Collected Miscellany

Before she was a blogger and author Joanne Jacobs was a journalist and columnist. She covered the education beat for over twenty years. In 2001 she began to volunteer at Downtown College Prep (DCP) a San Jose charter school just getting off the ground. DCP’s mission was to take failing area students, predominantly poor Mexican-American families, entering high school and help them qualify for a four year college or university. Jacobs decided that this was a story worth telling so she quit her job to write a book about this amazing place.

Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds is the result. And if you have any interest in education or the charter school movement you will want to read this book. It is a unique blend of human interest story and public policy journalism that tells the story of the leaders, teachers, students, and families of one particular charter school, but also offers insights and recommendations into this critical component of education reform.

In Our School Jacobs introduces the DCP’s founders, Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz, and describes what led these two young teachers to undertake such a imposing challenge. She gives you a sense of what running a charter school is like day-in-day-out and outlines the hurdles and barriers such a school faces. Interspersed within this narrative are glimpses into the lives and feelings of individual students.

Each chapter not only tells the story of DCP but also highlights the challenges of charter schools and education in general. Jacobs provides the political and personal back-story (including key data and statistics) so the reader can understand the larger context of the education system in California and the role of charter schools. In an appendix she even provides key lessons she has learned along the way for those looking to start their own charter school.

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“What if” or futuristic scenarios are often difficult things to pull off. Plausibility can be tricky thing. I would imagine that deciding how much you can trust the reader to suspend their disbelief is challenge for authors. In order to make people think, and to entertain them at the same time, you have to push things, exaggerate elements to a greater degree than you might wish in a more conventional story. But push things too far and you run the risk of losing the reader.

The reason behind these musings is Robert Ferrigno’s latest book Prayers for the Assassin which is set in the year 2040 and imagines part of America as an Islamic Republic. In large part, your enjoyment of the book will be dependent on how much you are willing to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story. Seen as an action/thriller with “what if” cultural and political components, Assassin is entertaining and at times thought provoking. If on the other hand, you are looking for a fully fleshed out view of what the world might look like in 2040, or a completely believable political scenario for an American Islamic Republic, you might be disappointed.

Here is how the book flap sets the scene:

SEATTLE, 2040. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the busy streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline. New York and Washington, D.C., are nuclear wastelands. Phoenix is abandoned, Chicago the site of a civil war battle. At the edges of the empire, Islamic and Christian forces fight for control of a very different United States.

[. . .]

After simultaneous suitcase-nuke attacks destroy New York, Washington, D.C., and Mecca — attacks blamed on Israel — a civil war breaks out. An uneasy truce leaves the nation divided between an Islamic republic with its capital in Seattle, and the Christian Bible Belt in the old South. In this frightening future there are still Super Bowls and Academy Awards, but calls to Muslim prayer echo in the streets and terror is everywhere. Freedom is controlled by the state, paranoia rules, and rebels plot to regain free will…

The story follows two characters: Rakkim Epps, a former elite warrior, and Sarah Dougan, a young iconoclastic historian. Dougan is researching the nuclear blasts that led to the conflagration and the formation of the American Islamic Republic. What she begins to find out about these world changing events calls into question the history and rationale of governments around the world. It also make her a fugitive. Epps is called on by her uncle, the head of state security, to find her. Epps does manage to track her down but rather than simply return Dougan to her father he helps her run down the clues to solve the mystery at the heart of these world changing events.

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Nelson’s Trafalgar: The Battle That Changed the World by Roy Adkins is a fresh and enlightening look at one of the most studied and discussed naval battles in history. The book is a relatively concise history of the battle and its aftermath.

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Leave it to Paul Auster to pull a fast one on his readers. When one thinks of Auster multi-layered and intertwined stories with a touch of the surreal come to mind. Meta-fiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, however you want to describe it Auster is usually anything but straightforward.

But Auster’s latest novel, The Brooklyn Follies, leaves most of that behind. Not all of it, however, as the main character is still a writer (at least in an amateur sense), the book is still about the power of stories, and there is a twist at the end aimed at forcing you to rethink what you just read. But even with these Austerian touches the book is really rather simple. It is about finding happiness in community; in the family and friends that surround you with all their faults and frailties.

The central character and narrator is Nathan Glass a retired and recently divorced insurance salesman who moves to Brooklyn looking for “a quiet place to die”. Glass has been diagnosed with lung cancer and the chemotherapy, his ugly divorce, and an estrangement with his daughter leaves him a dark mood. When Nathan beings a project entitled The Book of Human Folly – described as “An account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man.” – the reader thinks Auster is off on one of his traditional novels where unexpected chance events change people’s lives forever and where the story Auster is telling and the story the main character is writing/telling become intertwined and blurred. But the central focus of Follies never really shifts in that direction. Instead it concentrates on how Nathan goes from stoical despair to a busy and fulfilling life centered in his, and Auster’s, beloved Brooklyn.

This comes about, as is typical of Auster, by chance. Nathan runs into his nephew Tom Wood in a local bookstore. The once promising academic is now a lowly book clerk, a step up from his previous job of taxi driver. Soon nephew and uncle are eating lunch together and waxing philosophical about everything from the meaning of life to Edgar Allen Poe. Nathan’s interaction with Wood brings in a host of additional characters: Harry Brightman, Wood’s boss with a complicated past; Lucy, Wood’s niece who mysteriously shows up and refuses to talk; Aurora, Lucy’s ex-porn star mother who is trapped in a marriage with a religious fanatic; “The Beautiful Perfect Mother,” a gorgeous neighborhood women with whom tom is infatuated; not too mention a number of other side characters. Each character adds a little to the story.

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Good interview up at NRO with Jennifer Roback Morse. Morse is the author of a book that has been in my TBR pile for awhile: Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World. Morse presents some interesting arguments because she comes at it from more of a libertarian economist perspective than a strictly moral or spiritual one. Seems like an appropriate topic for Valentines Day.

Here are some snippets I thought were interesting:

Lopez: What is your biggest beef with the women’s movement, vis-à-vis how it has hurt marriage?

Morse: That is a tough question, because the women’s movement is so deeply culpable. However, if I had to name one issue, it would be the truly perverse view of equality that so much of the women’s movement embraced. Like much of the modern Left, the women’s movement insisted on “sameness” as their definition of equality. The fact is that the human species is a gendered species. We come in two sexes, male and female, that can never be made fully equal. This is one of the most basic biological facts of our species. You’d think our modern scientific age could accept this.

Yet in its desire for equality, or maximizing the reach of government, the Left has put every individual at war with their own sexuality, our own nature as male and female beings. This causes unbelievable heartache in married life, especially around child-rearing.

Social scientists have repeatedly observed that couples committed to gender equality find the arrival of their first child to be very disruptive and upsetting. Why should that be? Because parenthood is not a gender-neutral activity. Men and women behave, feel and desire differently, where children are concerned. Heck, even the babies react differently to their mothers than to their fathers. When the babies arrive, all that gender-based hormonal stuff comes roaring out of our bodies. We feel cheated, angry and confused. Couples who can’t let go of a radical gender equality ideology are headed for trouble.

The Left hates sex. Do not be deluded by the fact that the Left is hyper-active about sexual activity. Far too many on the Left are profoundly uncomfortable by any evidence of sex differences between men and women. They won’t be happy until we all believe that gender is an irrelevant category, for marriage, child-rearing, and even sex itself. Of course, we will make ourselves miserable trying to achieve this wrong-headed ideal.

And:

Lopez: So what counts as Smart Sex?

Morse: I take my motto from Sherlock Holmes, who once told Watson, “after you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” After eliminating all the forms of dumb sex, hooking up, cohabiting, divorce, and remarriage, what is left? Life-long married love. Although it seems improbable to the modern mind, the truth is that married couples have more and better sex, and have a far better track record at dodging the dumb sex that has caused so much misery.

Married sex is smart sex.