The Aliens Are Coming! by Ben Miller

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
p103: "...one of the most distant object known..." - 'object' needs an 's' added to be grammatically correct.
p104: (footnote) Inflation came before the Big Bang!
p118: "...whih has five protons..." should be "...which has five protons..."
p130: "Mars' gravity" should be "Mars's gravity" since Mars is singular.
p224: The printing press wasn't invented in Gutenberg - it was invented by Gutenberg - Johannes Gutenberg who lived in Strasbourg at the time.

Note this is a review of an advance review copy. The errors listed above may well have been corrected by the time this book is published.

I first encountered Ben Miller in a TV show called Death in Paradise, which I fell immediately in love with, only to discover that he leaves the show after the first season. He had good reason, but I was crushed. I felt so betrayed. I never wanted to speak to him again. Not that we have ever actually spoken, but then came this book and I forgive him for everything!

Not to be confused with several other volumes with this same title, The Aliens Are Coming!: The Exciting and Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe, is a book is about aliens in space: where are they? Are they even? How are they even? Would we actually know if we received a message from them? It's beautifully written, and it's highly amusing. It's also factual and smart, scientific, and very entertaining, covering the origin of life on Earth and extrapolating from what we know of that to ponder what we might discover in space.

The author did his homework, and given that he was studying Natural Sciences at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and was planning on pursuing a PhD in solid state physics before he relinquished those pursuits to take up comedy and acting, he definitely knows what he's talking about - and almost more importantly, he knows how to share this knowledge in a light-hearted manner with others in a way even I, with my math, can understand!

That's not to say it was all plain sailing! At one point he brings up the old Carl Sagan chestnut that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', which is nonsensical. An extraordinary claim requires no more evidence to support it than does an ordinary claim, because any claim requires sufficient evidence to establish it, and that's it. Once it's established, there is no requirement that we must keep piling on ever more evidence until it reaches extraordinary amounts before we can rely on on it! I really liked Sagan's Cosmos series, but I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's version better. I went to one of Sagan's talks once and frankly, he was a bit of a jerk and pompous, too. I didn't like him in person.

At one point I read that "...the tennis ball in the men's final at Wimbledon..." makes gravitational waves. There's no disputing the science there, but why the men's final? Why not the women's or the mixed doubles? Why mention that at all, why not say "...the tennis ball in the final at Wimbledon..." or better yet, "a tennis ball," since there's more than one in use? It felt a bit genderist, but this was a relatively minor complaint when compared with all the things which the author got right.

As it happens, gravitational waves were discovered in September 2015, but not reported until February 2016, which accounts for why it's not mentioned here, I assume. At least they're confirmed with 99.99 (etc.) percent confidence, so I'm on board! Two black holes (not to be confused with back-hoes!) merged and released energy the equivalent of three solar masses. That's pretty impressive by any standard. When you realize how much energy is out there for the taking - if we only had the smarts to figure out how to get it safely - it makes our pathetic and self-destructive search for more oil and gas pretty sad, doesn't it?

I really liked the chatty way the author tosses in random examples (well, they're random to me!). This is how we get brief mentions of subjects like Breaking Bad, Simon Cowell, Lady Gaga, and cups of tea. There's lots, lots more of course. I loved this book and I recommend it as a first class read about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (aka SETI) and what the likelihood is that we'll ever find any.

Oxford Portraits Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights by Miriam Brody

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this walking through the library in the entrance to the children's section, but this is way too dense and involved for young children - unless they're exceptionally precocious readers. It's more of a late middle-grade to young adult read. It details the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, who was a pioneer in women's rights at a time when women were held in Biblical-style ownership, giving up all rights to their husband upon marriage. They had no rights to property, no right to vote, and no money. If they were even lucky enough to get a divorce from a bad husband they were out of home and gave up their children, and probably would have been shunned by their parents, too,. for "bringing disgrace" upon the family name.

Wollstonecraft had an at best unhappy, and at worst miserable childhood. Her father was a drunk who squandered the family fortune. her mother was unsupportive, and it became obvious to Wollstonecraft that she was going to have to make her own way in life - something she had no problem with as it happened. She tried to start a school with her two sisters but realized quickly that while she loved her sisters, she could not stand to be in that close of a proximity to them for very long!

She eventually became known for her writing and became famous after she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects in 1792, but her life was never destined to be a completely happy one. She traveled in France during the French revolution and "married" Gilbert Imlay - an American. They were never actually married (she had written strongly against it in Vindication), and they were merely posing as married. He treated her poorly and abandoned her when she became pregnant. She raised her daughter Fanny, alone, but had the help of a servant/nurse whom she hired with her earnings

She traveled in Scandinavia and wrote a series of letters which were also published and won her more fans. It was after her return to England after this that she met (actually, re-met!) the man she would finally feel was her true match: William Godwin. Despite the fact that both of them has written treatises which derided marriage, they married and Wollstonecraft became pregnant with the girl who would grow to be Mary Shelley. But she died a few days after giving birth to Mary at the sadly youthful age of thirty eight.

This biography gives plenty of detail and commentary, and it pulls no punches. It's well researched and includes quotes from letters both written by Wollstonecraft, and written about her. I loved it and recommend it for both adults and young readers - but not too young!

Sea Turtles by Kay de Silva

Rating: WORTHY!

Who doesn't like turtles? This brilliant color story for young children goes under the ocean to look at sea turtles, and with the glorious photographs, we're right there with the divers. But it's not only gorgeous pictures! It's also an education as to how these turtles are built 9strongly!), how they live (peacefully!) and what they get up to (travel and food!). Most of their time it seems, from the pictures, is spent on vacation in warm holiday resorts! I am envious!

On the other hand there's a lot of travel involved. It's a lonely life, and unlike me when I commute, they don't get to listen to audio books! What goes on in their turtle minds as they swim thousands of miles? Plus if you're a turtle you have to eat sponges which, while I am sure is very absorbing, is not my favorite food! Other turtles eat jellyfish, which sounds tempting, but I'm guessing it doesn't really taste like Jell-O! Note that green turtles get their name not from their color (which isn't always green), but from the fact that they eat greens! Healthy little critters!

Then there's that laborious trek over the sand to lay eggs. I don't know about you but I dislike the sand sticking all over me after I come out of the ocean, but the turtles don't seem to mind being coated in it. Turtles are tough. They have to be to survive that mad dash over the sand after hatching, with predators on the look-out for them. No wonder they are survivors and live so long: eighty to a hundred years!

This book, part of 'an amazing world' series, was a joy: very informative, readable on a smart phone, and it talked about different species and was fill of information in small bite-sized pieces that kids can remember. I recommend it.

Helen Keller by Jane Sutcliffe

Rating: WORTHY!

I had no idea I had such a backlog of reviews to post. That's what happens when you get focused on writing and nothing else save for some reading here and there! So many of them are negative, too, which is sad, so it's nice to be able to post this last one of the backlog, and get caught up with a positive one.

I saw this in the library and thought it would make for an informative and interesting read, and I was right for once. Helen Keller was born about as regular and normal a child as you can get, although rather more privileged than many people in her time. Before the age of two, however, this all changed. She contracted some indeterminate illness which had the effect of rendering her both deaf and blind. This led to a life of acute frustration and anger for her until, through Alexander Graham Bell of all people, she learned to communicate. It was Bell who indirectly put her in touch with brilliant and dedicated teacher Johanna "Anne" Sullivan, who finally managed to break through these horrible barriers which had been erected by disease, and make a connection with the child inside the feisty Helen exterior.

Almost from that moment on (there was a certain period of frustration which this book glosses over rather!), Helen turned her life around and became dedicated to learning as much as she could about everything she could. She learned to read Braille and to write and eventually wrote her own life story. She and Anne stayed together for half a century until Anne's death. Anne became blind herself around the age of ten, but she was lucky enough that there was surgery to correct some of her problems, so she was with sight at the age of twenty when she came to work with Helen.

This short book with text and pictures is an ideal introduction for young children to these remarkable women. I enjoyed it and I can't imagine any child who wouldn't. I recommend it.

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential by Brian Ashcraft, Shoko Ueda

Rating: WORTHY!

Now this is girl power!

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool is a cool book in itself. It details, with great research, copious photographs, and a lot of historical and trivia information, the power of Japanese schoolgirls and their sailor outfits through the history of Japan and in particular since World War Two.

There is barely avenue of popular technology or cultural endeavor upon which Japanese schoolgirls haven't made some sort of mark. After a brief history of the uniform, the book takes off and explodes into discussions of how the schoolgirl sailor look became an icon, and transported these girls into whole genres of movies, and into pop music where the Japanese approach to creating a band was very different from western approaches.

This influence was felt in electronics, when these girls commandeered pagers and turned them into text machines, and then exploited cell phones when those came out, driving the development of the cell phone cameras which we take for granted today. They made their mark on fashion (and not just in the world of sailor suits!), on art, on magazine content, on manga, and on anime.

The story is told here with interviews, trivia, lots of illustrations, side bars, and lots of color - not all of which is pink by any means! It was a real education and a fascinating book for me. Your mileage may differ! Now my only problem is to figure out how to exploit this knowledge in my writing! I recommend this book as a worthy read!

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World by Daniel Callahan

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"humanity can solve the carbon and carbon problem" ??!
"but is now is now more" makes no sense.
"develop a successor to the Kyoto Prptocol is planned for Paris in December 2015" misspelling of protocol and poor grammar.
"such as improving automobile engine efficiency to reduce mileage per gallon" improve mileage per gallon, surely?!
"Too many cooks," the old saying has it, "spoils the broth." person mismatch.
"Of that amount $275 llion was spent on the top 1% of patients" million is missing a few letters.
"Michael Grubb has laid out the pathway that successful funding of technological research must follow to move from the beginning, research, to the end, successful implementation and dissemination." This made no sense to me.
"Most of that increase will come from the developing countries, which will account for 90% of the increase, with the Organisation for Economic Co -operation and Development countries (essentially developed countries) contributing only 17%." 107%?
" The IEA has projected a one-third increase in global energy demand between 2011- 2035, with a small decline in the share of fossil fuel from 83% to 76%. Renewables and nuclear energy will meet about 40% of basic demand during that same period." Again maybe I am misunderstanding this, but 76% *or 83%) plus 40% add up to more than 100, unless 'global energy demand' is somehow different from 'basic demand'. If it is, it should be made more clear.
Minor quibble: "between 2011- 2035" To me the hyphen equates to the word 'to' so this reads like 'between 2011 to 2035', whereas it should read 'between 2011 and 2035'. If I were going to use the hyphen, I'd write it as 'from 2011- 2035', but maybe others read it differently.

Note up front that this was an advance review copy and I appreciate the opportunity to read it. What I have identified as problems or potential problems with it may well have been taken care of by the time of publication! That said, this book, properly titled The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity by Daniel Callahan was a disappointment to me. I usually try to give environmentally themed books a positive review if I can because I think they're tremendously important, but i cannot honestly do that here.

The author has done an impressive amount of work, but what's presented does not appear to be intended as a popular handbook on solutions to important problems facing us in the near future. It's much more of a survey of five major problems which the author sees - problems which will impinge upon us all - and what options have been put forward in attempts at or as suggestions for the mitigation of these problems. As such, it can make for very dense and dry reading. I can't recommend undertaking it unless you're a true devotee of environmental literature, because for me, even that wasn't quite enough.

It was interesting in many ways, but I would not recommend it for casual reading. In addition to this, there were multiple issues with it which drew it out of my favor (for what that's worth!). There were areas that read - to me - like pure gobbledygook. For example, I had no idea what this meant: "Most proposals for mitigation and adaptation change require forging or greatly enhancing government- private sector alliances, a receptive government with public support, industry incentives to take chances with uncertain long-term profit, and multidisciplinary and integrated systems, among others." I'm sure I could have parsed it out and derived the intended meaning if I spent some time on it, but I wasn't willing to spend my time doing the very work I felt the author should have done.

First I want to look at the things which were interesting - or disturbing, depending upon your perspective. They were actually both: interesting for now, and very disturbing for the not-too-distant future. There were many of these. They were not always presented in the most coherent manner, though, which rather robbed them of their power and deluged the reader in statistics rather than an engaging relation of clear facts and opinions. It's hard to get a good feel for a situation when the reader has so many numbers, percentages and assorted facts spit out in short order with little by way of explanation or context.

While the book did a pretty decent job of presenting many disturbing facts, the apparent lack of good solutions was also upsetting; however, some solutions were completely overlooked. For example, we're informed that "Some 80% of all infectious disease in poor countries can be traced to dirty water" and some pertinent issues are discussed, yet one promising solution, from Dean Kamen (the inventor of AutoSyringe, the Segway, and the iBOT Mobility System) went unmentioned. Similarly, and still on the topic of water, I felt that sea-water filtration as a solution to fresh water shortage, was given way too short shrift, being largely dismissed as expensive. Well energy is expensive, but the places where water is often in very short supply are the same ones where solar power can provide abundant low cost energy, and we did get told how cheap that had become. That doesn't solve all the issues with sea water use, but I would have liked to have seen this explored more, given how much water this planet does have available even if it is mixed thoroughly with salt.

I confess that it was with a certain amount of smugness that I read about bottled water, which I do not drink. I learned that "Bottled water is an exceedingly profitable item, vigorously advertised, stoutly defended by its manufacturers, and seeming adored by the public. In 2009 Americans spent $10.6 billion to consume 8.4 million gallons of it. It is a strikingly popular item in upscale restaurants, where it is served at 80% markups." I also read that "A 2006 study found that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to produce the plastic bottles, while the cost of tap water production is around a thousandth as much" and "Americans drink around 29 gallons of bottled water a year per capita." That's a lot of expensive water being consumed by the very people who have least need of it. One thing which was not explored was the potential health risk in the possibility of leeching of chemicals from plastic water bottles into the water which these people are consuming in such massive quantities.

Aging was another area of interest. While those of us in spoiled-rotten western cultures have access to decent food (though we may not choose to avail ourselves of it), clean water, good healthcare, non of us can escape aging! "In 1975 there were six children for every older person, but by 2035 there will only two." This is another area of concern: how we will take care of our growing aging population when they are going to outnumber the very people who can physically and financially care for them. I would have liked this to have been explored in greater depth.

Climate change was disturbingly summed-up in this section which quoted James Hansen:

with current policies in place we are locked into a rise of between 2 ° C and 5.3 ° C, " adding in an interview that 4 ° C "would be enough to melt all the ice . . . we are now three years away from that point-of-no return.

For me, part of the problem with this book was the extensive quotation of the work of others. It felt more like reading a compilation than an original book and very little of what was quoted made much impact upon me, the above being one of the few exceptions.

In addition to those problems, there were assorted issues with grammar and with percentages not adding up. While those are on the author and publisher, another issue, the formatting of the book as read in the Kindle app on my phone which left a lot to be desired, is purely a fault of the app rather than with the book itself. Authors can take steps to mitigate the damage the Kindle conversion process subjects your work to, but this restricts creativity rather a lot. One thing which could have been fixed, I think, would have been to have had the references (with which the text was replete) clickable. It was annoying to read something, see a reference number, and not be able to click to it and click back. In a print book, it's easy to stick your finger between pages and look up a reference, returning to where you left off. It's not possible to do that in a kindle app unless the references are clickable and the book provides a return click to get you back to where you started. Perhaps this will be available in the final published copy, but without having a copy available to me that is close to what's intended to be published (which this book was hopefully!), I can't give an adequate review of those things.

Overall, and while I like, as I said, to review environmental books positively if I can, I wasn't able to do that with this one because it left too much undone and did not leave me feeling better educated afterwards than I had been before. Yes, it was an ARC, but in this electronic age, I felt it could have been in a lot better shape, including a final run-through with a spell-checker. I can't see this appealing to a wide readership, not without being better presented. With all these things in mind I cannot in good faith recommend this book, and I'm sorry for that.

Spy the Lie by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a book written by a twenty-five year veteran of the CIA, and ex-employee of both the CIA and the NSA, and a CIA security officer. I picked it up because it looked interesting and recently I've been watching the TV show Lie to Me which I completely adore. That show, which gets a mention here, actually employs some of the techniques discussed in this book, although it understandably over-dramatizes them (sometimes to a melodramatic level) for the sake of making entertaining TV.

This book is a little slow, and doesn't offer much (the audio version to which I listened was only four CDs), but what it does offer, when it offers it, is interesting and useful knowledge. It mentions real cases in which the authors have been involved, and some in which they were not, including, for example, the Simpson (OJ, not Homer) trial.

This book never was intended as an audio book, so it makes no sense to it referring to figures and diagrams, which are clearly print version only. Those issues aside, I enjoyed listening and learned some interesting stuff - stuff that maybe I can use in some future novel? Who knows?! It's read by Fred Berman whose voice was slightly irritating but not obnoxious. I recommend this if you're into the background to spying and lying.

I Love my Dog by David Chuka

Rating: WARTY!

From the auhtor of such literary efforts as Billy and the Monster who Loved to Fart and Billy and Monster: The Superhero with Fart Powers comes yet another disaster: a book about dogs (and yes, there are fart jokes in this book). Two kids, boy and girl, are excited to go find their first pet dog, but never once is the animal pound considered. All the dogs featured here are so-called "pure bred". The first dog is an Alaskan Malamute, and though the story is initially narrated by the sister, when we meet the dog, it describes its own role, but it says, "Do you know man still uses me as a sled dog...." I think a gender -neutral word would have been better, as in "Do you know that people still use me as a sled dog...." There's no reason at all to imply that only men can do this. Not in a year when we're newly celebrating the fact that the US finally wised-up and let women have their run of the army!

We also meet a Schnauzer (and yes, the name does come from snout, but it refers to the dog looking like it has a moustache!), an old English Sheepdog, a Poodle (the second most intelligent breed of dog, believe it or not), Dalmatian, Collie, Greyhound, Dachshund, Cocker Spaniel, Great Dane, Saint Bernard, Golden Retriever, and several others.

We learn only a very small amount about each dog, and while we do learn a bit about the down side of dog ownership, we don't learn anything, really, about what is potentially the most important thing about these 'pure bred' dogs, which is that inbreeding leads to awful deficits in too many of these animals. These problems range from, for example, deafness and hyperuricemia in the Dalmatian, to heart disease in the Boxer, to hip dysplasia in the German shepherd, to breathing problems in bulldogs, and other issues, such as mitral valve disease in the King Charles Spaniel (although this dog is not featured in this book).

I would have preferred a book that mentioned the options available and talked more about how much care, attention, and outright love a pet needs, as well as what it costs in buying the dog in the first place, and then in ongoing outlay for food, toys, bedding, and vet bills for routine visits alone. I can't recommend this book because it lacks far too much important information and kids deserve so much better.

Animals That Make Me Say Ewww! by Dawn Cusick

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a cute way to get children interested in learning about nature. I recommend it on that basis although I had an issue or two with it. One issue was a question of wording. On page 13 I read, "help them smell better" and I felt, in order to be clear, it should have read, "help them to detect smells better", or something to that effect! A minor point but worth attention. Other than that it was written well, but personally, I would have liked it better if it had said a word or two about endangered species given that it featured one or two, such as the gorilla. The attraction for kids is based on the gross-out factor, obviously, but since I knew this going in, I had no problem with it. There are other books in a series based on other perspectives, to round-out the picture, such as Get the Scoop on Animal Poop, Bug Butts, Animal Tongues, Animal Eggs: An Amazing Clutch of Mysteries and Marvels, Get the Scoop on Animal Puke!, and Animals That Make Me Say Wow!, none of which I've read.

The novel covers a variety of animals, but is focused strongly on mammals, and often the larger or better known ones at that. This is a bit class-ist, but it's not all mammals, by any means. There is the occasional insect or two, a fish here and there, a spider (my favorite spider, too!), and an amphibian or two, and quite a few birds, so there is variety, and for me, if you can get kids through that potentially difficult door of initial interest with the cuddly ones, that goes a long way to keeping them interested and helping to wise them up to other less adorable animals, and to what we're doing to the world, and how much we have to lose if we don't all wise up! Hopefully they will realize that not all animals are furry and relatively closely related to us. There's a huge variety out there, and maybe they will realize they can find 'eww' locally, too, if they're willing to keep their eyes open and away from their video games for a while! They don't need to travel to exotic locations.

My biggest problem was with technical issues. This is an advance review copy, so hopefully these will be worked out before the final copy is published, but just FYI, there were, for me, two main problems. The first was that many words were missing the letter 'r'. I have no idea what that was all about because it wasn't every 'r' which was missing - just some! For example, on p12 'bird beak' was missing an 'r' - it has a space instead. The same thing happens on p22. The same with kangaroo on p27, with flower on p35, with bird and fur on p39, with strong on p47, sources p51, 'Fly swatted and directions' on p55, 'upward and figure' on p58, 'are' on p59, 'Fight-or-flight and response' on p62. Also one 'f' in buffalo is missing on p77. Just the one!

This problem was apparent my iPad both in the Bluefire reader version, and in the kindle app version (I wouldn't recommend trying to read this book on a smart phone!). The Kindle app also screwed-up the placement of the pictures. Many of the pictures are evidently seated on a blue-green colored background, but in the Kindle app they were missing this completely and were all over the place and appeared in a variety of sizes! Bluefire Reader did not have this problem. Also some of the larger text was a bit blurry on the Kindle app (but not in Bluefire). Again, this may have been because this was an ARC or it may be because Amazon produced a crappy Kindle app.

Those problems had nothing to do with the idea or the writing, so I'm not worried about them! I consider this a worthy read and I recommend it.

She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

I swore after my last outing with this author that I wouldn't read another, but I'd forgotten that I'd ordered this book from the library, so I gave it a whirl in the hope that it would be better than Stuck in the Middle With You which I reviewed negatively back in October 2015. It wasn't!

This one just arrived at my excellent local library, and so, hoping it would be more focused upon what I was interested in, I plunged in. The problem was that this was just like the other (or that was just like this!). It was just as dissipated, random, lackluster and as meandering as the other one was. This disappointed me. Like the other book, this one was all over the place, starting in 2001 with a random encounter with two girls, one of whom had been a student of the author's when she was a both a professor of English and a he. This had taken place two years before the publication of the book. The second chapter referred us back to 1968. The third jumped up to 1974, then there was a weird interlude, after which we're off to 1979, and then to 1982. No. Just no!

I confess I don't get this "Nauseating Grasshopper" technique which, as a martial art, would undoubtedly be a deadly and disorientating fighting style, but which is nothing but irritating and off-putting as a literary conceit (and I use that last word advisedly). It's the same kind of thing which was employed in the other book and at a point just 50 pages in, I started to realize that I had little interest in continuing to read this despite the engrossing and important topic. I only ever had two English professors (post high school) and both of them were great in their own way. How this English professor can write a book about a n important and fundamentally interesting topic, yet make such a pig's ear out of it is beyond my understanding. Perhaps it's precisely because it was written by an English professor that it's so bad. Perhaps you have to have a certain distance from the language in some way I can't quite define, to be able to execute a story successfully in it.

If the skipping around like a cat on a hot tin roof had revealed anything, I could have maybe got with it, but it didn't. This wasn't a coherent story, not even remotely. It was an exhibition (and I mean that in the most derogatory sense) of miniatures - of impressionistic paintings in water colors that were so lacking in definition that they were essentially meaningless stains on old, discarded canvasses. They conveyed nothing, and I can no more recommend this than I could finish it. I wanted to learn just what had gone on with this guy who was really a girl, and I wanted to hear it in her own words, but I couldn't because she's not there.

Schools on Trial by Nikhil Goyal

Rating: WARTY!

Nikhil Goyal WAS a 17-year-old senior at Syosset High School when he first began haranguing the world about poor schooling, but after reading his book on school reformation, I was left with the feeling that his education was lacking - at least in terms of making intelligent constructive arguments and supporting them with solid data. I found this book (of which I read an advance review copy) to be shallow and inutile, and I cannot recommend it.

The system is culpable. However, what happens in nearly every instance is that instead of castigating the perpetrator of this crime, we - society - chide the victims. We blame the students for "refusing to be educated." We blame the millions of dropouts. We blame the misfits who weren't able to or refused to conform to the standards of conventional schooling. We blame the kids who goof off during class, the kids who don't shut up and sit down, the kids who don't pay attention, the kids who don't study enough, the kids who don't perform well on tests, the kids who don't finish their homework, and the kids who cut class or school altogether.

Like many of his assertions, this author fails to back up his frequent wild claims evidence or references. Maybe it's all true, but I'm certainly not going to take the unsupported word of a stranger for this. Why should I believe it from a book any more than I would had some random traveler pinned my ear back with these claims on the subway? And I don't believe it is true. Yes, some children are blamed, as are some teachers and some schools, and even some cities or states, but to put this out there, as though everyone blames the children and only the children and no one is trying to do anything about it, is misleading at best, and downright dishonest at worst.

School drop-out rate has been declining recently and graduation rates are at an historic high. A USA Today report indicates the drop-out rate is only half a million, not a million or more. That's obviously still unacceptable, but misrepresenting it isn't helping.

We're told that over a million students drop out of school each year! This would mean that means that our drop-out rate is around fifty percent, which isn't even remotely true when graduation rates, which have been increasing over the last few years, are in the 80% range. Even that rate is far too low, and lower than other nations, but it certainly doesn't support a claim of a million a year. We don't even get to hear what the reason for the drop out is, so while a portion of it is undoubtedly because the student isn't happy at - or simply doesn't like - the school, to pretend the whole one million, even if it were not an exaggeration, is for this sole reason is dishonest.

This book is one anecdote after another, and none of these anecdotes are supported with references, yet they are substituted for data in making claims for how bad students supposedly think schools are - and the anecdotes in the beginning of the book came from 1909. HOW IS THAT EVEN REMOTELY RELEVANT?! We're told of a 2003 study which essentially tested whether kids were happier playing or going to school - well duhh! Why wasn't the result a surprise? If you conducted the same study on adults who are working, the result would undoubtedly be the same. Does this mean that all work environments are terrorist institutions at heart and we should reform them en masse? We're told, in another bold claim, that "Much of the hell children go through in school would not be tolerated by any adult," yet we have twenty million college students in the US. Hm! It seems "the hell" - whatever the undefined "hell" is - is widely tolerated by adults.

In an interview, the author has said, "One common irritant was all the testing." He also says that students should "not be broken up by age group. Instead, students should be grouped by ability." - but how do you gauge the ability without some form of testing? Crickets chirp. Claim after claim about what he thinks we should do, but not a single suggestion as to exactly what we should do or how we should do it and finance it. The author asserts, "We need to have school resemble the real world as much as possible." Why? No word. How would that work? No word. What improvement would it bring? No word. How do you gauge where a student is without some sort of measurement or testing? No word. And if this is what he wants, why advocate getting rid of advanced placement programs?

In an article, we read of him comparing public school curriculum with that of a school in San Franciso called "Brightworks", but what he doesn't say is that this school is not a public school - it does not have to accept all-comers. There is an admissions process and an admission fee. They can afford to select the brightest students with the best social skills and aptitude - the ones who will fit and work in their system. You cannot make a comparison between a very selective school like this and a regular public school! It's nonsensical and meaningless The author sadly and blindly seems to have narrowly-focused his views on his own personal school experience and derived all of his "ideas" - which are not novel - from that. He appears to have done a very limited survey of educators, but not of schools, so he doesn't appear to know about what schools are doing outside of his own tunnel vision.

Like too many Americans, the author harks back to a golden time of colonialism, when he appears to be claiming, without a shred of evidence to support the claim, that the colonials were very well-educated without any formalized schooling system. He conveniently forgets that the colonists were not your everyday people, but were actually "gentlemen" fortune hunters come to exploit the colonies for whatever they could get out of it. Even later in the time of Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, the population was very largely rural and did not have to handle anything like we do today. The farms of today would be essentially unintelligible to the gentlemen of Franklin's era. But it serves the author's thesis well to compare the education "system" from those 'golden days' with the one today, whilst failing to compare the complexity of life and the employment skills needed today, because to do an honest comparison would fail him miserably. It serves him well to recall simpler times and say it will all work out in the end, without having to show how such a loose - and better-financed (these were wealthy men he's quoting and referencing) education system "beats" ours.

He asserts at one point that "school environments discourage the fostering of deep relationships and a larger sense of belonging" - so schools don't have sports teams, or clubs, or school 'houses'? No schools have uniforms? What school did he go to again? He says, " Out of the thirteen years most of us spend in school, we can usually only recount a handful of teachers we were genuinely attached." I can't recall one. How is this relevant again? And to what is it relevant? Is that crickets I hear again?

The author brings in a character named Sam, and goes on and on about him. It's a personal story and a good emotional trigger, but it's an anecdote, not data. There's no reason to believe that what Sam went through is "so common", or the norm, or representative. At one point we read:

Then finally, after two years of round-the-clock bullying [round the clock bullying at school? Was Sam in a boarding school?!], Sam's time in school improved slightly in the eighth grade. He grew taller. He gained some respect, made a few friends, received support from teachers, and didn't get ridiculed nearly as much as before.

And all of this was without a radical reform to the school system! How on Earth is this even possible?! The author conveniently doesn't go into any details about what changed and how it changed, so that others can learn from this experience and build on it, because none of that would support his thesis that only a radical makeover will work. On the contrary, this actually argues instead that the present system can work if it's handled properly.

Sam's idea for reforming the system is to let him sleep in:

That's another quibble Sam has about school: the sleep schedule it forces him to conform to. "School starts around 8 a.m.," he said. "I have to wake up at 7 a.m. It's actually really tough. You feel unmotivated, sleepy. Your eyes are weary. It feels terrible." In another conversation, he told me, "My natural sleep [bedtime] schedule is around 12 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Get thee to bed early, Sam! Duhh! You can't be up watching TV, or playing video games, or reading comic books, or whatever, until midnight and then expect to be awake the next morning. I have no idea what he means by his natural cycle being 12pm (that's twelve noon) to an hour after midnight! That would mean he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well before school starts. He should be at his peak at 7am if he wakes up at one! Did he mean 12am to 1pm? He wants to go to school in the afternoon and evening?! That's called night class.

He says, "In order to be popular, you need some combination of good looks, athletic ability, and brand-name apparel. Students who don't measure up or conform are inevitably ostracized." Welcome to the real world - the one you want schools to be more like! LOL! But once again. his unsupported claim is flawed. It's based on the assumption that bullying is violent, cruel, rife, and all-pervasive, yet he hasn't even attempted to make that argument! As with his entire thesis, he's started from assumptions and built his assertions on those without actually checking to even see if they're true, let alone if they're important. He asks, for example, "Why is bullying so common in traditional schools?" This a classic question along the well-worn lines of "Have you stopped beating you wife?" It's a question which carries on its back the assumption that bullying is very common in public schools, and the author takes this assertion and runs with it, without even once attempting to establish that what he claims is actually true. There's a huge difference between bullying existing in schools at some level, and it being "so common".

He then goes on, "Up to roughly 94 percent of a school's population consists of students, with the rest teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and staff. So what you have is 6 percent of the population making decisions on behalf of the 94 percent without their consent. If that's not considered antidemocratic, I'm not sure what would be." This is a quote in a section about how bullying begins. All he's done here is make it look like that 6% are the bullies! Is he was trying to argue that all school bullying is done by teachers? I'd agree if he was talking about my school, but I'm smarter than to let myself be deluded that my experience can be extrapolated to the entire nation and what would maybe have worked there will apply to everyone else. If he's not arguing that teachers are the bullies, then how is his out-of-left-field statistic even remotely relevant to one kid bullying another kid?

His "solution" to school bullying? We must teach children to be kinder to one another! I can't believe no one ever thought of that before. Thank god for this author! All these years the evil system has been fomenting bullying by evidently teaching kids to be meaner to one another when the answer was right in front of us from the start! How could we all have been so incorrigibly blind?! Well, I guess it's not just we readers! Illiteracy in the US in 1870 was 20%. Now it’s almost zero. Besides, literature and conversation was pretty much all they had for home entertainment – so what choice did they have? Assuming the could afford the candles or oil to read when it grew dark, and they were all done with their endless chores.

At one point the author lauds Summerhill school, an experimental school founded in England in 1921, that still exists. He praises this school, but when I looked in Wikipedia to see what outstanding students this school had turned out, all it listed were: John Burningham, a children's author, Keith Critchlow, an artist, Rebecca De Mornay, an actor, Storm Thorgerson, a rock album cover designer, Gus Dudgeon, a record producer and Mikey Cuddihy, an artist. Now one of these was also a professor or architecture, but this is all that Summerhill can deliver? No outstanding scientists, no such engineers, no such doctors, no great leaders of society?

So how is this of value? If the author had been able to show school after school, that does not restrict admissions, that teaches as he advocates, and that turns out outstanding members of society - people who create, and lead, and invent, and strike out in new directions, then I would believe he has a point to make, but he has failed comprehensively to do this. Despite the lousy (according to his lights) school system, the USA has one of the best educational systems in the world that turns out outstanding people in all fields. So once again, I ask, what is it, exactly, that's so bad about this system and how will this author's assertions improve upon that? And no, I'm not asking for breathless, adolescent, idealistic castles in the sir, but real world examples of what this would bring to the table. The author is completely empty-handed on this measure, it would appear.

Nowhere in this book did I read about any role for parents in their children's education (although admittedly, I skipped much). Why not? Why are parents irrelevant in this "struggle"? This author's problem, I believe, is that he's lacking a sufficiently wide education to know what he's talking about. As with any teenager, he's all idealism and devoid of practicality. He's using anecdote for data and he's trying to parlay idealistic examples into general conclusions. Worse, he's confusing school with college. School is where children get their basic education,. College (university, however you want to describe it) is where they make the very choices he's advocating - choices about which career to follow and which educational path to choose. That's not to say that there should be no such choices or guidance in lower schools, but there's a certain realism which this author seems either loathe to face or of which, at his youthful and inexperienced age, he's either ignorant or foolishly dismissive.

Without that preliminary basic education, children are not equipped to make intelligent informed choices because they do not have the tools to do so. He wants to put education into the hands of the very people who do not have the education and experience to be able to make properly informed choices which will best determine what they need. Suppose, in this free choice, the kids want to spend all day playing video games? Is his system going to allow that? Suppose they don't want to learn to read and write? Suppose they want to hang out under the bleachers drinking and smoking? Is he going to allow all of this? How is letting kids have complete control going to end bullying? What's going to become of such ill-prepared students? Is society going to pay their way throughout their life - to take care of these kids who are completely unprepared for a real life and a career: for finding work and housing, for taking care of their future, their savings, their health, the life, liberty, and happiness? The author is silent on where any of this will lead. And he's woefully ignorant of the fact that play and education can successfully and vitally go hand-in-hand.

A lot of his referents are appallingly outdated. He's referencing and quoting people from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and so on. That's not to say that no one back then had a handle on education, or had anything useful to contribute, but it is to say that the world we live in now is very different from what it was even in the seventies, when no computers existed as far as the general public was concerned. Harking back to ideas from those times might inform as to which directions have worked and - something he fails to address - which haven't, but the mindless wholesale trashing and abandoning of progress that's been made in the last half century in favor of juvenile daydreaming about idyllic golden ages isn't a solution. It's escapism at best and vandalism at worst.

As Michael Douglas, playing President Shephard in The American President put it, "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them." Maybe this author can reform education, but he's not going to do it by writing frantic books. He's only going to do it by becoming an influential expert on the topic and rolling up his sleeves and getting it done. What Nikhil Goyal most needs to help him get there is - an education! Until then, his fifteen minutes are up.

Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is probably a rule of thumb: never read a book about drugs or prison written by an author whose name starts with 'Piper'. I had a negative impression of this author right from the off. The story is about her stupidity and blindness to reality when she was a spoiled-rotten college grad. She had no clue what to do with her life and evidently had no intention whatsoever of contributing anything to society, so she started living off an older woman named 'Norah'.

Norah is evidently a lesbian, but we learn virtually nothing of her, or of the nature of the author's relationship with her. Some reviewers have assumed this was a failing of the author in not fully fleshing-out the people she interacts with, but my own impression was that Kerman was so shallow that she never actually got to know these people sufficiently-well, beyond a flimsy façade of friendship that is, so she actually was incapable of fleshing them out.

One thing which does come off clear as crystal is how self-centered and callous this older woman is, yet Kerman never learns this, not even when she flies to Paris, expecting to find a ticket to Bali which was supposed to have been left for her by Norah. Kerman doesn't wise up and return to the US. Instead, she calls an acquaintance of Norah's and freeloads off him to continue on the Bali, not even thinking for a minute that Norah might not even be there. That's where I got my impression of clueless from.

So she led this highly privileged life, knowing it was financed by drug money, and never once had qualms about it or about the company she was keeping. She graduates into running drug money around herself, and then ten years pass and her past catches up with her - Norah sold her out. Even so, she gets off lightly - or whitely, might be more appropriate. She gets a mere fifteen months. This is what her life of luxury cost her - and what a bargain it was! She becomes inmate #11187-424 and apparently has a blast. Then she writes a novel about it and gets rich from it. Meanwhile all those people who didn't go the criminal route get nothing but their good name.

The blurb describes the novel as "...at times enraging..." and I can see why it would be. It also says, "Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison" but that's a lie. All it offers is a narrow blinkered view into the selfish life of a privileged upper class woman in a holiday camp of a prison, and that's it! I can't recommend this audio book based on what I listened to, which was more than enough.

Lillian's Right to Vote by Jonah Winter, Shane W Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

Yes, it's definitely Jonah month on my blog. I've not only reviewed two novels with characters named Jonah, I now have a young children's picture book penned by a Jonah! This one is about exercising your right to vote. I remember some time ago someone coming to my door trying to 'get out the vote', and I expressed my refusal to do so, and she tried to lecture me that it was my duty to vote. No, it's my right to vote. It's my duty to exercise that vote or withhold it according to my conscience, and that year I was not going to hypocritically vote for person A simply to deny person B, when I couldn't stand A or B!

Lillian is a black female senior citizen - based on real life Lillian Allen (no, not that Lillian Allen, the other one) - and even though it means climbing this huge hill at her age, she is going to vote. When she looks up that hill into the blue sky, Lillian sees more than an opportunity to share in governance; she sees her great-great grandparents being sold in front of that same courthouse, where only white men were allowed to vote.

As Jonah Winter's writing is stirring, Shane Evans's artwork is rich, and intriguing, carrying an illusion of texture, just as the voting system carried an illusion of equality. It doesn't matter how impressive it is that a law was passed way back in 1870 denying exclusion based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, if the right people make the wrong decisions, the vote is lost.

This was the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution - the constitution which the founding fathers supposedly did such a brilliant job on! If the white folks in power could find a way to prevent the colored folks from voting, they found it and used it. They still do. Poll taxes may no longer be valid, but other methods are used now. Because the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, women didn't get the vote until the nineteenth amendment, half a century later!

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, this book makes for a really good read. It's an important piece of history and well-worth reading to your children. I recommend it, but what I would like to see is a book like this about true empowerment, because despite bullshit web sites which claim to show that one vote is important, it really isn't. Lots of one votes pulling together are very important, but one, by itself, in an election where there are thousands of votes, makes no difference, not when your only voting options are limited to those with money, and essentially to an unchanging binary "choice" between A or B, since few who don't kow-tow to those two major parties ever get elected. It makes no difference even if your vote does count if it's really a vote for those who kiss the asses of lobbyists for big business - monkey business which can and does derail pristine legislation.

What I'd like to see is a story about how a child can grow up and become an honest, independent representative, voting for what's best for the nation regardless of what vested interests try to rationalize.

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M Randolph

Rating: WORTHY!

Florynce Kennedy died at a ripe old age on the winter solstice of 2000. She had led a long life of feminism, black activism, and radical advocacy. She didn't lead a perfect life (no one does!) and this author doesn't try to pretend she did, which is nice. It's nice that we see Kennedy in all her glory - and lack of it - but one thing I missed was context. The author writes this as almost a series of cameos or vignettes of Kennedy's life, but it's oddly divorced from her times. We're catapulted from one instance to another, rather like character David Rice in the 2008 movie Jumper, with nothing in between and with changing backgrounds none of which are really explored in too much detail - or any at all in some cases.

That said, we do get a choice series of snapshots view of Kennedy - a woman I would never have heard of were it not for this book, and I would have been the worse for it. We see Kennedy organizing and protesting, or attending meetings or organizing them, and we see her unjustly arrested by racist police, and starting up some organization or other, including her own law firm as a black female lawyer in an era of appalling racism and white male chauvinism. In 1940 there were only 57 black female lawyers in the entire USA. By 1950, two years before Kennedy passed the bar, there were only 83. She was a rough in the diamond.

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We learn that Kennedy was one of five daughters in a relatively well to do - but still appallingly poor - family in Kansas, and pretty much her earliest big memory is a gang of white men coming to the door and trying to intimidate the Kennedys into moving from their own home, which Wiley Kennedy, the girls' father, owned outright. Her mother was a strong, independent woman who had no more problem standing up to these men than she did leaving her husband to better her life and that of her daughters, even when her husband wasn't a bad guy. It was this mom who informed Kennedy on the kind of woman she herself wanted to be, and she took this and ran with it when she moved to New York City and put herself through law school against the odds (yes, she's the tiny black face hidden away down the row of white male faces in her law class in one photograph included in this book) and determined for herself what kind of life she'd lead, even if it meant, at times, supporting violent radicals.

It led her into law, into representing the challenged and trodden down, and into deciding that the law wasn't going to do enough (or even anything!) by itself, which is when she got "radical" and started speaking up. The thing is her views were radical then. They're mainstream now - that skin color and gender should not be relevant when it comes to pay and fair treatment. That the big picture is a much better one to keep in mind than endless minor details when it comes to reforming injustices, and that you cannot divorce one struggle for equality from another when you're dealing with an entrenched and biased authority structure.

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This book not only misses a chance to place her in a solid context, it also really leaves us in the dark about the woman's personal life. We learn of her marriage and divorce, and of the absconding with over fifty thousand dollars by one of her law "partners", a sum which Kennedy worked for twenty years to pay back, but we really don't get a lot of the person except i'on the context of her radicalism and activities. I think that the book suffered for that; it would have been nice to have seen more of the woman that underlay the activism, because as interesting and important as that was, it wasn't all that she was. For example, Kennedy acted in a least two films: 1970's The Landlord, and 1983's Born In Flames, but you would never know that from this book.

That said, this still worth reading, even if we get somewhat obscure quotes from Kennedy of this nature: "...law school made me see clearly for the first time how the law was used to maintain the bullshit rather than to change things, that justice was really a crock of shit." I don't know if she meant by that, that those who make the laws maintain the bullshit, or the law itself maintains it, because that's exactly what law is supposed to do - not bullshit per se, but status quo. It's the lawmakers who are at fault if the law fails to do the job properly. The actual laws themselves are precisely intended to define and maintain status quo! A Lawyer ought to know that! But this is a minor quibble.

Another such quibble is this one weird sentence: "In the summer of 1964, Kennedy was one of several black and white women..." Forget the oddity of the ideas of a "black and white woman" - that's just ill-advised grammar - but this sentence was intended to convey that a group of woman, not all of the same race, attended a function. A majority of white people might well assume that the women were white, so once we know that Kennedy is among them, we know the group is composed of black and white people, but this appeared right after a bit on Kennedy's frustration with some fictitious attackers being characterized by race! It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to specify race here when it was the problem beforehand! Again, a minor oddity related to writing.

So, overall, I consider this to be a worthy and informative read, whether or not you like the subject of this biography or agree with all of her views!

Get Yourself Organized for Christmas by Kathi Lipp

Rating: WARTY!

As I post this, the calendar is turning towards that time of year when you are at least giving some mind towards the holidays. I thought this book might have some cool ideas and ingenious tips, but when it came down to it, it was nothing more than common sense and rationality, which we all need a good healthy dose of, but if you're in such a bad way that you need as book like this "to get on track", this book isn't really going to help you unless you're pretty much just like the author: a very religious woman in a comfortable income bracket, who evidently is technology-shy, who organizes quite large gatherings of friends and family every Christmas, has historically left things until the last minute, has (by her own admission) a husband who really isn't very useful around the house unless things are spelled-out for him, and a woman who tends to take a while to learn from mistakes. If that's you, then this book might help. It isn't me, so it was of no use.

I found it sad that a book which offers to get you organized for Xmas had so narrow a focus. I thought (and dearly hoped in this day and age) that it would be more expansive, but as I said, while there was, here and there, a brief hand-wave at other situations, it was far too narrowly aimed at people who are just like the author. It was largely exclusive of those who lead different lifestyles, who are not religious, who may approach Xmas in a different way, and who may not be a traditional family unit, and which may not even be constituted in the form of husband and wife. It carries with it the assumption that your Xmas is composed of rather rigid and relatively large events, many of which are religious in nature.

Talking of a non-traditional Xmas, I had some issues with the formatting on my phone when I tried to read this in the Android Kindle app. The headers showed Asian characters in titles such as How to Avoid Conflict During the Holidays where the last D T,G, and E were Asian characters! I looked at this in the Bluefire Reader in the iPad, and this and other headers (such as "Your Projects for a Clutter-Free Christmas") which had this problem on the phone, were composed of italicized characters and they looked fine on the iPad, so I continued in that format and abandoned the phone on this occasion.

There was some obnoxious stereotyping in this which I didn't appreciate - such as the old saw-horse that the mother-in-law is a trial and a torment, as exemplified in this statement: "...threatening your husband with a spontaneous trip to your mom’s house because you just can’t stand his mom anymore." I also found it strange that in a book which promises to help you organize, there was this old engineering sawhorse, too: “You can have it better, cheaper, and faster. Pick two out of three.”

There were some statements I found as sad as they were curious, such as "It is my sincere hope that no one feels like a failure around Christmas time. But I’ve felt that way myself, way too many times to count." All I can say about that, is that if it's honestly a routine for you to feel like that, then you shouldn't need a book to tell you you're doing it wrong. Christmas is about kids. If there are no kids then it's about other loved-ones. If there are no loved ones then you get the honor of it being all about you! Enjoy! Don't make yourself miserable. If you don't want to do it, just say no. If you don't want to go there, just don't go. It's a healthy thing for women to take these rules to heart not just at Xmas.

There were statements which fell flat for me because they read rather misogynistically, which is odd given that this appears to be written exclusively for women, as though men have nothing to do, say, or contribute at Xmas! Here was one that implies that all women obsess on shoes, as exemplified in this statement: "Who chooses an office product over new shoes?" Seriously? There were contradictions, too. If "Nobody is getting any time off to plan the perfect Christmas" then how does "...think the key is to take a few minutes, step back, and really think about what is important to you." work? If you flatly don't have time, then you sure don't have those minutes here (and other blocks of minutes elsewhere) to make these elaborate charts and lists and plans. If you're that short on time and have that complex of a holiday schedule, then cancel a few things and simplify the rest! Take a break. Think of yourself for a while! Sheesh!

There were arrogant religious statements, too, which I found obnoxious and insulting, such as this one: "I want to experience that deep, abiding joy that only comes from God and being with His people." That pretty much divorced this book from my favor! When I was religious I never experienced that joy from the religion, but I did and still do find it in abundance in all kinds of other ways, such as my children, my marriage, nature, taking a vacation, pets, traveling, physical activity, growing trees in my yard, reading a good book, enjoying fine music or an engrossing movie. It's everywhere. All you have to do is open your eyes and quit focusing on all those lists and charts and tables of organization!

I didn't like that there wasn't a thought for recycling and wise use of resources here. You do not have to wipe out forests so you can gift wrap. You do not have to shred trees and send them through the mail in the form of cards, and organize with binders and folders and lists and charts. If you do choose this, then please look for recycled products. If you're Christian you should be doing this anyway if you really think we're to caretake this planet, but there are other ways, and this goes back to my comment about technology shyness above. You can send electronic cards. You can send an email card. You can send a video of your family wishing the recipient a Merry Xmas. You can call your family and friends in lieu of a card. You can go visit if they live nearby. You do not need to be hidebound by tradition or commercialism.

But I think that's really the problem here. In Christian society, what was a simple winter solstice celebration conducted in many cultures, has been co-opted by Christianity and built up to a ridiculously self-important height, raised obnoxiously higher by crass commercialism, that it seems like you have to go all out all the time, excessively doing everything. No, you don't. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do!

You don't have to go to midnight mass. You don't have to go to church. You don't have to go to parties and send out a billion Xmas cards, and get family portraits done, and buy humongous expensive presents like Harry Potter's uncle did for his son's birthday. It's your Xmas, yours and your immediate family's - no one else's! You're not required to go to elaborate festivals and events. You're not required to attend a friend's party or throw one yourself, especially if you're not enjoying it and it's wearing you down, and draining all of your free time.

If you have the energy, if you want to, then by all means, but if it feels like an obligation or a chore rather than a joy, you're working way too hard at it. And who says you have to do all these things every Christmas, ritually? How about we do this one thing this year and go all out for it, then this next one thing next year, and so on, so each Christmas is unique and memorable instead of becoming one mindless, forgettable rubber stamp repetition every year?

I know that those who follow a religion which celebrates Christmas as a religious or mythological birth, feel like they have to go to church, but why not ask yourself the same question you would ask someone else? What would Jesus do? I don't believe there was was a Jesus, son of a god, but let's pretend, for a moment, there was. Did he, according to the Bible, go to midnight mass? No! Jesus wasn't a Catholic. He wasn't even a Christian. He was a Judaist. He never celebrated Christmas nor did he ever tell us to celebrate it. It has nothing to do with any founder of Christianity, not Jesus, not Paul. It's purely an invention of the Catholic church designed to usurp the pagan solstice festival. It's time to take it back! Keep that in mind and you won't go wrong and you won't need to worry about organizing anything; nature will take care of the details! Trust me on that. Just you sit back and enjoy!

I cannot recommend this book

A Little Book About You by Scott Gordon

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been a fan of Scott Gordon's books for a while. Once in a while there's one I am not so keen on, but he has so many and most of them are so light, fun, and entertaining, and even educational at times, that it's hard to find one that doesn't amuse. This one is more of a self-affirmation kind of book, and I had to think about the utility of this for quite a bit as I was reading it.

I mean, any parent can tell - and indeed ought to be telling - their kids how wonderful they are, and finding the positive in as much of their life as you can possibly wring out of it, so why do we need a book which takes this important role out of our parental hands? I think the value of this book is that it's something any kid can enjoy when you're not right there to read it. Its like leaving a piece of you in their hands when you can't be there at that moment. Of course, it's going to mean nothing if you haven't spent the time with them and this book beforehand. You have to put in the time, and a lot of it, but after that, the kid can associate the book with your words, even if they can't read it themselves.

If they're learning to read of course, they can read it to themselves, but if they cannot, they can at least enjoy the fun and colorful pictures - pictures they associate with your voice reading it - so on balance I'd have to say this is a good book to have around for as long as your kid derives something from it, and I recommend it on that basis.

Asking For It by Kate Harding

Rating: WORTHY!

The problem with this book is that the people who need most to read it will not, and if they mistakenly happen upon it, they will dismiss it as "more feminist propaganda". It's an uncomfortable experience to read it, but I think people need to read it until they get beyond discomfort and get downright angry that this crap not only goes on in 2015, but that it evidently doesn't even cause widespread outrage. The problem is that when people are talking about "rape-rape" (like it's a baby topic that no real grown-ups waste their time with), or about "legitimate rape" or about "the rape thing", then you know as well as I do that despite recent progress, there's still a hell of a long way to go. That's what's disturbing.

What also outraged me is that this didn't show up in the first page of results on Goodreads. Asking For It it is evidently a really poorly-chosen title because Goodreads showed over 500 screens of titles that were triggered when I typed that in. Even when I typed in the author's name it was second in a long list! The title is even one in a fictional series, which reportedly attempts to retro-justify rape - because she liked it in the end. What the hell kind of a fantasy that is, and how dangerous is it? That's rape culture in all its shabby glory.

The book explores the topic of rape in civilian and in military life, and how rape culture (which the author defines) enables rapists and does serious injustice to those who are raped, to the point where those who have gone through this horror can be even more victimized by the aftermath than they were by the original atrocity itself. Even to the point where survivors have subsequently been charged with a crime - essentially charged with the 'crime' of reporting it!

That's not to say it was all plain sailing. I had some issues with the way this was written. For example, the author does explore the wider implications of a rape culture, but nowhere near enough for me, and in nowhere near enough detail, especially for a book that is specifically about the rape culture rather than specifically cases of rape. She covers, for example, the absurd clamoring of celebrities to support other celebrities - such as those who came out for rapist Roman Polansky who ostensibly couldn't distinguish between a thirteen-year-old and a consenting adult, and others like Bill Cosby and people from other celebrity ventures like the sporting world where victims aren't even given a sporting chance in popular reporting.

Having said that, she fails to address the wider picture (except briefly in passing, and tangentially) of the whole culture we live in - the movies, the video games, the comic books, the novel, the TV shows. Yes, she briefly covers some of them, but briefly isn't sufficient in a book like this which is supposedly aimed at this very problem. Rape culture isn't just rape victims getting a raw deal and rapists getting a good deal - it's the entire ethos of how women are treated and viewed in society and I felt this got short shrift.

Another issue I personally had is that the author's tone felt a bit preachy and strident at times and thereby at risk of undermining a really strong case. In this kind of environment, lists didn't help as much as they ought, and her love of lists to me was counter-productive to her aim. I'm not a fan of lists and regimented structures because life is neither, and neither are personal interactions except in crappy rom-coms. Once you start relying on a fixed list, you're in danger of missing things that are important but have failed to make the "official list". One list which I felt which was particularly confusing at best was the first one, on page 14. Clearly the author fully expects us to answer "No", but the lists are full of ambiguity which, to someone who is not clued in (and no rapist is, by definition) is going to miss, or misinterpret.

This goes to what I've been saying about taking wise precautions, and about making a "No" quite clear. Yes, lack of clear consent means no, that's a given, and yes, even a clear and unequivocal no has indeed failed to stop rapists, but given the pervasiveness of rape culture, a lack of a clear "No!" has also been used to try to muddy the waters in rape cases. A clear "No!" will cut that off at the knees. Remember, we are not dealing with an ideal society here. We're not even dealing with a rational one, much less a victim-friendly one. Here we're dealing with one which facilitates criminals getting away with rape the bulk of the time. You simply cannot play fair in that environment. You're a fool if you think you can hold out any hope that a rapist will be reasonable, considerate, nuanced, decent, or amenable to argument or persuasion.

I'm not even sure what the author was trying to demonstrate, but let's look at the list:

1. I'd love to, but I already have plans.
2. Sweet of you to offer, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it.
3. Oh geez, maybe another time?
4. I so wish I could!

Not one of these actually says no (not that this means 'yes', understand!). If you're sensitive, which rapists are not, you will suspect that this person does not want to be involved with you, but even so you may feel free to ask again at some point, because you want to be sure, and because the answers equivocated at best and invited a "return match" at worst. Indeed, three of them say the opposite of no: "I'd love to", "Maybe another time?", and "I so wish I could!". Einstein is often quoted as saying something along the lines of "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war," which is nonsensical, but it's that kind of approach which is being pursued here. Rather than give an unequivocal "No!", the person in question here has offered what might well be seen as an "invitation" to further predation from those who are given to viewing women as prey and are blind to subtlety. Even those who are not predators are at risk of being thoroughly confused by such ambiguous answers.

If you have no intention of becoming involved with a guy, you do not say you'd love to! You do not offer another (what may be seen as an) opportunity to stalk you. You do not utter wishes that you could be together. You do not use the word "afraid" in your response. You say "No!" It's better to be perceived as rude than to offer what a potential pest at best and rapist at worst will see as weakness, equivocation, or invitation.

If you like, you can soften it with "I'm involved with someone" or "I don't want to be involved with anyone here" or whatever, but don't omit the clear "No!". Having given that, you are in no doubt as to whether you "encouraged" someone, and neither are they - if they are even remotely reasonable. If the worst happens, you will be confident you made it crystal clear that your answer was no, and you will not be haunted with concern that you somehow "encouraged" this guy. Rape is god-awful enough without bringing self-doubt and self-recrimination into it, on top of whatever other horrors you're going through.

On this same topic, it bothered me that on some occasions the author appeared to be disparaging rape prevention advice and campaigns by presenting an anecdote which "proved" all the advice was wrong. Yes, in an ideal society, women should not have to do these things. It's reprehensible that they're forced into this position, but the fact is that we do not live in an ideal society, and we're a long - probably impossible, I'm sorry to say - way from ever getting there, so until and unless we do live in that ideal society, the advice isn't wrong and people are foolish not to take it and follow it.>/p>

It's like saying that it's foolish to wear a seat belt, because there are some occasions where the seat belt has been the problem - the victim died anyway, or the seat belt trapped them in the car. Indeed, I was once trapped in the back seat of a car fortunately not due to an accident, but because the car was old and the seat belt was shitty. We had to find some scissors and cut me out! Did I give up wearing seat belts because of this fail? Absolutely not. This doesn't mean that a victim who has failed to take this advice is the problem and no crime has been committed. Far from it. There has still been a crime and the victim's lack of forethought isn't a mitigating circumstance by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how hard the police or the commanding officer, or courts might dishonestly pretend it is - because of this rape culture. But there are nonetheless ways in which, regardless of whether we're talking about rape or any other crime, you can endeavor protect yourself from harm and it's just plain stupid not to heed them.

They're not guaranteed, by any means, and they will at times fail despite the best efforts, but on balance, they will make women and men safer, and this author's single-minded focus on the need to address the rapist problem, not the victim non-problem, commendable and accurate as that approach is, did a disservice to prevention in a society where it is a real a present danger, as they say. It's this evident inability on the author's part to separate the wheat from the chaff which for me weakened the message she was bringing - a message which is long overdue.

By that I don't mean it invalidated it, but I think it served to tint water which could have been clearer. For example, I would have liked to have seen the author outright condemn binge-drinking for an assortment of reasons, but because her focus was solely on rape, she tended to gloss over this problem because, it seemed to me, she felt it took away from her message that even if the person who was raped was drunk, she was still the victim of a crime and this does not mitigate the rapist's criminal behavior. This is unarguably true to anyone with half a functioning brain, which rapists and anyone else who buys into the rape culture quite evidently doesn't have, but more instead of addressing the real and unarguable issue

In the same vein, I would have liked her to have talked about educating men not to be criminals rather than zero in on the narrow field of educating them not to be rapists. That needs to be a distinct and pronounced part of such an education, but there needs to be a wider focus.

There are also issues with the prevalence of rape, which I admit is a doomed thing to try and calculate given how little of it goes reported because of the very fact that we do live in a rape culture. Numbers are tossed around without very much verification, so we end up with a one in five or a one in four number which then becomes folklore without anyone going back to see how that number was arrived at in the first place. Lisak's 2002 study was evidently flawed. We can see how hazy the numbers are by looking at this article on the Drew Sterrett / CB "affair" which is well covered by the author. "...a reported sexual assault rate of 0.03 percent" Even multiplied by ten that's a far cry from one in five.

The Sterret case is interesting not only in and of itself, but also because it makes it clear that not all cases of rape (or in this case alledged rape) are about power. This one clearly was not. And neither is the power always with the guy - in this case the power to ruin his life was clearly in his supposed victim's hands.

In a 1996 study, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina set out to determine the rape-related pregnancy rate in the United States. They estimated that about 5 percent of rape victims of reproductive age (12 to 45) become pregnant — a percentage that results in about 32,000 pregnancies each year. If 5% become pregnant and that's 32,000 per year, it's an atrocity, but that's not what I want to address here. Multiplying that 32K by 20, should give us 100% of rape victims, which is 640,000 annual rapes. Even one is too many but over half a million is phenomenal and shocking beyond polite words.<.p>

Reading elsewhere, we get this number: "...there were overall 173,610 victims of rape or sexual assault, or 0.1% of the US population 12 or older in 2013". That's a far cry from 640,000, unless of course 466,390 failed to report the crime - but that's entirely possible. Elsewhere still, we learn that according to RAIIN, every 107 seconds, someone in the United States is sexually assaulted. There is a yearly average of 293,000 victims we're told, but a rape every 107 seconds comes to 294,729. This is good enough to fall in with that average, but it's a far cry from either 640,000 or 173,610.

My point is not to belittle the magnitude of the numbers, which regardless of which number is most accurate, are appalling, but to point out that the numbers vary wildly, and this is the kind of thing which will be the very one that nay-sayers latch upon to try to call "the rape thing" into question. Look," they will claim, "they're making wild guesses! No one knows, clearly they're making this all up as a scare tactic!" Obviously that's blind nonsense, but that doesn't mean that it would not help to get better, more reliable numbers, because quoting poorly substantiated or discrepant numbers isn't going to do anyone any favors. A look, in this book, at the accuracy and sources of the numbers would have been appreciated, and while the author touches on this more than once, she never really pursues it as a legitimate topic in its own right. We do not want to give those who would continue to try and sweep this rape culture pandemic under the carpet any ammunition even if they're firing blanks.

I like that the author covers the fact that while the overwhelming number of rapes is indeed male on female, rape isn't just male on a female. It's very much cross-gender despite the British rather Victorian idea that girls can't rape guys. I liked the discussion of the focus on college versus focus on 'civilian' rape, but this was a relatively short book and the author obviously could not go into great detail on every topic. Focus on college is important, but in one way it's a bit of a mis-focus because college female students are only about half as likely as non-college females of the same age range to be affected by violence:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-sexual-assault-legal-20140608-story.html
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/11/07/after-uwc-complaint-two-students-wait/
That doesn't mean it's not a problem, by any means, but it does mean we can be smarter, use better resources, and be more effective across all areas, instead of focusing on one and pretending we're addressing the problem.

I like that the author called into question some of the at best ill-advised, and at worst, situation-exacerbating ad campaigns aimed at reducing rape, but done in a wrong-headed manner. The problem isn't so much those, however, as the very effective ad campaigns which are aimed in the opposite direction, and which flood our senses throughout our lives almost subliminally. Indeed, they are so pervasive and so common and so readily available that we don't even consider them, much less talk about them.

This is why, for me, where this book most fell down is in its almost complete failure to address the far more widespread, and often very subtle rape culture problem: that which shamelessly pervades TV, advertising, movies, and literature. The author did cover, briefly and in a limited way, some movies and some TV, and even took a very small dip into advertising, but nowhere near enough. In my opinion, it's in these areas that rape culture is seeded, because it is all-pervasive and it hits men and women alike from childhood. Note that I am not saying here that some guy watches a TV show or sees a commercial, and suddenly is filled with the idea that he can simply go out and rape him some women! It doesn't work like that. But when you have, for example in movies, been subjected to a lifetime of stories where the tough hombre battles the odds and is rewarded with the helpless "chick" every time, a "babe" (not the infantilization in play here) who pretty much literally falls into his arms, a wilting violet subservient to his every command, it's not hard to see that this cultivates a mind-set which takes only a weak will not to act upon.

Every time I'm in the grocery store waiting at the check out line, I'm bombarded with a host of magazines aimed at women, and what do all of these magazines have on the covers? Curiously enough, semi-naked woman. What text do the covers most often carry? Something about sex, about improving your technique, making yourself sexier, spicing things up, and on and on. I rarely stand at the check-out without seeing at least one mention of sex on the cover of at least one magazine. These are magazines that used to cover the model's head with the magazine title, as if to make it clear that only her body was of interest - you can safely ignore the mind. Only a professional idiot (aka a rapist) would view this as a guide to your average woman's mind-set and inclinations, but if you're one of the idiots, this tells you quite unequivocally that women want sex, they're desperate for it, they crave it, they need someone to deliver it to their open door. That's all the "consent" a rapist needs.

These magazines, to me, are more abusive to women than actual pornography is, because they are much more pernicious and sly, and they're everywhere. TV and movies send the same message - a message that a woman is only waiting for the right man and she;ll hop right into bed and the hell with worrying about STDs. Books are just as bad, especially the ones showing a woman in a state of undress with a manly man on the cover, and even more-so, ill-conceived and misguided young adult novels. The worst of those are ones which purport to deliver a strong female character the main protagonist, yet almost inevitably have this character wilt and take second place when a man shows up, as though she's really quite weak, if not outright incompetent, by herself and in truth needs a man to whip her into shape. All of this contributes to a comprehensive and overwhelming, if seriously deluded, view of women. I find ti a bit sad that this author who does so well in other areas, barely mentions these areas, if at all.

Overall though, despite some issues (one of which is the author's unilateral declaration that couples in happy long-term relationships are pretty much rapists if they wake their partner up by means of foreplay!) this book is well-written, well-researched, and full of useful, needfully disturbing, information and I unreservedly I recommend it.

Here's an addendum based on a recent report, which cast previous figures into doubt - so once again we're stuck with the problem of which numbers can be relied on and how the hell we get any kind of handle on a problem which we evidently cannot measure reliably! These numbers were here:
http://www.aau.edu/Climate-Survey.aspx?id=16525

KEY FINDINGS

*Overall, 11.7 percent of student respondents across 27 universities reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation since they enrolled at their university.

*The incidence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation among female undergraduate student respondents was 23.1 percent, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration.

*Overall rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement or others were low, ranging from five percent to 28 percent, depending on the specific type of behavior.

*The most common reason for not reporting incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct was that it was not considered serious enough. Other reasons included because they were "embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult," and because they "did not think anything would be done about it."

*More than six in 10 student respondents (63.3 percent) believe that a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct would be taken seriously by campus officials.