden-shepherd mix pest (who, by the way, turned into the world’s best doggie), but I didn’t cry once. That may have been, though, because I saw where the book was going about two chapters from the end and decided to bail. When you have a 10 year old dog that you love beyond words in your life, you don’t need to read about the demise of other people’s dogs no matter what kind of happy ending they try to wrap it up in. In the end, it was a nice book and I enjoyed the stories, but I really didn’t see why everybody was so gaga over it. It just didn’t catch me, yanno?

By contrast, I have been righteously hooked by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Oh my good lord, how I am hooked. I can barely stand to take these rare minutes of calm quiet nap time to write this out, when I could be reading to find out what happens next to Bella and Edward and the rest of them. I’m halfway through the third book now, and after racing through the books to this point, I find I’m trying to slow down, knowing there’s only one book after this one and then I’ll be done. Whatever will I do then?

I’d asked for the books for Christmas, after waiting nearly two months to move from 600th to 350th in the public library queue for the first book alone. I wasn’t even sure, to be honest, that I’d like the books, but I’d heard enough from those whose taste I truly admire to think that maybe I’d enjoy them. Besides, even if they were a little too teeny-bopper sacchariney, as I feared they might be, I’ve always been a fan of a good vampire tale. Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned are still among my favourite books of all time.

Now that I think of it, I think I’ll post my review of the Twilight books under a separate post. This one is long enough, methinks! But for now, I’m curious about the “Oprah effect” and how it affects your enjoyment of a book. I think I would have enjoyed Marley and Me a little bit more if I’d just stumbled randomly upon it, rather than having it saturated through popular culture. And yet, although the hype about the Twilight books is no less ubiquitous, I’m completely and utterly drawn in. I can’t even say that they’re more finely crafted. I expected to enjoy them, but I didn’t expect to want to put my life on hold until I finished them!

What do you think? Do you find that the “Oprah’s Book Club” stamp on a book is the thing that draws you in, or (like me) the thing that makes you say, “No thanks.” Do reviews and the recommendations of friends enhance or take away from your enjoyment of a book?

Kids, books, and a love of reading: Part Two of two

In part one of this mini-series on helping your kids to fall in love with books, I talked about a new website full of book suggestions. This post is about a great set of new books that I was offered for review in mid-November. Not just any books, but graphic novels comic books for beginning readers.

I might have mentioned before, we come by a love of comic books honestly in our home. Beloved studied illustration formally before moving on to an animation program, and our basement is crammed to the rafters (literally!) with the paltry remains of his once-legendary comic book collection, largely skewed to the 1980s superhero genre. And at the tender age of six, Tristan is already creating his own comic books. So when the nice people from TOON Books sent me a pitch offering me a couple of free high-end hardcover comic books for beginning readers, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough.

Here’s the pitch that hooked me:

Since the early days of comics, parents and teachers have experienced a challenge: Kids, even reluctant readers, love comics, but are comics good for them?

With TOON Books, the solution has arrived. Authored by illustrious cartoonists and children book artists, edited with the highest literary standards, and thoughtfully making use of a controlled vocabulary, the new books are perfect for emerging readers ages four and up. The series, developed by Francoise Mouly (Art Editor of The New Yorker) with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (MAUS) as Advisor, builds on a tradition of excellence in children’s literature: young readers will fall in love with these books and return to them over and over again. The luxuriously produced hardcovers are gifts that they’ll treasure for years to come.

They sent us three books: Jack and the Box, Mo and Jo, and Stinky. The very first night, Tristan read the entire Jack and the Box book from cover to cover out loud to Beloved and Simon. That’s 30-odd pages, and he’s only in Grade One. I was so impressed! And it’s not an overly simplistic book either. That’s what I liked about these books, that they’re accessible without being condescending. Beloved and Tristan took turns reading the next two books out loud over the subsequent nights.

The same week we received and devoured our TOON books, Art Spiegelman was interviewed on my favourite radio program, CBC’s Q. There’s an article about the books, and you can listen to his interview from the CBC site. (Gah, the link to the interview from the CBC article doesn’t work. If you’re determined, and it is worth it, go to http://www.cbc.ca/q/pastepisodes.html and scroll down to December 2 to download the podcast of the episode.) It’s really quite fascinating, the philosophy behind reclaiming the comic book genre for beginning readers. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion about how Jack and the Box is even a bit on the scary side, from a child’s point of view, and how they attributed kids with a level of sophistication and cognizance that a lot of beginning-reader books simply do not. They also talk about how comic books add a nuance in expression and interaction that regular picture books do not. Even if you don’t get the books, which I highly recommend, the interview makes for some thoughtful discussion.

Am I raving a bit? It’s genuine. I honestly love these books, and can’t wait to go out and add some more to our collection.

Kids, books and a love reading: Part One of two

I’d originally planned this as one post, but time and my own loquaciousness have deemed that they be separated into parts one and two of a theme: I love reading and by all things holy, my kids shall love to read as well. Lucky for us, I’ve got two great new tools to help with that goal.

The first is a new website designed to help you find books that one celebrity author thinks your kids will love, courtesy of a Mother-Talk blog tour.

James Patterson, one of our generation’s most prolific authors, has taken to heart the cause of getting kids of all ages to love reading. To that end, he recently launched a new website, ReadKiddoRead.com, filled with recommendations to truly great books for kids. From the Mother-Talk pitch I received:

Whether you are still enjoying picture books with your baby or have an older child reading at an advanced level, ReadKiddoRead acts as a resource for finding the best books. Each featured book, hand-selected by Patterson, includes a synopsis, related themes, quotes from critics, links to find the book in any number of locations (including local libraries), and even similar suggested reads. In addition, the website provides resources for finding book discounts and promotions, features interviews and contributions from authors and celebrities.

I signed up for this blog tour because it’s a topic close to my heart, but I was genuinely impressed by the ReadKiddoRead website. It starts with an overview of various age groups and book types. Click on one of them and it will bring you to a list of book ideas in that category with truncated reviews of each one. Click one more time, and you get a full review of the book, including where to buy it, a US library finder (too bad there’s no Canadian equivalent!), a few words from the critics, and a list of a dozen or more “if you like this book, you’ll love this one” suggestions.

They’ve set up a Ning community (you’ll know Ning if you signed up for TwitterMoms or Nablopomo, among others) to discuss ReadKiddoRead and other book ideas for kids.

Just in time for the holidays, if you’re looking for a new book or ten for your favourite kiddies, this is a great place to start. A lot of my board books have been drooled to death, so I might just use the 0 – 2 category for a few suggestions to fill Lucas’s stocking this year!

Coming up next, a set of amazing new books for beginning readers…

Disclosure: I received a $20 amazon gift certificate for participating in this Mother-Talk blog book tour.

Ten-pages-in book review: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written a 10-pages-in book review. This is largely because I am in the year of the series, working my way through all seven Harry Potter books, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, and I’m currently in the middle of re-reading one of my all-time favourite series, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts)(snicker). But this isn’t about those books.

The book I’m reading right now is Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I’d seen it mentioned here and there, and it was on the library’s express read shelf. In a fit of optimism (I read quickly, but never seem to have the time to get around to reading lately, and the books are due in seven days) I picked it up. I am so glad I did.

I don’t know if this book would have resonated so deeply with me if I weren’t already in the midst of my own dietary recalibration exercise, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Pollan’s book is an examination of how we in Western society have reduced food to nothing more than nutrients, and asks why in a society completely obsessed with ‘healthy’ eating we are more overweight and more sick than ever before. It’s fascinating reading: part history lesson, part self-help, part diatribe. Even with the library-imposed deadline, I couldn’t put it down.

Why does Pollan think food needs to be defended? He observes that over the last generation or so, we have slowly replaced our intake of actual food with highly processed foodlike substances. He says that in reducing food to its nutritional components (not only macronutrients like proteins, carbohydrates and fats, but micronutrients like omega-3 and vitamins) and reducing the purpose of eating to bodily health, we actually do ourselves considerable harm.

In Defense of Food is broken into three parts. The first is a historical examination of how we came to be in this “age of nutritionism”, as Pollan calls it, and how “fake foods” became so ubiquitous. We in Western culture are so obsessed with the nutritional value of food that we have elevated it to an ideology requiring an “-ism”. Pollan blames the unholy trinity of the food industry, nutrition science and journalism our current mentality, and for propagating misleading and even dangerous dietary recommendations: “[M]ost of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half-century … has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.” Not to mention, he observes, ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan illustrates this in the example of margarine, “the first important synthetic food to slip into our diet.” He notes that margarine was created in the nineteenth century as a cheap substitute for butter, but became the poster child for the anti-saturated-fat movement that began in the 1950s at the advent of nutritionalism. This (albeit lengthy) paragraph illustrates not only Pollan’s point but his rather entertaining style as well:

[M]anufacturers quickly figured out that their product, with some tinkering, could be marketed as better – smarter! – than butter: butter with the bad nutrients removed (cholesterol and saturated fats) and replaced with good nutrients (polyunsaturated fats and then vitamins.) Every time margarine was found wanting, the wanted nutrient could simply be added (Vitamin D? Got it now. Vitamin A? Sure, no problem.) But of course margarine, being the product not of nature but of human ingenuity, could never be any smarter than the nutritionists dictating its recipe, and the nutritionists turned out to be not nearly as smart as they thought. The food scientists’ ingenious method for making healthy vegetable oil solid at room temperature – by blasting it with hydrogen – turned out to produce unhealthy trans fats, fats that we now know are more dangerous than the saturated fats they were designed to replace. Yet the beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking — including the real wincer that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer. So now the trans fats are gone, and margarine marches on, unfazed and apparently unkillable. Too bad the same cannot be said of an unknown number of margarine eaters.

Fake foods and nutritionism aren’t Pollan’s only targets. He notes that the problem starts in the industrialization of food production. Pollan notes that two-thirds of our daily caloric intake comes from four crops: corn, soy, wheat and rice. Think about that. TWO-THIRDS! Humans are designed to be omnivores, so this kind of restriction — not to mention the lengths to which those four crops are processed — is a completely unnatural diet. He also talks about how the way in which we produce food has slowly eroded the quality of the food in order to improve yields, pointing out that it would take three apples from today to equal the iron content in one apple from the 1940s. He goes so far as to suggest that maybe this “nutritional inflation” is an underlying cause of the obesity epidemic: we are the first generation that is overfed AND undernourished at the same time.

As far as dietary advice, Pollan’s prescription is poetic in its simplicity: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the last third of the book, in which I am currently immersed, he expands upon this advice with a few simple dietary rules of thumb like, “would your great-grandmother recognize it as food” and “don’t eat it if it has ingredients you don’t recognize and/or can’t pronounce.”

It’s an engaging, easy-to-follow and eye-opening account, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. And, as an aside, I think Pollan is the first published writer I’ve ever seen even more in love with the parenthetical interruption of his own stream of thought than I am. Read this book, because it will totally change how you think about food.

Coming up next: integrating these ideas into the Plan B diet.