The Road to Anaheim: Orange County: A Personal History by Gustavo Arellano

Orange County: A Personal History by Gustavo Arellano

There's a very significant difference between me, a blandly white mutt of German and Scotch-Irish heritage, and Gustavo Arellano, the son of an illegal Mexican immigrant: his family has been in the United States longer than mine has.

And while our forefathers took similarly miserable jobs, mine working in coal mines and steel mills, his picking oranges and packing tomatoes, so that their children could someday go to college and get cushy professional jobs, there's another major difference.

Nobody ever called me names, blamed me for ruining America, or tried to legislate my family out of the country. My family is American, but in the eyes of many, Arellano's isn't.

Of course, this is beyond nutso, but then again, fate would lead Arellano's family to Orange County, one of the more nutso pieces of real estate in the United States, a nest of right-wing conspicuous consumers who love the Lord, but hate the immigrants - the land of Nixon, Minutemen, and Tammy Faye Bakker.

What made Orange County this way? It's perhaps too big a question for one book, so Arellano helpfully gives us two in Orange County: A Personal History. The first story is an irreverent, mightily refreshing history of Orange County that stands in stark contrast to most of the dry, whitewashed local histories of the region. Arellano tracks the settling of Orange County from its mission and orange grove days to the massive postwar migration, and then traces all its present-day conservatism, fundamentalism, isolationism, and racism right back to its roots. In his hands, Orange County is wittily dissected as postsuburbia, the Ellis Island of the 21st century, and "a petri dish for America's continuing democratic experiment."

But the second story, told in alternating chapters, is the story of the Arellanos in America, from his great-grandfather, chased out of town by a herd of potato-slinging youths to the author himself, and his transformation from geeky OC pocho to politically-conscious and sometimes controversial author of the syndicated column, "Ask a Mexican!"

Arellano is heartbreaking, sometimes cruel, and not always easy to read when talking about his parents' limited education ("I don't want to be like you and my mom, Papi"), his father's alcoholism during his early childhood, and the typical callousness of adolescence (none of the Arellano kids went to, or much cared about their father's citizenship ceremony). But it's all in the spirit of that all-too-rare a thing, thoughtful reflection on the past and the truthful memoir. And despite the distance he's travelled from his family's roots, it's also clear that Arellano takes a great deal of pride in their journey from the rural village of El Cargadero to Anaheim.

One small bone to pick, however. Though Arellano admits he's been called immature, perhaps a bit the result of sharing a bunk bed with his younger brother until well into his 20s, there are times when he describes women that I want to roll my eyes, and perhaps toss him into an ice bath or whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. When a woman tells you she's not particularly fond of your column, it's probably not okay to write in your book, "Chula, I wasn't too fond of the spare tire around your midsection," nor to discuss a girl by saying, "Then I actually met her - I'm not going to describe the gal since she's very much a sweetheart, but let's just say she wasn't my type," nor to describe a crush as possessing "hips that moved like hydraulics." Sort of icky.

That tiny bit aside, I adored every minute of the book, as I do just about anything that Arellano writes. You'll have fun, you'll learn something, and if you're a pinche gabacho, you may just come a step or two closer to understanding why we as a nation need to stomp out this nastiness about immigration once and for all.

As Arellano says:

"As Orange County goes, so goes my family, and as my family has traversed through a century or assimilation and resistance, so will the United States - not the easiest of transitions, but always moving forward. Toward the fruit of knowledge - not an apple, but an orange. Picked by a Mexican, of course."

"It's Toasted": The 60s Ad Campaigns Behind Mad Men

There's no denying that the writers and researchers at Mad Men do their homework, incorporating meticulous period detail as well as some of the most famous advertising campaigns of the 1960s.

I picked up a few books on advertising history, and while some titles were more informative than others, Taschen's The Golden Age of Advertising: The 60s is by far the glossiest, packed with page after page of the most enduring, most beloved, and most horrifying ads of the decade.

It's fun to see where the fictional world of Sterling Cooper crosses paths with history. There's a throwaway line in "For Those Who Think Young" about Freddy Rumsen's work on the Maidenform account (though it seems that will be visited in more detail later this season). Here's one of the ads from Maidenform's famous "I dreamed I was... in my Maidenform bra" campaign. Nice work, Freddy!:



The scan turned out badly, but I thought these were reminiscent of the scrapped Bethlehem Steel ads from "New Amsterdam." Similar concept, though I preferred Sal's WPA-style art:



And remember that Volkswagen ad that Don Draper hated so much in "The Marriage of Figaro?"



Well, turns out not all of those VW ads were so cute after all.

Weekly Geeks #4: Adoption Law and History

For this week's Weekly Geeks, the challenge is to choose a political or social issue, and compile a list of books on the subject.

My interest in adoption law and history is motivated by a few really great books I've read on the subject, coupled with the ways it's impacted the lives of people around me -- from my cousin and his partner, who have spent the past four years navigating the murky waters of adoption through the County of Los Angeles, to a friend who is legally prohibited from receiving medical history information about his biological parents. Our system of adoption in the United States is a troubled, and troubling one.

A few recommended reads:

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

Fessler's book contains the oral histories of unmarried women who became pregnant, entered homes for unwed mothers, and surrendered their babies for adoption during the 1950s and 60s. It's a truly moving, tragic, and horrifying social history from people in the adoption equation whose stories are often overlooked.

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Georgia Tann brokered over 5000 adoptions out of her Memphis orphanage, and raked in over $1 million doing it. Her methods were monstrous, and involved tricking unwed and poor mothers into signing away legal custody of their children, kidnapping children from poor families, and falsifying birth certificates so they'd be impossible to track down once she sold them across state lines. Raymond's harrowing account of Tann's practices, and how she got away with them is not to be missed.

The English American by Alison Larkin

A bit lighter than the first two books listed here, The English American is about Pippa Dunn, a young woman born to American parents, but adopted by a British family. When Pippa decides to contact her birth mother, she runs headlong into the infuriating legalities of the U.S. adoption system, but is eventually reunited with Billie, a dramatic, creative woman with whom Pippa feels an immediate connection. However, as she gets to know Billie, and her birth father, Walt, their happy reunion gradually becomes cloudier and more complicated. Though the premise plays out in sometimes fanciful ways, the relationships and emotions explored here always ring true.

And here are some others I haven't read yet, but am interested in:

Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 by Julie Berebitsky

Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption by Barbara Melosh

"You Can't Have a Negro": The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

On one side were Americans dizzied by Red paranoia and terrified by the perceived threat of juvenile delinquency. On the other, a burgeoning field for young artists that offered nearly total freedom and creative control. Postwar America was just the right place for the gory, irreverent horror, crime, and romance comics, and at the same time, no place at all.

For years, the hundreds of titles produced by publishers like EC, National/DC, Marvel, and Timely were devoured by young readers, and either ignored or dismissed by the adults who weren't writing and drawing them -- something juvenile, but benign that kids would eventually grow out of. But then, the grown-ups started to pay attention, Fredric Wertham published the methodically shoddy, but polemically brilliant Seduction of the Innocent, and things got messy.

Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague is a cultural-historical examination of the crackdown against comics and the emergence of the Comics Code, which lamed everything up good and proper. This is what the book purports to be about, but it is also the least interesting part.

What makes The Ten-Cent Plague worth checking out is its exploration of the rise of the comics publishing houses, and the writers, artists, and publishers who determined their courses and individual styles. After the Comics Code put many titles off the rack and publishers out of business, literally hundreds of people were forced out of the comics business for good. For the book, Hajdu interviewed over 150 of these individuals, as well as comic book readers -- the very people who were excluded from the studies of the 1940s and 1950s that "proved" a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency.

The brightest spot in the book is Hajdu's account of EC (Entertaining Comics), the most notorious of the horror and crime comics publishers. Formerly Educational Comics, EC became the home of Shock SuspenStories, Weird Fantasy, Tales from the Crypt, and most enduringly, Mad, when science teacher Bill Gaines took over the business after his father's death. Gaines was an unlikely, and at first, unwilling leader, but he gradually became caught up with the fervor of his artists, and eventually became one of the industry's biggest defenders and champions. When the CMAA told him to edit one of his stories, saying, "You can't have a Negro," Gaines called up its head, Charles F. Murphy:

"Gaines said, 'Fuck you,' hung up on Murphy, and published the story intact.

'That was Bill's last act as a comic-book publisher,' said [Al] Feldstein."

Though EC's gruesome illustrations (for example, a baseball player hitting a ball with a severed limb) were found notably offensive by Wertham and Co., their war comics, edited by Harvey Kurtzman, refused to glamorize war. Hajdu writes, "Parents no doubt watched their children reading Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat and figured that the kids were being spoon-fed jingoism, unaware of the books' diet cynicism toward the American military and sensitivity to the impartial cruelty of war."

And how could you not love a company that sent out the following call for writers?:

"You should know this about our horror books. We have no ghosts, devils, goblins or the like. We tolerate vampires and werewolves, if they follow tradition and behave the way respectable vampires and werewolves should.

We love walking corpse stories.

We'll accept an occasional zombie or mummy.

We relish the contres cruels story...

No cops and robbers stories. Virtue doesn't have to triumph over evil."

Really, I would have loved an entire book about this. Leave out the pseudo-science, the Congressional hearings, the comic-book burnings hosted by misled youth, but then again, you can't tell the story of EC, and other publishers like them, without them.

Hajdu seems to realize this, and Wertham and the Comics Code encompass only the last 75 pages of the book, and really seem a little thin compared to his vibrant chapters devoted to the writers themselves.

All I can say in the end, and unlikelier words have never passed through my lips, is, "Ah, to have been a 12-year-old boy in 1951." It would have been good readin'.

Like Something Out of Kafka

There are a few things for which I am grateful each and every day: family, friends, the critters, good health. In addition to these incredibly important, yet fairly typical things, I am constantly reminded how grateful I am that I am no longer a public school teacher.

From a recent episode of This American Life, I learned about "the Rubber Room," a sort of Kafkaesque holding pen for NYC public school teachers who are awaiting disciplinary hearings. They report here for the workday, and sit, doing absolutely nothing -- sometimes for months or even years. It is not required that they be told the charges against them.

Some of these teachers clearly should not be allowed back in the classroom, but some people are there on dubious charges, and some merely had personality conflicts with school administrators. Though the BOE won't discuss it, it is estimated that somewhere between 600-900 teachers are currently assigned to these facilities.

Five Boroughs Productions is currently making a documentary about it -- here's the trailer.



UPDATE: Ugh. As if I needed another reason to be grateful. Sure, my institution's materials budget may have been cut by 75% for the remainder of the fiscal year, but at least my job is safe.

Children for Sale: The Baby Thief by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

A friend of mine once had Victorian-style business cards made up that read, "Joe Leo, Purveyor in Fine Human Infants." Hilarious, right? I always thought so, until I learned about Georgia Tann, a woman who kidnapped and sold children out of her Memphis orphanages from the 1920s until her death in 1950.

At the turn of the century, adoption wasn't terribly popular, as orphans and illegitimate children were considered to be innately inferior. Children most likely to be adopted on the Orphan Trains that took loads of children west were older boys who looked like they could do heavy labor.

Georgia Tann helped make adoption appealing to American families, even if they only happened to be wealthy or middle class white ones. Children were adopted to be children, not unpaid labor, which seems to have been her only positive contribution to the institution.

Tann brokered over 5000 adoptions during her tenure in Memphis, and raked in over $1 million doing it under the legitimate front of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Her clients included state and local officials, judges, and Hollywood stars, including Dick Powell and June Allyson and Joan Crawford. Undoubtedly, she liked associating with these types, but even more, she enjoyed the leverage this gave her over them. These placements allowed her to run her dirty business without oversight or censure, and also allowed her to have laws changed when they hampered her methods. Having the notorious Boss Crump in her corner didn't hurt either.

Tann believed that adoption was good for orphans. She also believed it was good for children born out of wedlock. And she also believed it was good for children whose parents happened to be poor. She tricked unmarried women in labor into signing "routine forms," which severed their custodial rights, or bribed nurses to tell mothers that their babies had been stillborn. She hired spotters to find poor families, snatched the youngest and prettiest children from their homes, and enlisted one of her pocket judges to sign away the parents' rights, citing "poor living conditions" (apparently, the living conditions were not so poor that ALL the children had to be taken away).

And the suffering didn't end there. Conditions in Tann's homes were abysmal. Children were beaten, starved, dehydrated, and sexually abused by Tann and her staff. She made no effort to place children with loving families -- wealth was enough. As a result, many children were mistreated and abused by their adoptive parents, and some were "exchanged," if they weren't working out.

Also horrifying were the ads Tann ran in the local newspaper, featuring exploitative photographs of children up for adoption: "A solemn little trick with big, brown eyes, Madge is... five years old and 'awful lonesome,'" one ad reads.

To hide her crimes, Tann changed the birth certificates of the children she sold, and had the originals sealed. This policy seeped into legitimate organizations, and to this day, adoptees in many states are forbidden access to their birth records -- it's the law.

In the book, Raymond interviews men and women who were sold by Tann, and recounts their stories of being kidnapped from their parents, tortured in her facilities, and herded off to new families. She also interviews Memphis citizens, many in their 80s and 90s, who knew what Tann was up to, but were powerless to stop her and the Crump machine.

At first, the structure of the book is frustrating. Raymond jumps around in her narrative, and just when it seems she's about to sink her teeth into her subject, she turns her attentions somewhere less painful. It's almost as if Raymond can't face the monstrosity of Georgia Tann all at once, but has to confront her in bits before she can tackle the whole package.

However, by the end of the book, Raymond finds her courage and exposes Tann's crimes. It's a heartbreaking story, and almost unbelievable that one woman could destroy so many lives. That it happened here, and that it happened so recently, that the crimes were so blatant and heinous, and that no one stopped it. Then again, that's U.S. history, more or less.

If you liked...: (although "liked" isn't quite the right word for it) The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler, this book is for you.
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Creepy Note: I just looked up the address of Tann's House of Horrors on Google Maps, and discovered that my apartment was 4 blocks away from it when I lived in Memphis.

Tater Chip Books

The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Never Shower in a Thunderstorm: Surprising Facts and Misleading Myths about Our Health and the World We Live In by Anahad O'Connor

Sometimes one wants a book to pick at rather than to read. This can be Herodotus's Histories, or more likely, it can be a book like the two here, which are books written by very smart people who are obsessed with trivia and know that the rest of us are, too. However, they are, essentially, also books that could have been written by anyone with a library card.

Our authors here are very different types of writers, but both have major media affiliations, which goes a long way towards separating them from the herd, as trivia books go.

O'Connor is a recent Yale graduate who landed a gig writing for the New York Times (damn those young overachievers!), including a popular health and science column titled "Really?" The feature largely proves or debunks a variety of old wives' tales, popular wisdom, and that article you read on Yahoo! News two years ago where scientists said something that you've been using ever since to justify your chocolate, latte, or exercise habits.

Whereas, the authors of The General Book of Ignorance are a producer and a writer from the popular BBC comedy-quiz show QI (Quite Interesting). The program(me) is hosted by Stephen Fry, English television personality and comedian (and author of one of my favorite books, Revenge), and also seeks to debunk commonly accepted answers to popular trivia questions. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone, but does anyone really know the name of the man who did (well, unless they read The Book of General Ignorance)? Since correct answers are rare, points are awarded on the basis of the interesting-ness of incorrect ones and deducted for simply regurgitating common misconceptions. QI says, "It's okay to be wrong, but don't be obviously, boringly wrong."

While both books have their charms, O'Connor's didn't say a whole lot that isn't already known by the discerning reader. We know that chicken soup is good for what ales you, that a poppyseed bagel can make you fail a drug test, and that the key to losing weight is generally to eat less and move more. However, I did learn some interesting things from him about seafood and scabs. The book includes a handy chart, listing the seafood with the most Omega-3 and the lowest concentrations of toxins, which I've now committed to memory. Also, everything your mom ever told you about treating a boo-boo is probably wrong; they ought to be covered, kept moist, and (yes) picked at occasionally.

On the other hand, I learned a ton of things I had no idea about from The Book of General Ignorance, including the technological contributions of the Scottish, the fashion contributions of the Croatians, and the culinary contributions of the French. And there's also a very funny story about Napoleon and a rabbit hunt gone bad.

Still, despite the cranky Guardian digested read about the latter, you couldn't go wrong with either if you need a good public transit, airport, doctor's waiting room, or bathroom book, and I suppose that's fairly high praise. Nobody says that kind of stuff about Sister Carrie.

Publish, Profit, and/or Perish?

In light of this very nifty article over at LA Weekly about the independent booksellers here in our beloved and sprawling metropolis, I thought I'd drop a plug for Laura J. Miller's Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption.

I'm only a chapter or so into it, and I'm reading it for dissertation-related reasons, but so far it looks like a corker. It's dense, to be sure, but well-researched and informed by the best current sociological thinking on the intersection of culture and economics.

(If that last nerdgasm doesn't convince you, the good people at Skylight books have it on their "Staff Recommends..." shelf.)

What's Up With Morrissey, and Other Burning Cultural Questions

Ask a Mexican by Gustavo Arellano

In 2004, Arellano's editor at the O.C. Weekly suggested he write a column where readers could write in to ask questions about Mexicans. To some, this might seem like a suggestion in questionable taste. Well, welcome to the O.C., bitch. Arellano dubs it "the most Mexican-hating county in the country," and that's not exactly overstatement.

But if the ills of racism can be cured by education and a dialogue to promote understanding, this Mexican was game. As the son of an illegal immigrant and the recipient of a masters degree in Latin American Studies, he had more than a little insight on the subject. Plus, he figured, no one would read it. Arellano penned this for his debut:

Dear Mexican, Why do Mexicans call white people gringos?
Dear Gabacho, Mexicans do not call gringos gringos. Only gringos call gringos gringos. Mexicans call gringos gabachos.

And a star was born.

The column is now the Weekly's most popular feature, and this book collects the most probing questions posed to The Mexican. These come from sensitive liberals, Minutemen-loving xenophobes, and perplexed second-generation Latinos alike, and a good hunk of them are absolutely horrifying.

But for every pinche gabacho asking, Why do Mexicans stand on the side of streets trying to get jobs? Why can't they just get real jobs?, there's a reader desperately trying to understand why Mexican candy is covered in chile, how the Mexican postal system works (answer: it doesn't), or what's up with all the Guatamalan-bashing.

What's most fun about this book is watching Arellano spin the most offensive, empty-headed questions into cultural studies gold in 500 words or less. You'll learn about la raza cosmica, the regional differences in Mexican popular music, and the intricacies of Mexican and U.S. immigration policies.

An added bonus for English speakers: you will learn a lot of good, new swears.
An added bonus for everyone: you will read the sardonically heart-warming story of how porn saved Arellano and his friends from gang life.

Adoption Before Roe v. Wade

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

Fessler's book contains the oral histories of unmarried women who became pregnant, entered homes for unwed mothers, and surrendered their babies for adoption during the 1950s and 60s. On the one hand, this book contains the kinds of stories you'd expect -- the women interviewed are mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly Catholic, and mostly woefully uninformed about sex. The stories echo one another almost to the point of saturation. And yet, the cruelty and denial of parental rights each woman was subjected to is so egregious that their stories stand alone, each heartbreaking and unforgettable.

The treatment the women received at the hands of their families and their babies' fathers is awful, though somewhat predictable, knowing what we know about gender roles and sex ed. in those days. More shocking, however, are the psychological games that social workers played with the new mothers. Lines like, "What do you have to offer this child?" and "He'll be called a bastard on the playground," and "She'll be better off with this nice family," are repeated over and over, as though scripted. The women in the homes were encouraged to forget about their children, being told, "You can have another one."

And, of course, this did not prove to be a good coping strategy. Many of the women interviewed spoke of entering into abusive or hasty marriages, either believing that they deserved no better or hoping to give birth to a child they could keep.

A horrifying social history that tells you a good deal about what you think you already know about sex, the double standard, and unwed motherhood in the 50s and 60s.

57th Most Literate City... Hmph!*

It's a good PR week for our respective institutions.

Susan Patron, a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, is awarded the 2007 Newbery Medal for The Higher Power of Lucky

USC sociologist Barry Glassner is interviewed at Salon about his new book, The Gospel of Food.

We may not know all the best people, but we can at least say we work with them.
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* It's a fact.

We Have Met the Spacemen, and They are Graduate Students

Hari Seldon is the Scotty of the social sciences: a science fiction character who embodies our particular brand of geek's idealized sense of self, the ultimate in wish fulfillment for the Chi-Square crowd. While Montgomery Scott taught the indoor children of the physics persuasion that sometimes the engineer saved the ship, got the girl, and beat the hell out of a bunch of Klingons who couldn't hold their liquor, with the Foundation series, Issac Asimov teaches us that we, the bastard children of Cassandra and Emil Durkheim, were right all along, and if everyone would listen to us, we could fix society.

And also: we would have spaceships and nuclear blasters.

Seldon is the inventor of "psychohistory" - a kind of demography/political sociology/ group psychology on an interplanetary scale that can predict the broad sweep of history with amazing accuracy. Crunching the numbers shows him that the Empire is about to collapse and galactic society is about to fall into a dark ages that will last 30,000 years. However, Seldon has also figured out how to shorten that interregnum to 1,000 years via subtly planning out the course of the future, and establishes a foundation of scholars on a tiny planet out in the galactic boonies to carry out "the Seldon Plan".*

Overall Seldon is more of a mythic figure than a protagonist per se and he may be a bit of a trickster, as it becomes more and more clear that he arguably set up a double-blind experiment where the outcome is the fate of humanity and the confederates are hard to tell from the dupes. The series follows several centuries of the Plan, and if anyone can be said to be the hero of the story arc it's the Seldon Foundation itself. Over the course of the series, several forces arise to challenge the Foundation, and not all of them were predicted by Seldon.

Of the books, my favorite are those that cover the early leaders of the Foundation, as they resort to ever-sneakier and more inventive diplomacy to take on interplanetary warlords, the remnants of the dying Empire, and internal political intrigue. Asimov also does a nice job keeping the characters engaging, which is very necessesary when one of the basic conceits of your story is that the mass actions of humanity render their individual choices and actions more or less irrelevant.**

Plus, at the end of each crisis the Foundation faces, a little Hari Seldon hologram pops up in their town hall and explains how he'd had all of this predicted with an alpha = .05, given that he set up the Foundation when, where, and how he did. The series eventually starts to exhibit diminishing returns, but I think it stays pretty solid all the way up to Foundation's Edge.

If you like...
States and Social Revolution by Theda Skocpol,***
Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse by Jared Diamond,****
those old Star Trek episodes where Kirk and the gang find some planet run by a computer, or an alien dressed up like a 19th century dandy, or the Romans or something,

These books are for you.
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*In regards to the amazing predictive power and causal heft of Seldon's Plan, he's also kind of the Golden Fleece of sociology as well, but that's neither here nor there.
**The duality of structure, determinism vs. agency - does this sound familiar to anyone else?
*** Come to think of it, given the logic of the plot, admirers of Barrington Moore might like it more.
****This Jared is not, FYI, the Subway guy.

The Kids Are Not Alright

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids by Alexandra Robbins

I reviewed this for PopMatters earlier this week, but wanted to mention it here since I know one or two readers of this blog are huge Pledged fans.

You might wonder if nervous, panicky, grade-obsessed high school kids could be even half as interesting as drunk, promiscuous sorority girls, but believe it or not, they are more so. As much as I liked Pledged, I've got to say, this book is a little bit better.

And it's every bit as sad. Even though the kids go to an exceptionally good public school and have quite a few life advantages and opportunities (internships at the NIH and the Supreme Court, computers at home, supportive parents), they're broken little people. Most of the kids have been programmed to believe that unless they go to an Ivy League, they might as well be dead. They throw themselves into their extracurricular activities and studies with a dutiful joylessness. No one really seems to have genuine interests or a love of learning - it's all about impressing the admissions staff at Stanford.

Despite all of this, the kids that Robbins studies are quite likeable and sympathetic, and because she follows them around for an entire school year conducting in-depth interviews, you get to know them pretty well. You wish them well. But mostly, you just wish they'd loosen up and enjoy being young.

It's a mighty thick book, but very accessible and a page-turner besides. Aside from that, I learned a lot of very illuminating things about standardized tests, college admissions, and how college rankings are tabulated. Really, kids should throw out their U.S. News & World Report rankings and use a more humane source like Colleges That Change Lives (where, I am pleased to say, my own alma mater receives a very nice little write-up).

Robbins says that students should be encouraged to find a school that fits them, rather than contorting themselves to fit a school. Sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised.

How To Write a Left Wing Manifesto

I realize that, as a good leftie, I am the target audience for the glut of Bush-bashing books on the market. I'm supposed to love them, but I don't.

Why? Because most of them are hysterical, smug, and crappily written. It might seem nit-picky to dismiss a lot of these books over their execution when I support the politics. However, I'm not going to make excuses for bad books that make progressives look as wacky and unstable as Ann Coulter.

Plus, it doesn't have to be this way. If progressive writers would follow a few simple guidelines, they could write meaningful, influential books that reach a wider audience than the MoveOn.org choir.

1. Stop trying to be funny if you're not (Dude, Where's My Country anyone?). Simmer down, Michael Moore, and stick to the facts. You're extremely good at certain things, but you're not as clever as you think you are. Also, you're not Jesus. The cover of this book makes me want to hork.


2. We understand that you might like to make some money off of this whole thing, but for the love of God, don't be so damn obvious about it. Books that seem like they were written in two weeks and researched entirely on the internet are just whorish.

3. While I don't care for him much either, I like books that give their readers a little more credit for appreciating subtlety and formulating complex opinions. I do not like books that envision their readers as left-wing automatons, running around in circles, frothing at the mouth, and shouting, "Bush is the devil" at regular intervals.

Some of these books are very very good, however. Two in particular are widely reviled in my household because they are the reason we do not eat meat. Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser are well-researched and well-written books. They blend hard facts and numbers with in-depth investigative research that finds a human angle. And Bushwhacked in particular is charming and funny. This is how good activist writing is done.

I haven't read any similar books from the right (though I probably should), so I don't know if there are any good ones. Does such a thing exist, or is it all O'Reilly and Hannity-esque hacks and nutjobs? If you can think of any, let me know.

Good Trash

Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins

Reading this book is kind of like going to a horror movie knowing that the plucky teens will die horribly at the hands of a deranged psycho killer, but still wanting to see how it happens. A reporter goes undercover into sorority houses at schools around the country and find that the 'secret' life of sororities involves busloads of casual sex, binge drinking, eating disorders, back-stabbing, and general superficiality. Of course, this is a tremendous surprise to us all.

Still, I have recommended this book to a number of intelligent, well-read individuals, the kinds of people who manipulate Census data and build websites and read Sartre for fun. And you know what? Each and every one of them freakin' loved reading some debauched tales of skinny rich girls bombed on Grey Goose.

It's not all vomit and shoe-shopping, though. Sometimes you really feel bad for them. Some of them are decent human beings who make bad choices or wind up in bad situations. Some of it is just sad.

Every once in awhile your brain hurts and simply refuses to process anything too deep. And as everyone but the biggest culture snobs know, books don't have to be good to be good.

If you like...: the occasional pop psychology, true crime, or bodice-ripper, and aren't the least bit ashamed of it, this book is for you.

Why People Who Say That U.S. Workplaces Are Overregulated and Unions Have Destroyed Corporate America Are Evil Incarnate

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle

The Goods: When I was in high school, I remember reading a paragraph in my history textbook about the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, and thinking, this sounds important, we should study this. But no, there were wars to be covered, and if we were going to make it to Vietnam by the end of the school year, there was no time to spend dallying around with labor movements, workers' safety and Tammany Hall.

As a result of my gap-filled history education, I am a huge sucker for any U.S. history books that deal with domestic happenings between 1865 and 1914, 1918 and 1941, and 1945 and 1965.

Triangle deals with the circumstances that led to 146 people burning, suffocating, or leaping to their deaths because they were locked in the factory workroom. And why would you have hundreds of people working in your factory and only one exit, you might ask. Why, to make sure none of those working class women were smuggling stolen shirtwaists home in their handbags, of course.

Although the disaster led to a massive overhaul of workplace safety regulations (a lot of which are currently being dismantled), the factory owners were aquitted of all criminal and civil charges, and in fact, wound up with an insurance settlement that surpassed their monetary losses.

This is also a book about corrupt Gilded Age politics and the struggles of female factory workers for fair wages and humane working conditions and socialist newspapers and strikebreakers with no compunctions about beating up women in dark alleys. After reading Triangle, you will be running to your local library with a list of at least five things that you want to learn all about.

If you liked...: highly readable histories like Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson, this book is for you.