Sticks and Stones, by Emily Bazelon

Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, by Emily Bazelon
The Name of the Game
(Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Kindle India, Amazon India)

It's the appearance of difference that leads to bullying. The three cases the author follows in great detail make that much clear; tragically so in one case. The book is a fairly engrossing account of the sometimes very disturbing specifics and details of bullying.

Words give expression to thoughts, making them tangible and real. Words have a power that is rarely wielded responsibly by those who do not realize the power that words have. Words, barbs, insults, innuendo, gossip, all mixed in the cauldron of malice and apathy results in a toxic mix. Bullying is as much about individual power as it is about societal attitudes towards the weak.

Bazelon's book is divided into basically three parts. The first is more or less detailed reporting and investigative journalism into three cases of bullying - two of girls and one of a boy. One resulted in a suicide. The other two had less tragic endings. The second part, "Escalation", is the weakest part of the book, where reporting mixes with opinion, philosophy, and deft jabs at the conservative right.

Where the book excels is in the reporting of the three different cases of bullying. When transitioning from the descriptive to the analytical and prescriptive, something however gets lost in the book.

The Indian Renaissance, by Sanjeev Sanyal

The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline, by Sanjeev Sanyal

"Useful enough. But... Misleading title, dry and unengaging prose"
(Amazon US, UK, CA, Flipkart)
One-line review: Useful in its own right, but makes for dry and uninviting prose.

Short review: If a country is indeed seen as rising after a thousand years of decline, and if you put so in the title of your book, it stands to reason you are expected to devote some amount of reasoning and logic to that line. This book does not. Why the decline happened is only fleetingly touched upon, and without much conviction. The book's stronger sections are towards the latter part, especially when talking about the country's broken education system and its archaic and dysfunctional justice system. The book's heart is in the right place, but it needed more meat on its bones, and a more vigorous heart, so to say, to elevate it from the ranks of the me-too to a must-read.

The White Man's Burden - Winthrop Jordan

Image credit: OUP

The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, by Winthrop D. Jordan

One-line review: Self-evident truths are sometimes the hardest to uphold.
"Every revolution must suppress its successors"


(Amazon US, Kindle US, Amazon UK, Kindle UK, Amazon Canada, Kindle Canada, Flipkart)

Short review: This book is a condensed version of the author's celebrated work on the history and origins of racism in the United States. That book is still considered the "definitive work on the history of race in America in the colonial era" , but its formidable length persuaded Winthrop Jordan to come out with a condensed version that would appeal more to the general public. This book should be on every Indian's reading list for two reasons: first, it is a very accessible introduction to racial attitudes and societal discrimination in the United States, and in my opinion has value in the Indian context also. Second, the rationalizations for such discrimination, and in particular the arguments used there were to find an echo in early British colonialism in India, continued in the early twentieth century, and still find echo in several western and even Indian academic institutions. Lastly, this is also a very well-written book.

Long Review:

"Prejudices are inevitable, innate, and right"

Why should an Indian particularly care to read a book on slavery? It is, after all, a history of enslavement and discrimination half a world away, decades and centuries ago, and India has enough problems of her own to sort out without burdening itself with a history in a geography seven seas away.

To do so would however be to miss an opportunity.
For two simple reasons. To understand the mechanics and rationalizations of discrimination on the one hand, and how those same attitudes would vend their way from Europe to Africa, then to the Americas, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to India.
Studying discrimination in a context removed from one's own self can sometimes help bring perspective and understanding. It can also help see patterns that may not be visible otherwise.
What worked hundreds of years ago to dehumanize and subjugate an entire race of people half a world away would also be applied by the British to colonize an entire subcontinent.

"I remain convinced that white American attitudes toward blacks have done a great deal to shape and condition American responses to other racial minorities."

In the words of the author, a study of history "impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to, at least in the immediate future." To that end, "The White Man’s Burden" does a tremendous service in lucidly documenting the evolution of slavery’s form and rationale. While the initial material on the roots of slavery is decidedly sketchy, the book is simply outstanding when taking the reader through the century and a half when slavery established roots, along with the accompanying prejudices. The book’s length should make this accessible to even casual readers.

While forming firm opinions on the basis of one book is risky, doing so on the basis of a well-researched and widely acclaimed book as this, from a scholar as well-respected as the late Winthrop Jordan is a relatively low-risk endeavour.

How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough 

"Fascinating But A Somewhat Skewed, Though Even, Cadence"
    
(Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, Powell's, Publisher, review on Amazon)

This is an excellent book on some of the misconceptions, myths, and challenges that children face when attempting to succeed. Traits and skills previously thought fixed and unmalleable, like character, turn out to be mouldable, while IQ turns out to be a very unreliable predictor of success. The author chronicles  the challenges of a few teachers, students, and administrators as it blends glimpses into academic research with first-hand accounts of on-the-ground challenges faced by these people.

The structure of the book is very, very self-explanatory - there are only five chapters in the book - "How To Fail (And How Not To)", "How To Build Character", "How To Think", "How To Succeed", and "A Better Path". For my money, I think the first and second chapters - "How To Fail" and "How To Build Character" are well worth the price of the book - you would do well to read these carefully.

That many of US schools are not performing is not news. That several of these schools happen to be in poor neighbourhoods is also not unknown. Millions, and billions of dollars at the national level spent, and a score or more programs have been launched, scrapped, and launched - all in the hopes of improving measurable outcomes in the form of improved scores, lower dropout rates, sustained efforts that lead to more students finishing high school and college. All with varying degrees of success. The effort to find more fundamental causes of poor academic performance and poor social skills among students therefore continues.

"In 2008, eighty-three school-age teenagers were murdered in the city, and more than six hundred were shot but survived." The city being Chicago, where the "murder rate is twice as high as the rate in Los Angeles."

The book traces the efforts and struggles of people like Nadine Burke Harris, who was the "lead pediatrician of the Bayview Child Health Care Center", or Elizabeth Spiegel, school chess teacher at the Intermediate School 318, where more than 60 percent of the students "were from low-income families", and which was also the "best middle-school chess program in the United States, bar none." In following the lives of these and more people in the profession of education, the pursuit is to find out what are the building blocks of meaningful success in later life for students.

More than parents' education, professions, or any other socio-economic indicator, it is the correlation between "Adverse Childhood Experiences" and "negative adult outcomes" that are very powerful. These were described in a medical journal article titled, "The Relationships of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead." written by Vincent Felitti. This is what causes children to fail, and hence the title of the chapter, "How To Fail (And How Not To)". For each category of trauma they had experienced, children were given one point by the researchers, and these categories included "physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and various measures of household dysfunction...".
What the researchers found was that "men with an ACE score above 5 were forty-six times more likely to have injected drugs than men with no history of ACEs." It so happens that our human bodies evolved to deal with stress that dissipated within a very short amount of time - you either got eaten by a predator in a jungle, or not - and not with the stress that humans are subjected to in modern society - the mental stress that can linger for long periods of time. It is the body's reaction to stress that really kills us, not the stress. After all, how many times has your boss actually murdered a person, with their bare hands? Not very often, I would hope and assume. On the other hand, elevated levels of stress result in a hardening of the arteries over a period of time, and that leads to heart attacks. If adults cannot handle stress very well, imagine what havoc stress plays on the psychological and mental state of children.

Lest we think that problems of underachievement are a problem only of those schools in low-income districts, the author points out that even in schools like Riverdale, where the affluent send their kids, children can be found wanting in grit. Schools such as Riverdale exist "not to raise the ceiling on a child's potential achievement in life but to raise the floor, to give him the kinds of connections and credentials that will make it very hard for him to every fall out of the upper class. What Riverdale offers parents, above all else, is a high probability of nonfailure."

And there in lies a valuable lesson - we cannot truly succeed in life unless we experience failure. Which requires the ability to tread off the known, safe, and beaten path, and try something different, not just for the sake of trying something different, but different based on a rational assessment of the alternatives. In other words, the ability to exercise cognitive self-control. "Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one" Now, researchers have demonstrated that "for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers..." These traits are seeded at a very early stage in life. Being passionate about something can be "very liberating for kids".

This book is filled with such nuggets of research, anecdotes of grit and perseverance. By the time I was halfway through, I realized that it - the book - follows a somewhat predictable cadence, which is not a bad thing in itself, at all. A flurry of research at the beginning of a chapter or section that summarizes and familiarizes us with the problem at hand, the status of research into that area, some of the people involved with the research, findings, open questions, followed by a long dive into personal experiences of the people and students in the field. Towards the middle and also in latter part of the book I felt that the narrative had become too skewed towards the narrative, and less so towards the analytical. It may well be the case that without reading about in some detail about the challenges faced by these students and teachers we may not truly appreciate the monumental nature of the task - I however felt some passages appeared more as filler, an attempt to get the book past the two-hundred page mark.

A highly recommended, must-read for anyone wanting to understand the why and what of getting children to become more self-aware, develop character, and ultimately be happy in and with their lives.


ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780547564654
ISBN-10: 0547564651
256 pages
Publication Date: 2012-09-04

Kindle Excerpt:

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, by Evgeny Morozov

"Intellectual Recycling and Internet-Centrism, a tale of Cyber-Utopia Gone Really Wrong"
(Amazon IN, Kindle IN, Kindle, Paperback, Amazon UK, Powell's, Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, my review on Amazon)

"The Net Delusion" by Evegny Morozov dunks a much needed, well-reasoned, and well-researched bucket of cold-water over "Internet-centrists" and "cyber-utopians" (cyber-utopianism is a "naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication"), and assembles together an excellent though somewhat depressing array of evidence to dismantle this edifice of technology-centrists.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, by Peggy Orenstein

“Why be a role model when you can be simply a model?" One icon begets another, more veneer, more commercialized, crasser.

The seeds of this book were laid in 2006, when the author wrote an article called "'What's Wrong with Cinderella?' which ran on Christmas Eve in The New York Times Magazine." The article itself was a response to the "Princess" obsession everyone seemed to be afflicted with. "I fretted over what playing Little Mermaid, a character who actually gives up her voice to get a man, was teaching her." "Her" as in Daisy, the author's daughter. The article attracted a ton of attention, and morphed into this book. We are taken to toy shops, those cheap Made-in-China Barbie dolls as well as those selling dolls that cost several times more, to kids' pageants, to the world of fairy tales, and what the originals say and what the ersatz Disney monstrosities have twisted them into, teenage pop singing sensations that cannot wait to grow up even as they pretend they aren't, and yes - the world of teenage sexed-up role models in TV serials like Hannah Montana and the like.