Nobody Knows Anything

Dexter Morgan, the hero and narrator of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, is a guy with a problem: while he doesn’t exactly know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” he’s a serial killer who’s known from a young age both what he is and that murder is generally considered “wrong.” His foster father, a cop, trained him how to channel his impulses toward a fairly narrow set of victims: other serial killers.

In his day-to-day life, the one where he pretends to be human and interacts with humans with complete incomprehension of what they’re thinking, Dexter is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. His foster sister, Deborah, is a cop who really wants out of vice and into homicide. There’s a serial killer preying on the hookers on the Tamiami Trail, and Deb knows this could be her ticket to a detective’s badge. She needs Dexter to give him one of his famed “hunches.” Dexter often has hunches when serial killers are on the loose, because he knows how to think like them better than anyone. But the Tamiami Trail killer is different—not only does Dexter highly admire the killer’s technique, if not his aims, but the killings seem almost like they’re meant to communicate something specifically to him. Dexter, you see, has been having strange, incomprehensible dreams, and he’s been sleep walking. The question he faces is: has he been sleep killing?

I started reading this at 10:30 last night and finished the entire thing shortly after 12, so I rate this one, Two thumbs, way up.

What I especially love in this book is how Lindsay keeps Dexter in character all the time, showing us Dexter’s point of view at all times. Dexter finds humans utterly incomprehensible. For example, there’s the female detective in charge of the Tamiami Trail case who seems to treat Dexter in the oddest way:

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn’t stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don’t buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn’t actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

Lindsay builds the suspense very nicely—Dexter knows he’s off, but how off is he?—and maintains a great balance between humor and horror. Dexter is a great narrator: ironic, charming, confident of his abilities, pathetic in his inhumanity. The ending has a few problems, but the thrill ride to get there, and the unexpected emotional punch of the unusual choice Dexter has to make, make it worthwhile.

The sequel, Dearly Devoted Dexter, is due out next month. I don’t know how long Lindsay will be able to keep up this balancing act, but I’m definitely picking up this book. And according to Lee Goldberg, Showtime has ordered a pilot for a series based on this book. To which I say, !!! I don’t know how they’d do it. Can you show the hero of a series killing people every week in a particularly inhuman manner?—well, I guess cop shows have been doing that for years. I’d at least tune in for one episode.

I fully expect all of my friends to sign up for this in lieu of, you know, developing craft:

Casting Call For Reality TV Show Contestants…

“At Last, You Could Become America’s Next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity!”

The newest reality TV show, Book Millionaire, is providing applications and holding casting calls for people who want to become published authors or those who are published and want to achieve best selling status.

Eight people with dreams of seeing their book ideas become published and being the next author launched to best selling and celebrity status will meet Book Millionaire’s Publishing Committee during July 2005 to start filming of Book Millionaire Reality TV Show.

Here’s your chance to finally become America’s next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity! We are scouting for the next group of candidates for America’s hottest new reality show. Act now. Picture yourself featured on national television sharing your story, writing, book-to-be or book with millions of people showing you have what it takes to be America’s next Best Selling Author and Book Millionaire.

At last…

Why do I find myself hoping this is some kind of Internet scam and not an actual show?

Update: Lee Goldberg has a longer analysis of this.

I got Baking By Flavor by Lisa Yockelson (which I heard about because it was recommended early and often by Zarah at Food & Thoughts) out of the library today and brought it to the park to read while the kids played and Darin recovered from tandem-bicycling with Sophia. Before I had a chance to read it, though, I had to go do something with the kids; Darin picked up the book to flip through it. When I returned he looked up at me and said,

You need to buy this book immediately.

So, just in case you’re looking for a really good cakes, pies, pastries, and cookies book? Evidently this would be one.

(My friend Otto threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t post, so I got my butt in gear and finished this review.)

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is the latest publishing marvel to come down the pike: it’s twisty and brainy and has puzzles in Renaissance art, like The Da Vinci Code! It’s written by two young punks just out of Princeton! It’s erudite and a gripping read! Yadda! Yadda!

Well, not so much.

The Rule of Four is the story of Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, two seniors at Princeton the night before their theses are due. Paul’s thesis is about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real book from the Renaissance that details something in a strange code that has yet to be broken. Tom’s father worked on the puzzle for years; Paul looked Tom up at Princeton because what Tom’s father did on the book.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. The infatuation with Princeton is overweening—the emphasis placed on every little part of the Princeton experience as though it’s poetic or marvelous or something. (I asked Tamar if students at Harvard are this fatuous. She did say that Princetonians are a lot preppier. Then she snorted when I mentioned that these guys are working on a thesis the night before it’s due.) There is a hell of a lot of emphasis put on eating clubs, for instance. As someone not currently at Princeton or worked up about which eating club I belong to, the awe that “the Ivy” appears to inspire seems, uh, ridiculous.

Paul, the guy working on the thesis (and apparently doing so to the exclusion of anything approaching a life at Princeton), manages not to figure out that what he’s doing might be of some, uh, notice, in academic circles, if nowhere else. (You think some undergraduate working on a paper that happened to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem might have an inkling that what he’s done might be of interest?)

The title is The Rule of Four, and much is made of the four guys at the center of the story (Tom, Paul, and their roommates Charlie and Gil)…except they have no relation to the title, no parallels, no thematic unity.

The puzzles that Tom and Paul figure out definitely struck me as stuff that was reverse engineered to show off how esoteric and cool the authors are and not how well the supposed author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might have hidden whatever secrets the book might contain.

The timeline of the book really bothered me: I believe the entire current storyline of the book covers one night and one day, and there is no way the events described in there could happen.

But what annoyed me most about this book is that it’s not about anything. Or, even worse, I found the theme of the book to be this: it’s all about the bling-bling.

(Yes, the suburban mom in her thirties used “bling-bling,” thereby proving beyond a doubt that phrase has jumped the shark.)

The Rule of Four wants to be The Name Of The Rose, but the biggest difference between that book and this one is that The Name Of The Rose, for all of its puzzleworthiness, is about ideas. What is the secret of the monastery, and why are monks getting murdered for it? The Rule of Four is, in my opinion, pretty much about the stuff. I can’t tell you more without giving it away, of course, but tell me that what you’re supposed to think at the end is: Oh wow, wouldn’t that be cool?

Anyhow, if you want a twisty-turny thriller that makes you feel smarter than you really are, definitely check out The Name Of The Rose (by Umberto Eco, in case you’re wondering). Another one, always fun, is The Eight by Katherine Neville. There are also all the books by Arturo Perez-Reverte, such as The Club Dumas. (I’m not a huge Perez-Reverte fan, but he’s way better than this book.)

But if you want to read The Rule of Four, get it out of the library. Or better yet, read the rest of this entry and I’ll spoil the book for you…
(more…)

There’s an article in today’s Mercury News about a local writer who did what I always thought I would do but haven’t yet (registration required—try Bugmenot if you hate registration):

Lolly Winston’s dream came true.

Her first novel, “Good Grief,” is a bestseller. Lately, life’s been “a surreal string of good news,” she says. But before that, she was living a Silicon Valley nightmare.

The Los Gatos writer always dreamed of writing a novel by 40. So she quit her other jobs to finish the book she’d been working on parttime for four years.

Then the bubble burst. Her husband’s software company went bust. They were paying the mortgage with a home-equity loan. The credit card was maxed. Her stepdad died. Her brother drowned.

“It was kind of scary,” Winston says of trying to finish the book in the face of financial and emotional hardship. Once done, she found an agent who secured a book deal. “It was like winning the lottery to sell the book.”

The novel is the sometimes painful, sometimes humorous tale of a young Silicon Valley widow. After her software engineer husband dies, she suffers a breakdown at her PR job, showing up for work in her robe and slippers. She moves to Ashland, Ore., and rebuilds her life.

“Good Grief” is No. 14 on the New York Times bestseller list. Reviews have been good (“Bridget Jones meets Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.”).

You know what? It’s nice to know that it can be done. For those times when I’m not so certain.

I really like Robert Harris’s novels (Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel)—for one thing, while they’re all thrillers, they’re all cut from different cloth. One is an alternate history of the Nazis winning World War II, one is a spy thriller set during World War II, and one is set in present-day Russia. As with the best thrillers, I always come away from Harris’s novels feeling as though I’ve learned something, even if he’s made up the whole damn thing.

He continues his streak as far as I’m concerned with Pompeii, a thriller that begins two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It follows the travails of the water engineer or aquarius, Marcus Attilius, who’s dispatched to the Aqua Augusta aqueduct following the disappearance of the previous aquarius. The aqueduct suddenly dries up, and Attilius has to find out why, despite being hampered by the fact that no one wants his interference in what’s going on in the region.

Now, like with Titanic, we know what’s going to happen. We know why the water is fouled with sulfur, we know why the earth keeps shaking, we know that the great city of Pompeii is going to buy it. Harris still manages to weave a few mysteries in there to keep you reading—why is Attilius’s arrival in the region such a threat? and why did the previous aquarius disappear? He also manages to give you just enough information about aqueducts, volcanoes, and Roman life at the time to make you confident of rattling on at the next cocktail party.

Downsides: The writing isn’t great, though it’s better than many of his contemporaries—Dan Brown, I’m looking at you—and things like the romantic angle are mercifully dealt with in a shallow, quick manner. Attilius does show rather unbelievable fortitude, even in the midst of a natural disaster. The guy’s a regular Timex watch*.

But if you’re looking for a good yarn, I recommend this book.

*If I have to explain this reference, I’ll…cry.

(You know, one of the complaints my girlfriends had about having kids was that there was no more time to read books. I don’t seem to have that problem. Heh. Maybe I’m letting my kids run around like wildebeests or something.)

Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How pressure groups restrict what students learn is a study of how textbooks—and therefore school itself—has been hijacked by forces both on the right and the left to reflect their desires and worldviews:

Censors on the right aim to restore an idealized vision of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life, in which the family was intact, comprising a a father, a mother, and two or more children, and went to church every Sunday…It was a happy, untroubled setting into which social problems seldom intruded. Pressure groups on the right believe that what children read in school should present this vision of the past to children and that showing it might make it so. They believe strongly in the power of the word, and they believe that children will model their behavior on whatever they read…

Censors from the left believe in an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social situations. In this vision, there is no dominant group, no dominant father, no dominant race, and no dominant gender. In this world, youth is not an advantage, and disability is not a disadvantage. There is no hierarchy of better or worse; all nations and all cultures are of equal accomplishment and value…

For censors on both the right and the left, reading is a means of role modeling and behavior modification. Neither wants children and adolescents to encounter books, textbooks, or videos that challenge their vision of what was or what might be, or that depict a reality contrary to that vision.

The book is filled with hilarious and terrifying examples of the kind of censorship she’s talking about. The two most powerful state school boards in the country are, of course, California and Texas, and they roughly stand at opposite ends of the spectrum (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which stands where). If publishers can make it there, they can make it anywhere, so they vanilla up their books to satisfy the requirements of the two behemoths. What this results in are books so bland and boring that no one wants to read them. But who cares? The publishers have already made a killing, because centralized school boards have approved these texts for purchase—meaning school districts can buy these books with state funds or other books with their own funds. Which do you think they do?

The various bowdlerizations of literature Ravitch includes—from a story named “A Perfect Day For Ice Cream” that becomes “A Perfect Day” with no mention of ice cream because ice cream is a proscribed topic in California, because it encourages obesity, to an edited version of Fahrenheit 451 (irony’s not pretty, but it sure is hilarious)—are very sad. Not only because our children need to be protected from various things, but because they’re being presented with such boring stuff to read. We wonder why people are not just illiterate but antiliterate?

Schools cannot beat the entertainment industry at its own game. What they have to offer students is the chance for intellectual freedom, the power to think for themselves rather than gorge themselves on the media’s steady diet of junk food.

But under the present regime of censorship, the schools themselves are not intellectually free. They cannot awaken young people’s minds with great literature when the stuff in their literature textbooks is so banal, so ordinary, so engineered to appeal to childish narcissism. They cannot expect students to think critically about social issues and the world when their history textbooks do not demonstrate critical thinking. When their reading is constrained by the fine filter of bias and sensitivity codes, how can it possibly contribute to the forming of critical and independent minds? How can young people discover the drama of history when their textbooks anesthetize them with a relentless slog across the centuries, lumbering from one event to the next, from one culture to the next? Great history consists of great stories, surprising convergences, the conflict of powerful ideas, and the historian’s insights into motivation and character that illuminate the life of a man or woman—but all of that has been sacrificed to the gods of coverage and cultural equivalence…

I’m not sure there is any way to avoid this kind of censorship of materials so long as we have these mass markets for product. One of the suggestions Ravitch gives is that the power for buying books should be given back to local school boards, so that they can make their own decisions about what to buy and not have to rely on the behemoth state boards. I’m not entirely sure that would solve the problem—wouldn’t the publishers still want to make their wares as vanilla as possible for the greatest number of purchases?

Great literature does not comfort us; it does not make us feel better about ourselves. It is not written to enhance our self-esteem or to make us feel that we are “included” in the story. It takes us into its own world and creates its own reality. It shakes us up; it makes us think. Sometimes it makes us cry.

The same is true of the study of history. It is possible to spend one’s time learning only about one’s own family or ethnic group. But there are worlds of adventure, worlds of tragedy awaiting us if we are willing to let go of our solipsism, our narcissism, our need to study only ourselves…

One of the interesting books I’ve been reading recently (see also: first paragraph of this entry) is Not Out Of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz, which takes on the theory of Afrocentrism, which says (among other things) that black Africans were responsible for the philosophical advances of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Lefkowitz writes of how she was stunned not only by the wild inaccuracies and poor scholarship presented by proponents of Afrocentrism, but how her colleagues were unwilling to engage in the intellectual debate necessary to weed out bad or useless ideas.

Rather than being encouraged to ask questions, to read widely, and to challenge any and all assumptions, students were being indoctrinated along party lines…

In [Not Out Of Africa] I want to show why Afrocentric notions of antiquity, even though unhistorical, have seemed plausible to many intelligent people. In part, the explanation lies in the present intellectual climate. There is a current tendency, at least among academics, to regard history as a form of fiction that can and should be written differently by each nation or ethnic group. The assumption seems to be that somehow all versions will simultaneously be true, even if they conflict in particular details.

In The Language Police, Ravitch condemns the process of making literature and history “relevant” to the students at the expense of accuracy. Yes, she discusses what “accuracy” is. No, it’s not easy. Yes, each of us would probably have our own ideas of what should be included.

The problem now, it seems, is that the extremes of the left and right are tearing apart the idea of a shared culture and history. By mutilating and enervating our shared cultural stories, we are hastening our cultural balkanization.

When we as a nation set out to provide universal access to education, our hope was that intelligence and reason would one day prevail and make a better world where issues would be resolved by thoughtful deliberation. The great goal of education was not to cultivate an elite, but to abolish class distinctions to the extent that education can do so. Here is the rub. Intelligence and reason cannot be achieved merely by skill-building and immersion in new technologies; elites have always known this and have always insisted on more for their children. Intelligence and reason cannot be developed absent the judgment that is formed by prolonged and thoughtful study of history, literature, and culture, not only that of our own nation, but of other civilizations as well.

That is not what our children get today. Instead, they get faux literature, and they get history that lightly skims across the surface of events, with no time to become engaged in ideas or to delve beneath the surface. Not only does censorship diminish the intellectual vitality of the curriculum, it also erodes our commitment to a common culture. It demands that we abandon our belief in e pluribus unum, a diverse people who are continually becoming one. The common culture is not static; it evolves to reflect the people we are becoming… Our nation has a history and a literature, to which we contribute. We must build on that common culture, not demolish it. As our common culture grows stronger, as we make it stronger, so too grows our recognition that we share a common destiny.

At the back of her book Ravitch provides a list of works she thinks would constitute a decent, and interesting, reading list for Grades 3 through 10, including poetry, biographies, and novels. “Great Books” lists are always tough because someone’s going to be offended and someone’s going to be left out. But you know what? You can always read more. You have to start out with the basics somewhere.

Anyhow. I liked The Language Police very much, even though its depiction of the kinds of censorship (from without and within) in our schools is deeply, deeply disturbing.

I finished School of Dreams by Edward Humes and found it a fascinating read all the way through. The stats are great, the anecdotes are great. The book is the story of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, the top-rated public high school in the state and possibly in the country, with test scores that rival the elite prep schools. (You can see how your local California schools rate with this handy set of pages from the Associated Press.)

A couple of elements come through loud and clear in the book as to why Whitney is so successful. The first is that the school is selective: students have to take a test to get in, they have to keep their grades up (or get kicked out), and they have to be college-bound—there are no vocational tracks here. And the second is the large Asian population that makes up the student body: expectations are high that the children will achieve what their parents have set out for them to achieve…in some cases by taking drastic steps:

Another call comes in a short time later, an anxious woman speaking in a thick accent. “How can I get my daughter into Whitney?”

“Well, what school is she in now?”

“She’s in sixth grade here, where we live,” the caller says. “In India.”

India? India? A family would uproot itself and move to another country to partake of an American public school? But this isn’t at all unusual for Whitney. Not in the slightest:

Thousands of Korean and Chinese immigrants have chosen Cerritos over other communities in the United States because of Whitney’s reputation. Several real estate agencies in town have focused their businesses—and made their fortunes—courting future immigrants by placing advertisements in South Korean newspapers listing homes for sale in Cerritos.

Don’t we keep hearing how Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. schools are better than ours? What is the attraction of the American school? I don’t think Humes answers these particular questions and I wish he had.

One thing he does go into quite often is how overbearing the Whitney parents are. From arguing for higher grades for their kids to offering bribes of all types to demanding their children attend the college of the parents’ choice and study what the parents want them to study… Man, I was certainly left wanting to shoot a number of these parents, which is undoubtedly what Humes intended the reader to feel.

School of Dreams initially had me very worried about what the hell are our elite schools expecting of students today, but as I read I got the idea (possibly correct, possibly not, I have no idea) that the heaviness of the workload and the lightness of the sleep schedule are more about students wanting to show how hard they’re working…and about how poor their planning skills are. Humes mentions multiple times that students spend much of their evening time on Instant Messenger together socializing instead of doing their homework, and when the students do get together to work on one of these heralded “group projects” they spend as much or more time eating pizza and talking as they do working. It sounds as if the students were a little more disciplined, they could get a few more hours a night.

Which is not to say that it isn’t hard—just that it isn’t impossible.

Whitney students are high achievers who get into great colleges and score well on tests, but the book leaves some question as to whether they’re learning anything. Of course, this is the big criticism of all American education at the moment (possibly of education around the world, though I doubt it). Whitney kids take a lot of Honors and AP classes for their transcripts, not because they actually want to know anything:

Kids are learning to pass a test on French or biology or civics, but their interest in the subject may go no further, or may even be extinguished, by the rigors of the AP, especially in recent years, as the number of such classes that competitive colleges have come to expect on students’ transcripts has gone from one or two to four or six. There are students at Whitney with ten or more. Tony’s reaction after taking an AP test at Whitney is fairly common: “Now I’ll never have to speak French again.” It wasn’t about learning the language and taking that knowledge with you for life, he explains: “It was about memorizing enough to do well on the test, then putting it behind you. I just took it to increase my chances of getting into a great college.” (114)

Not that these kids are stupid, by any means. They demonstrate that over and over. Particularly fun is the segment in which Neil Bush, Dubya’s younger brother of Silverado Savings and Loan fame, comes to Whitney to push his education program Ignite!, which proposes to make school “fun.” He gets taken to town by the Whitney students, who show no fear of telling him exactly what they think of his program and what school should be.

§

One of the best sections of the book, in Chapters 19 and 23, details an experiment the physics teacher gives his class: he shows them an experiment and tells them they’re going to spend the quarter figuring out how it works and then they’re going to teach him about it; he doesn’t know how it works.

Four of the strongest students in the class band together in one of the groups and figure this is going to be easy. So easy, in fact, that they do little to no work on it. In fact, it becomes clear they don’t know how:

“There’s plenty of time,” Cher says (after the group gets a dressing down from the teacher), a phrase that soon becomes the group’s unofficial mantra. But her tone seems to lack conviction. The group is floundering; they all can see it. But none of them is sure why.

This is pretty much a first for them: They have always had success in their academic careers. But now they are on unfamiliar terrain, with no tests to ace, no one riding herd on them every day with incremental lessons, no spoon-feeding. They are used to cramming at the last minute, not setting a pace for six weeks of sustained investigation, Irene complains.

The end result of the teacher’s you-be-the-teacher experiment is great stuff. I hope it inspires a teacher or two out there to try something similar in their own classes.

§

One thing I’ve heard over and over again of late is how students graduating from our schools these days have poor writing skills. School of Dreams has a great demonstration that this is, in fact, true, and why it might be. The writer, Humes, teaches a class to juniors on how to write the personal essay for their college applications. He discovers something very interesting about his students:

As we work through their drafts, it becomes clear that the underlying problem is as basic as it gets: Many of these students simply don’t know how to write a logically constructed essay, or how to unfold and develop a story, and this is only complicated by their discomfort at being their own main character. Many of these students, though they are impressively advanced and sophisticated in their academic pursuits, well-read, and possessed of vocabularies that would shame most adults, have never had to develop their writing skills. Writing just isn’t considered crucial during much of their schooling, it isn’t tested for, and their preferred method of communication these days—the barely literate venues of e-mail and online chat—is only making matters worse. Even the kids see that. “I used to write better before Instant Messenger,” David says. “Now I don’t always remember to use complete sentences—you don’t need them online.”

…

Amy Palmieri thinks she knows one reason why a majority of her seniors’ writing skills aren’t as advanced as their other areas of scholarship: Group projects. The widespread classroom practice of letting groups of students produce their major papers and projects has left many of them ill-prepared to write individual papers or even simply punchy essays on their own.

“They complain about the workload,” Whitney’s newest English teacher says, after a particularly tendentious round of griping from her AP seniors. “But I’m really not asking that much of them. They should at this stage be able to string together a few well-written paragraphs. Many can’t. There are some good writers in here, but many of my seniors are going to be eaten alive in college if they turn in papers like this.” She holds up a sheaf of essays. “I was really quite shocked.”

Palmieri has observed that her students excel at the toughest multiple-choice tests she can find, and that they are close, good readers with excellent comprehension, even with notoriously dense works such as Heart of Darkness. Consequently, she has dismissed her initial theory that language barriers in a school of many immigrant families might be causing the writing difficulties. Language isn’t the problem, she says, and that leaves simple lack of practice as a likely cause.

A group writing project?

In my dreams.

These kids are complaining about how much work they have to do and they have group writing projects?

Hey, not only did I have to walk uphill through the snow ten miles in each direction, but I typed up my papers on a typewriter. Of late I’ve thought that writing skills might be improved exponentially by making people do a first draft on paper; the computer lends itself too much to tweaking and editing as you go along, so instead of just finishing the damn thing and then beginning to edit, you meander along, never quite finishing. I also never get as good a mental picture of the piece I’m writing when I write on a computer—with a long entry like this one I have to continually preview it to see how it reads. (I should probably also outline once in a while. Enh.)

§

And, for Calpundit, here’s the bit about how much math to take in high school:

For all the testing and accountability-driven reforms aimed at bolstering student achievement around the country, the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed these depressing facts: Eight out of ten American high school seniors cannot pass a basic science test. Sixty-three percent of seniors cannot perform simple fourth-grade multiplication necessary to determine how much postage is needed on a package of a given weight. Nine out of ten cannot say how much money they would earn in interest from their savings accounts—even with a calculator. This is why hundreds of thousands of college students must take remedial math classes (often taught at the middle school level), why there are ever-fewer American-born math, science, and engineering majors, and why Whitney is so keen to have all its students take one, if not two, years of calculus: because if they do, the colleges treat them like gods. (pg. 304)

Damn. If only I’d known. Oh wait—I did. Never mind.

§

Humes has excellent criticisms of the No Child Left Behind Act, which I think should be called the Stealth Vouchers Act. (There may be good reasons to have vouchers—let’s not get into that here—but the underhandedness of NCLB is simply breathtaking.) This book was obviously printed before the revelations of how the Texas Miracle was accomplished in Houston under Superintendent of Schools (now Secretary of Education) Rod Paige, but the small section on page 335-338 is good reading.

The book even includes a few questions from the Texas High School exam that are embarrassing in their simplicity: check them out on page 357. What this shows, of course, is that if you lower the bar enough, of course you show greater and greater achievement. If your reading test consists of “the cat sat on the mat,” everybody’s probably going to be considered literate. Probably.

§

School of Dreams is a fascinating look at an amazingly successful American high school, but I don’t think any of its lessons are necessarily applicable to America’s public school problems as a whole. If schools get to be elite and select their students, rather than accepting everyone is eligible for school. If parents are uniformly demanding and high-pressure. If students are, on the whole, geared toward going to college (and if all high school students are headed for college, won’t that make future applications to college all the more fun?).

But it’s certainly a different look at American public education than we’re used to hearing—an overwhelming success rather than “yet another failure.”

Man, is this a good book.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett is one of the rare books that left me saying, Damn, I wish I’d written that.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep is the only cop in Thailand not on the take. He used to share that distinction with his partner (and close friend) Pichai, but Pichai is killed during what should have been a routine mission, and Sonchai vows to kill whoever did it. The ensuing investigation takes him (and us) through modern Thailand: karma, sex, drugs, Buddhism, Americans, reincarnation, and fallout from the Vietnam War, which includes the lowly social status of the offspring of American GIs, white and black, and Thai mothers, which pretty ensures they grow up to be whores…or cops.

Bangkok 8 introduces you to what life in Thailand is like—or at least it leaves you feeling as though this is what life is like. The depiction of this society is fabulous. The characters are almost all great (and certainly more three-dimensional than in most books). The storyline behind the murder mystery is about more than someone just killing someone else.

Plus, this book is funny. There’s the scene in which Sonchai blithely talks to one of his mom’s old coworkers as she practices her act (which involves popping balloons in a rather unorthodox manner). Or the way Sonchai remarks to the reader how he knows several other characters from their past lives…right as he meets them. Or just little musings on the way things are in Thailand:

For reasons unfathomable to me, the Colonel has hung on the wall behind his desk a map of Thailand issued by the Crime Suppression Division, which shows the geographical areas in which police conniving in organized crime is supposed to be at its worst. Arrows of different colors point almost everywhere. Along the Lao and Cambodian borders the police help smuggle drugs and endangered species destined for China; along the Burmese border we help bring in enough methamphetamines weekly to keep the entire population awake for a month. All along the coast the police work hand in hand with Customs and Excise to assist the clandestine oil trade, for which most of the country’s fishing fleet has adapted its boats: they sail out to offshore tankers most nights, receiving the contraband diesel into their specially designed stainless steel tanks; more than 12 percent of Thailand’s diesel oil is contraband. All around the edges of Krung Thep and in hundreds of rural locations the police protect illegal gambling dens, mostly from other police and the army, which is always trying to muscle in. At street level the police commercial genius produces some of the best cooked-food stalls in the city, owned and run by young constables who are immune to prosecution for illegal hawking. The map is a mind-boggling maze of red, green, yellow and orage arrows designating the different infractions indigenous to each area, with Day-Glo cross-hatching, dire warnings in boxes, pessimistic footnotes and stark headers. I am not the first to observe that the Colonel is the only person in the room not to have it in his field of vision.

I have gazed at this map many times. Taking into account that the police are generally facilitating someone else’s scam, it begins to look as if 61 million people are engaged in a successful criminal enterprise of one sort or another. No wonder my people smile a lot.

One of the best features of Bangkok 8 is how many shades of gray there are with every character: Sonchai isn’t necessarily better than anyone else because he doesn’t take bribes; his mother is straightforward in her approach to her profession; the Colonel in charge of Sonchai’s district is massively on the take…and yet honorable at the same time. Sonchai’s outlook on life—sex, drugs, money, desire, passion—is completely alien and yet completely understandable.

Many of the reviewers on Amazon mention how much they hated the ending. I have to completely disagree—I thought the ending was completely in character with everything that had gone before. If you haven’t figured out by the end that life in Thailand is a little different than it is in the West…well, can’t help you there.

Ever since Sophia’s birthday, we’ve had a little problem with her: she wants Princess everything. Most especially books. (Well, and music in the car. I bought her the Disney Princess CDs and I rue the day I did, because all I friggin’ get to listen to now is Judy Kuhn wail about the “Colors of the Wind.” You never know what you’ve lost until you can’t listen to NPR any more.) Whenever we offered to read her a book, she wanted a Princess book, and finally Darin put down his foot: when we’re at the bookstore reading books, no Princess books. He even hates reading them to her at bedtime.

So while we were at Kepler’s the other day we noticed a new book that was co-created by the author of one of our favorite children’s books. Calef Brown did Polkabats and Octopus Slacks, which is hysterical: if you have kids, or you like poetry, or both, run out and buy this book. (Its companion, Dutch Sneakers and Flea Keepers, is good but not superlative; we read Polkabats a whole bunch and Sneakers only a few times.)

The book we found at Kepler’s was Greece! Rome! Monsters! written by John Harris and illustrated by Calef Brown in his offbeat, folk art style. Darin and I have always loved the Greek myths, and we thought Sophia might enjoy this book. Then we opened it up and read a bit and thought, Hmm, descriptions of flesh falling off bones and monsters with three rows of sharp teeth and cutting off the Medusa’s head. Perhaps this is too scary for a three-and-a-half year old.

Wrong again, mater.

Sophia loves this book. She isn’t scared by it at all; she wants to hear it over and over again. If she could get both Darin and me to read it to her before bed, she would. She likes to point out the various monsters in the opening spread and she can name them all. Manticores and basilisks and Cerberus oh my! My little girl isn’t fazed by the tale of the Minotaur in the least.

I found D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths when I was eight and on vacation in Bermuda. Yes, even at eight you couldn’t get me out of a bookshop. And I was looking forward to the day when I would get my kids and copy and sit down with them and discuss the Greek myths with them.

What can I say? That day may be now.

And she hasn’t asked for a Princess book lately, thank goodness.

If you have a tot who needs something a little offbeat, check Greece! Rome! Monsters! out. Or Polkabats and Octopus Slacks. They’re both excellent.