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So Sorry

Dear visitor, I am so sorry about all the crazy extra spaces in the book list and that it takes forever to move from post to post. Soon I am moving to a new website. I'll tell you what my new address is as soon as I build it. In the mean time, I highly recommend The Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I dare not put up more posts on this site, as everything seems to be falling apart.

Big Fish

In "Meditation 17," John Donne says that "God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another" with such poetic beauty that, reading it, I forget what a terrifying idea that actually is. Do I really look forward to being fully known? If I could be assured that I would be fully accepted (something the Bible does assure, but that I have a hard time believing), I would long for it. In Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, Edward Bloom wants acceptance from his son, but can't bring himself to open up to him. He has been fabricating stories about himself all his life, and refuses to turn his back on them.

His son William asks him to just have one completely truthful conversation with him before he dies. At various points it seems like he might be finally opening up, but the seriousness gets shunted off the tracks into some silly joke. William grieves not only for himself but for his father's sake: "Beneath one facade there's nother facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place."

The stories that Edward tells all make himself out to be the hero. He subdues a giant, saves a little girl from a mad dog, buys a town to preserve a simple way of life for its people. Edward is safely able to tell these stories because he spends so much time on the road while William is growing up. "The very idea of coming home at the same time every single day made him just a little nauseated," so he travels, and when he comes home, he tells stories. William reflects on the times when his father was away: "I'd say I missed you, if I knew what I was missing." His father is gone most of the time, and when he comes home, he brings a false sense of who he is.

Daniel Wallace has hit on an archetype that must resonate with every father and son who reads the book, the father who feels that he must be judged by his own son. Men have a wild desire to prove themselves, and it is ther sons who can see through them, to see clearly when they are posing. The most sincere thing Edward says to his son is actually a question: "As a father . . . do you think I did a good job?" All of his insecurity is wrapped up in the question. The sad thing is that he wants the affirmation without the honesty, as though the words themselves, "You are a good dad," were "some sort of password" into the afterlife.

Ultimately Big Fish leads the reader to think about his own lies and their effects on his relationships. Don't we really want to be loved for who we are and not for some facade we are throwing up? We're such posers! Beyond that, the book makes us question our idea of reality because so much of it comes through stories others tell. Edward's deathbed scene is told four times. The first three come in chapters entitled "My Father's Death: Take 1," "My Father's Death: Take 2," and "My Father's Death: Take 3." These all seem to be the same very realistic, unsatisfying scene told over again in slightly different ways, as though William is trying to find something good in it, but can't. Then the book ends with what seems like the real deathbed scene, "My Father's Death: Take 4," but it veers off into a wildly mythical, truly wonderful ending, worthy of one of Edward Bloom's stories. It's as though William has decided that his father might as well die the way he lived, and one has the impression that his children's children will hear this version.

Riding the Bus with my Sister

I am a shy stranger. In the locker room at the recreation center, I am amazed at the men who strike up conversations with others they don't know. I speak when I'm spoken to. I feel awkward when others are overly friendly. I'm alarmed when someone draws undue attention to themselves. I took a trip to New York once with one of my students who is the most extraverted person I know. On every bus and subway car, at every bus station and subway station, on every sidewalk, and in every line we stood, he struck up a conversation with someone we didn't know. He had a gift. Rachel Simon's Riding the Bus with my Sister really reminded me of that trip, of both the embarrassment and the wonder.

It's a true story about Rachel and her sister Beth, who has mild mental retardation. Beth is a thirty-some year old woman who spends her days riding buses in Philadelphia. Rachel tries to put aside her judgment of her little sister's lack of a job and promises to ride the bus with her off and on for a year. At first I wondered if this book would be sentimental, depicting Beth as one of "God's true angels" who speaks truisms out of her open-hearted naivety that the rest of us jaded, "normal" people long for. Simon actually scoffs at that depiction of people with mental retardation. Beth is headstrong and often downright rude. Jacob, one of Beth's bus driver friends, tries to model the golden rule for Beth and convince her to follow it herself, but she isn't going to be easily swayed.

Chapters in the book alternate between describing Beth's relationships with people--whether they be bus drivers, her social workers, or her boyfriend--and telling the heart-breaking story of Rachel and Beth's years growing up. As the book progresses, the two sisters come into clear focus as two wounded people who are stuck in ruts they find nearly impossible to climb out of. Rachel realizes that she is just as much "a clock that nobody can reset" as her sister is. What started out as a favor to her sister, just spending whole days riding the bus with her, becomes a transformational experience in her own life.

For the most part, it is the bus drivers who are the heroes of the book. I will never look at a bus driver the same way again. It takes a real gift to be courteous to rude people, understanding of hurried people, sympathetic with hurting people, and compassionate toward people like Beth who don't fit easily into society, all why negotiating traffic and weather. Some of the bus drivers start out with great intentions, but weary of Beth's persistent demand for attention. I could so easily see myself as one of those. True love is shown over the long haul. It has been a long time since I have felt as convicted by my own lack of love as this boook has made me feel.

Even Rachel comes to several points at which she distances herself from her sister. Once, she goes to the back of the bus and acts like she doesn't know her. It sounds terribly hurtful, but having read to that point in the book, I completely understood. Those who love Beth the most seem to set boundaries for their relationship, but continue to care for her even when she bucks against them. Relationships aren't easy. When those boundaries are set though, they really do enjoy her, and just riding the bus all day, Beth really does have a lot to offer society.

Having a sacramental view of sex and marriage, I found that Rachel Simon's acceptance of people living together outside of marriage was a hurdle I had to jump over in order to appreciate the book. Apart from that one difference in values, I felt like the book would really be great for high school students to read on their own or even study in class. Riding the Bus with My Sister belongs on the shelf with other great nonfiction books like Angela's Ashes, Obasan, and The Color of Water. It had me in tears at several points. The ending was particularly a wonderful surprise.

The Help

Kathryn Stockett's The Help is about black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's gaining the courage to tell the truth about their circumstances, though they risk their jobs and even their lives in doing so. It's a fun, lively, and thought provoking book. Stockett has a great sense of drama and an amazing ear for dialect.

There are several heroes, but the central character is Aibileen, a middle-aged maid who eventually gets the others involved. Aibileen is particularly heroic because she is the first woman willing to tell her story to Skeeter, a young white reporter who wants to write about more important things than how to clean things. Together, and eventually with others they enlist, they set to writing a book about the experiences of black maids in a nameless town in Mississippi. In the process, Aibileen discovers that she herself has a talent for writing as well as persuasion. In order to get her friend Minny to join the effort, she simply acknowledge's that Minny is right:"We don't want a change nothing around here." As a result, Minny starts thinking about the word "Truth." "It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning up all my life."

Truth is as important to Skeeter as it is to the maids. Constantine, her own maid when she was growing up, taught her the importance of it. Tall and gangly, Skeeter always felt unattractive, an impression that her mother encouraged, but Constantine taught her to say, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?"

"Them fools" includes much of society at that time in the South. Skeeter finds a book of Jim Crow laws, which she realizes defy logic. One involves segregating blind people who can't even see color: "The Board shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the instruction of all blind persons of the colored race." The truly blind are those who see color, and one of Skeeter's best friends, Hilly Holbrook, seems to be the worst of them. Though she is horrified by having to use a toilet that a black person might have used, she somehow doesn't think she is a racist. "'It's true. There are some racists in this town,' Miss Leefolt say. Miss Hilly nod her head, 'Oh, they're out there.'" Probably the most obvious indication of Hilly's blindness is her desire to help "poor starving children in Africa," but her total disregard for black people in her own neighborhood.

Though the book is a clear indictment of the racist South, Stockett carefully avoids painting Hilly or any of the others as monsters of evil. Aibeleen, for instance, can't help but admire Hilly's love for her children: "One thing I got to say about Miss Hilly, she love her children. About every five minutes, she kiss little William on the head. Or she ask Heather, is she having fun? Or come here and give Mama a hug. Always telling her she the most beautiful girl in the world. And Heather love her mama too. She look at Miss Hilly like she looking up at the Statue a Liberty. That kind a love always make me want a cry. Even when it going to Miss Hilly. Cause it makes me think about Treelore, how much he love me. I appreciate seeing a child adoring they mama."

The book also shows the passive, cowardly type of Southerner in the form of Stuart, who wonders why Skeeter wants to "stir up trouble." My guess is that there were as many Stuarts in Jackson as there were Hillys, though that may be giving too much credit to human nature. The only character who doesn't "see the lines" between the two races or even between the classes is Celia. She wants to sit down in the kitchen with Minny over coffee, but be one of Hilly's high society friends. You can't help but love Celia, but even she isn't idealized. Her life is a train wreck in itself, and she desperately needs someone like Minny.

Though the book is primarily about racism, it's almost as much about mothers and daughters--about Constantine and her daughter, Elizabeth and Mae Mobley, and Charlotte and Skeeter. All of these mothers at one point or another give in to society's expectations rather than loving their daughters. Of course the book is as much about Constantine and Skeeter and Aibileen and Mae Mobley--relationships where the black maid truly mothers the child.

The Help has some strong language, sometimes that is central enough that you can't pass over it and get the plot. The situation involving "the terrible awful" is one case in point. I won't be a spoiler, but it is aptly named. I never quite recovered from reading this part of the book. I'm trying to decide whether I'm a prude or not. One of my best friends is a seventh grade math teacher who once put up a poster of a guy picking his nose on the door to his room. I feel sure that he would love this part of the book. I'm just saying it isn't for everyone.

The Screwtape Letters

This is a review by Richey Riviere, one of my students.

Many people struggle with the daily grind of trying to stay faithful and be a good person, whether they are Christians or not. In one's own life it is hard to imagine the subtle ways in which the devil "comes to steal, kill, and destroy." Temptations from the devil seem like they would be sins that are clearly defined in the Bible and that pastors in local churches regularly comment on. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, however, expounds on a more thoughtful and descriptive perspective of Satan's techniques.

The Screwtape Letters is an account of the letters from senior demonic tempter Screwtape to his young, inexperienced nephew, Wormwood. In his letters, Screwtape offers advice on how to turn the man Wormwood has been assigned to away from "the enemy" (God) and to assure that the man's final resting place be reserved in the pits of hell. The Screwtape Letters forces one to examine one's own life and brings to light certain weaknesses in the human mind, whether one is a Christian or not. Most of what the book expounds on isn't even what most Christians think of when they think of someone who is on his way to hell. Screwtape makes a big deal out of the fact that big sins like murder are no worse than small sins like gambling, if they will both eventually lead that person away from God: "Indeed the safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts . . . ." Screwtape tells his nephew that he should focus on exploiting the common human weaknesses and to let the humans do the rest of the dirty work in the world. In this area, C. S. Lewis displays an extraordinary understanding of human nature and what truly drives men and women.

It is interesting to see how Screwtape concedes that God is genuine in His love for humans and that God only wants the best for them (even though Screwtape later denies acknowledging this when confronted about it by higher demonic authorities). Another interesting point in the book is when Screwtape acknowledges that all pleasure comes from God and is beneficial to a human's relationship with God, even when it is achieved through sinful and non-beneficial means, such as sexual sin. He says that while the actual act is the sin and can often drive the person further from God than the pleasure will benefit him, the pleasure is still from God, no matter what the circumstances: "Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving close up to the enemy makes against us in the long run."

Lewis also points out the dangers of pretending to be someone else in order to impress others. Screwtape states, "All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be." This is a warning not to pretend to be someone who does not love God or someone who sins on a regular basis because one just might turn into this imaginary person.

All in all this is a very good book. One criticism of the book is that it might cause many high school students to have to pull out their dictionaries or read certain sections over again to understand them fully. The vocabulary and sentence structure was sometimes difficult. Still, the book is a great classic and well worth the effort it takes to read it.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Jesus took a child in his arms and told his disciples that if they wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they should become like one of these little ones. I think at least a part of what he meant was to let go of the jaded cynicism that allows adults to talk about evil as though it is something we all must accept and live with. The best way to really see through the pretenses of even the worst things in the world is to see them through the eyes of a child. In John Boyne's The Boy with the Striped Pajamas, Bruno, a nine year old boy, discovers first hand the horrors of the holocaust.

Boyne calls the book a parable and writes with a simple style that matches a child's innocent point of view. Bruno's naivety allows the reader to discover the concentration camp with "the charm of novelty," as though those images from history books and documentary films were never stamped sharply on his mind and he is standing with Bruno at the window of his new bedroom, both of their mouths "in the shape of an O," wondering what this could be. "To begin with, they weren't children at all. Not all of them, at least. There were small boys and big boys, fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps a few uncles too. And some of those people who live on their own on everybody's road but don't seem to have any relatives at all. They were everyone."

In some ways, Bruno seems too naive. I really think that at nine years old, if I had seen a vast array of men in striped pajamas surrounded by a fence, I would have surmised that this was some sort of prison. Still, there had to have been some purposefully self-induced blindness among German people during World War II. The alternative for Bruno was to accept that his father was a monstrously evil man, a conclusion that Bruno does not want to hear from his new friend Shmuel, but cannot always avoid, considering some of the glaringly wrong things he witnesses. One of the best illustrations of Bruno's inability to really take in his experiences is when the story of Shmuel's past does not sink into Bruno's mind until he is telling it to his sister. As Jesus often said of people, he had heard the story, but hadn't really listened to it.

Occasionally, Boyne goes too far and makes the children in the book unrealistically naive. When Gretel sees the concentration camp, she suggests that it is the countryside. After Shmuel's encounter with Lieutenant Kotler, Bruno asks him if he fell off his bicycle. Come on! My willing suspension of disbelief failed at those moments; the story crashed to the ground like the Hindenburg. Still, the story has stayed with me, and I have found myself mulling over it again and again.

Inkheart

Dr. Roger Lundin, my professor of American literature at Wheaton College, could have gone the whole semester without teaching us, and his class would still have been one of my favorites. He could have stood at his lectern and read from William Bradford's journal every period, and we would have been mesmerized. He could have read James Fenimore Cooper, the wordiest of writers, and we would have been mesmerized. He had an amazing gift. He could read and make you feel like you were in the book. Twenty five years later I still distinctly hear his voice saying the word "beans," and it brings back the wonder of Walden. Cornelia Funke celebrates this wonderful gift in Inkheart.

The most compelling passages in the book describe Mo reading aloud: "So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained-glass pictures, tickling the skin."

Funke takes that figurative idea of making things come to life and makes it literal. Whenever Mo reads aloud, something or someone comes out of the book. What a great plot idea! Mo's daughter Meggie has never heard him read aloud though because there is a catch. Whenever someone comes out of the book, someone goes in. Though Meggie doesn't know it at the start of the book, this is why her mother is gone.

The conundrum of people going in and out of books begs the characters in Inkheart to compare the worlds of fiction to the world we live in. Wondering how she can rescue Mo and Meggie from thugs that have come out of Inkheart, the book within the book, Aunt Elinore ruminates, "The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live in. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness--and love. . . . Love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death." While he considers Elinore naive because he has experienced the terrors within Inkheart, Dustfinger, a firebreather who was pulled out of the book, desperately wants to get back into it even as he guesses that he will come to a bad end there. He finds our world cluttered with noise and only feels comfortable at night.

The plot of Inkheart is incredibly creative and the characters are compelling, but it isn't told that well. Nothing makes me angrier than when an author witholds information from the reader in order to purposefully misguide him. It is not until pg. 395, well after we first heard about a maiden named Resa who is serving the villain Capricorn, that Funke "dramatically" tells us Meggie's mother's name in the blunt, clunky line "Teresa was her mother's name." She could have easily mentioned Teresa's name earlier in the book and let the reader put it together, even if Meggie didn't. Likewise, we are told even later than this that Dustfinger is in love with her. Also, the scenes in the book tend to meander. The writing is not as taut as, say, J. K. Rowling's is in the Harry Potter series. For instance, Capricorn hangs Resa and Dustfinger in nets for a while (which seems like it would be difficult to do in a chapel), but then sends them down to the crypt supposedly because anyone who is executed has to spend time in the crypt. How is that a reason for moving them, and why were they in the nets to begin with? Motivations are often unclear or made clear too late.

You have to read Inkheart for the beauty of the whole story rather than looking at each part too closely, but I still recommend it highly, and my daughter tells me that its sequel, Inkspell, is even better. I'm still wondering about whom I would read out of a book if I could--maybe Innocent Smith from Chesterton's Manalive or Rebecca from Scott's Ivanhoe. Better yet, what book would I like to be read into--maybe somewhere fun like The Importance of Being Ernest or a magical place like Peter Pan.

Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is a fictional account of Stalin's purges in the late 1930's, in which many of the founding members of the Communist party either just disappeared, or were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for divergent points of view. The main character, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov has spent his life sacrificing the lives of individual people for the common good. Now he himself has been arrested for having divergent ideas. In prison, Rubashov realizes that he must either admit that he was wrong in sending others to their death or go to his death willingly himself.

Rubashov calls his personal point of view "the grammatical fiction" and tries to resist listening to its appeals to a sense of personal justice or longing. He has constructed his whole life on the principle that the individual, one person, is merely "a million divided by a million." He reminds himself that during the revolution, empiricism replaced morality: "We had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion." Because they were so confident that their course was inevitable, if anyone, even others who called themselves Communists, stood in their way, the person was arrested and executed.

Over time though, the Communist government devolved into a dictatorship. Rubashov mulls over how it happened, and his only explanation is that the masses were not ready for the revolution. He compares history to a ship going through a series of locks. When the ship passes through a lock, it has to wait for the water to rise to a level where it can pass through the next lock. The masses are like the water in that they needed time to adjust. The present dictatorship is a necessary intermediate time in which the government has to sacrifice the happiness of a generation of people in order to move forward in its original revolutionary purposes. In the mean time, no one must call into question the dictator's policies. The unity of the Communist government must be preserved at all costs.

For Rubashov this means his life, and most of the book is about his struggle to come to terms with this sacrifice. He reasons that a person's sincerity means nothing. He thinks about thirty-one men who were killed because they disagreed with the dictator over what form of manure the country should produce. However sincere they might have been, they might have caused the agricultural ruin of their country: "For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit." Rubashov scoffs at the Christian point of view that the individual is sacrosanct. He points out that among Christian nations, in "exceptional circumstances," the rights of the individual go out the window. Considering the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or more recently, the prisoners interned at Guantanamo without a trial, he has a point.

Behind all of Rubashov's ruminations, one can clearly see Koestler's disenchantment with Communism. He points out that the Communist leader must have "an axiomatic faith in the rightness of one's own reasoning" to suppress others' points of view through persecution. He points out that such a course of action suppresses creativity and the communication of ideas. In fact, the founders of the revolution were doomed from the start to kill each other because they were bound to disagree on some things, and minor divergences meant death. Finally, Communism offers no answers to the ultimate question of what lies beyond death, which must be faced as an individual.

Darkness at Noon is a prophetic book that that criticizes Communism from the inside out. While Animal Farm seems to present Stalin's dictatorship as a hijacking of Communism, Darkness at Noon shows how it was an inevitable result of the original revolutionary policies. I highly recommend this book to high school students who truly want to understand the twentieth century. I have talked about it mainly from a philosophical point of view, but it also offers incredibly intense drama as Rubashov faces multiple interrogations and relates to other political dissidents in prison.

The Bad Beginning

There is nothing more horrifying than ordered chaos. The most terrifying people in the world are like the suave, articulate duke in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" who matter-of-factly "gave commands" for his wife to be killed. I think the appeal to The Bad Beginning, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events is that horrific things are presented in such a matter of fact, ordered, and rhetorical way.

Take for instance how the three orphans learn of their parents' demise. A banker walks onto the beach and tells them, "Your parents have perished in a terrible fire." What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker? What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker who uses the word "perished"? What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker who uses the word "perished," and then defines it: "Perished means killed."

All the trials and tribulations of the three orphans are described in a patiently articulated, parallel form that would excite the mortal William Strunk and E. B. White. "Excite the mortal" here means "Bring back from the dead." This is an allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is another story in which things go from bad to worse. Notice the patience with which Count Olaf's friends are described: "There was a bald man with a very long nose, dressed in a long black robe. There were two women who had bright white powder all over their faces, making them look like ghosts. Behind the women was a man with very long and skinny arms, at the end of which were two hooks instead of hands. There was a person who was extremely fat, and who looked like neither a man nor a woman." In each case, we are introduced to the person, given a description, and then given an extension of the description. Each sinister character fits into place like gears on a clock, giving the impression that their grotesqueness is inexhorably woven into the fabric of things. There is no escape from calamity.

Having finished the book though, I am wondering if we have all been duped by Lemony Snicket. He calls the book The Bad Beginning and warns us that there won't be a happy ending. Come on! I'm not going to say how, but the kids get the best of Count Olaf in the end. You wouldn't have a story if they didn't. If you really want something without a happy ending, watch the movie "Doubt," or go see the play Waiting For Godot. I actually think The Bad Beginning is a good beginning. We'll have to see how things turn out at the end of the whole series. Maybe the kids will all get eye tattoos on their heals and join up with Count Olaf's acting troop. Klaus will learn that the reading of many books brings great grief, Violet will discover how to breed anthrax, and Sonny will try to chew her way over an electric fence.

The Princess and Curdie

As a freshman in college, I became sophisticated. I remember my friend Joanne McAllister asking me what happened to my old fun self. I had swapped it for French Existentialism and thought it a good trade. It's not that I actually became a French Existentialist; I just associated myself with it and felt very intellectual. Camus and Sartre seemed to see through everything, and their despair had a compelling allure. When I earned a C in philosophy, I had to rethink the whole thing; my professor saw through me. Like Curdie in George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie, I'm actually a natural believer, but growing up muddies the mind. MacDonald says of Curdie in his youth, "He grew at this time faster in body than in mind--with the usual consequence, that he was getting rather stupid--one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind."

MacDonald's description of the people of Gwyntystorm gives a prophetic picture of modern society: "All men said there was no more need for weapons or walls. No man pretended to love his neighbor, but everyone said he knew that peace and quiet behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite as useful, and a great deal more reasonable." Without any sense of the eternal, people are reduced to believing in "commerce and self-interest." For those who are depressed by the lack of higher ideals, there are "pills for enabling people to think well of themselves."

It's hard to read this book without seeing George MacDonald as the forerunner to C. S. Lewis. The Princess and Curdie is like a rough version of The Chronicles of Narnia. That wonderful blend of Romanticism and Christianity is there, but in a crude form, as though Narnia has been dipped into Grimm's Fairy Tales. Two kinds of people with very different perspectives inhabit this world: "In the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection." Notice that the dying part is inevitable. For the person who believes in enduring things, a day is a death not only to self, but to this world. Curdie is given grace to be "forever freshborn."

The old princess also gives Curdie another gift, something one might want to use on a used car salesman. Curdie can shake hands with a person and tell whether he is continuously dying and becoming more bestial, or continuously being resurrected and becoming more truly human. Curdie's best friend is a grotesquely ugly dog. Though Lena has a short body with long legs "made like an elephant's" and her underteeth are somehow outside her lips, when he holds her paw, it feels like a small child's hand.

Armed with this gift, his ugly dog, and a miner's mattock, Curdie heads off on a mission set before him by the old princess, "Old Mother Wotherwop." You have to love that name. The Princess and Curdie is a wonderful adventure, though somewhat episodic at first because we don't figure out what the mission is until a good way through the book. It's enough like the old fairy tales that you never know what Curdie will swing his mattock at next. My favorite character is the creature with "neither legs nor arms nor head nor tail," who proves useful in ways I will not divulge. The story gathers force and ends with an exciting climax, though it clunks to a finish on the last page. I recommend it to anyone who wishes there was another book in The Chronicles of Narnia. It might not be another course to the meal, but it makes a great hors d' oeuvres.

Deerskin

I recently read an article in U.S. News and World Report that claimed that roughly one in three women in the world have suffered physical or sexual abuse at some point. I think of the world as a relatively safe place for women, but it just isn't. Even if I could wrap my mind around the scope of men's disregard for women that that statistic implies about our world, it couldn't quantify the suffering of even one individual. It would take a book like Robin McKinley's Deerskin to do that. This book at first seems like a typical escapist fantasy novel, but it takes a savage turn into an intense story of a girl's recovery from horrific abuse.

McKinley relentlessly drags the reader through Lissar's emotional turmoil and physical hardship. Alone in the harsh, but quiet place she escapes to, Lissar sees herself in a bucket of water she has poured to try to clean herself. The sight and touch of her own body brings back a "howling darkness" that she cannot face, and she blacks out and throws up. "There was little in her stomach to lose, but it felt as if her body were turning inside out to get away from itself; as if her flesh, her inner organs, could not bear the neighborhood of the demon that ate at her, that by exposing her body the demon became visible too." How can a woman recover when her own self--her own body, her own memories--cause her to wretch from shame and humiliation?

Lissar manages through a miserable winter with the companionship of her dog, Ash, who has shared in every step of her suffering. Whenever she comes to the end of her rope, she either feels Ash's tongue "licking her wounded, bleeding body," or hears her "loud whuffling breath in her ear." On one level, Deerskin simply celebrates the close relationship that man and dog can have, the deep sympathy and loyalty that can spring up between the two. In Lissar's case, that sympathy is a fundamental part of her healing.

Ultimately, Lissar cannot heal on her own though, even with the love of her dog. At her lowest point, divine intervention brings her the gift of time, and when she is ready, a chance to confront the man who assaulted her. Much of the book dwells on time spent healing. Even a time of denial is a necessary stage to heal some wounds. McKinley is incredibly patient in painstakingly drawing that period out; when Lissar returns to confront her past, even then, she does so tentatively and only because of a desperate crisis. The confrontation scene felt a little over-drawn to me; I had a hard time reconciling the flaming avenger with the innocent victim. But then the scene is saved when Ossin does distinguish between the two and takes the real Lissar's hand. I'm still thinking through why I was uncomfortable with the scene. I recently saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards and felt like the total reversal of power in which the Jews avenge themselves in a demonic fury on the Nazis was totally unsatisfying and farcical. Deerskin rightly stops short of that.

The themes in Deerskin are too mature for most high school students, especially for boys. However, I recommend the book to adults. It may have the most likable prince in all of literature, and while he pursues Lissar nobly, he does not sweep her off her feet and resolve all her problems for her. His heroic nature does not crowd out the dignity of her personal struggle to recover. He offers her sympathy and love, but beyond that, he respects her as a woman--a real woman who rolls around with dogs, likes to feel the ground under her feet, and can peg a charging wild beast in the eye with a rock.

The Midwife's Apprentice

What do you want? Every teenager needs someone to ask him that question. I remember having no idea what I wanted as a teenager. Graduation from high school came as an utter shock. My world collapsed, and for the first time I seriously asked myself, "Now what? Who am I going to be?" In Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice, Alyce is confronted with this question. Her answer is "a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world."

From the start, Alyce has been steadily pursuing what she wants with an inquisitive and industrious mind. As the story opens, the midwife finds her sleeping in a dung heap and derisively calls her Dung Beetle. As demeaning as the name is, it reflects her ingenuity; she slept in the warm dung to keep herself from freezing. Throughout the book, Beetle keeps her eyes open and learns what she can, whether it is listening in while the midwife delivers babies, or cleaning up the inn close to the old scholar while he teaches his cat to read. She's not afraid to try things either. This is most notably shown when the Devil comes to town and all her enemy's vices are exposed. However, this quality is put to its greatest test when she is asked to help Emma Blunt through a difficult delivery.

So many things contribute to Alyce finding her place in the world. A merchant compliments her hair and gives her a comb. She makes a friend of an enemy. She makes another friend through a compassionate act. She tries something a second time and learns perseverence. She gains in dignity in the reader's eyes long before she does in her own.

Maybe most important of all, she decides that she will have a name. How important a name is! "My name is Alyce." This is a book about a poor girl who simply wants a place in her village, but as she demanded that others call her Alyce, I was reminded of the movie Gladiator: "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius."

The Midwife's Apprentice was one of the most satisfying coming of age stories I have read. On top of that, the book gives a full picture of life in a Medieval village in England. Cushman gives an author's note at the end, supplying a short history of midwives. By that point, she had me as curious as Alyce was about all the strange practices, and I read it eagerly.

The Hero and the Crown

At my daughter Joanna's graduation, I presented her with a sword. I told her that God had put within her an adventurous spirit and that I was proud of her and wanted to see her go out and make the most of it. It probably seemed hokey to some people, but I stand by it. At the time, it felt a little strange because the sword already belonged to her (I had stolen it from her room for the ceremony), but now that I have read Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, I realize that there is a precedent for presenting a daughter with her own sword and that good things happen when you do.

The first half of this book would be awe inspiring for any girl with a romantic thirst for adventure. Aerin struggles through a debilitating illness, befriends an injured war horse, trains him back to greatness, and with a dogged patience that would rival Thomas Edison's, develops a concoction that will defend her against dragon fire. Thus armed, she heads off to fight dragons. Step aside, St. George! Step aside, Prince Whatever Your Name Is in Sleeping Beauty! The description of Aerin's battle with Maur beats any I've read anywhere in English literature. It makes a mockery of such silliness as Beowulf leaning up on one arm and prying Grendel's claws back with one hand. You don't defeat a monster many times your size without being slung around, charred to a crisp, beaten to a pulp, and left for dead yourself.

The second half of the book is a bit harder to swallow. Who is this Luthe guy? How old is he? Is he really bald? Why fall in love with him when Tor is back home fighting off the northern demons? Aerin's experience with Luthe drags on beyond endurance. Listening to Aerin and Luthe beside the silver lake rivals listening to Bella and Edward talk in the cafeteria. When she falls in love with him, it feels like Luke Skywalker has fallen in love with Yoda (minus the gender problem--okay, maybe that was a bad analogy). All the same, at the end when she has nicely turned back to Tor but somehow keeps Luthe in her heart for the next life--yuck--it reminded me of what a good thing it was for Rowena that she didn't know how often Ivanhoe thought about Rebecca. We're supposed to believe that "it was her love for Luthe that made her recognize her love for Tor," that "her destiny, like her love, like her heritage, was double." It never comes together for me.

All the same, when Aerin gets back to Damar, the book picks up again, and there are some great battle scenes. The book is like a beautiful figure with a gaping wound. What do you do with it? Joanna tells me she just reads the parts she likes. That answer would make Aristotle turn over in his grave, but if you look at it like an Arthurian romance where the whole is clunky and episodic but certain parts pierce your heart, it might work. In that sense, The Hero and the Crown fits right in with other great fantasies in the Medieval tradition.

Peter Pan

When I was a kid, I day dreamed about getting tied to a stake. It wasn't always the same bad guys who captured me. Sometimes it was Medieval bandits, sometimes Arabs, sometimes pirates, sometimes Nazis, sometimes Soviets, but most often it was Indians. The shape of my world sprung from "Rin Tin Tin" episodes. I watched them avidly and idolized the little boy who owned the dog and got to wear a uniform just like the Cavalry officers. My mother sewed a stripe down each side of my blue pants for Christmas one year and proved her worth. They always captured me and tied me to the stake because I was trying to save a girl who was already tied to another stake. So there we stood a few yards apart, our hands tied behind our backs, without a hope in the world. If she was gagged, she stared at me with burning eyes that said, "I love you. Thanks for trying." If we weren't gagged, I said something along the lines of "To die will be an awfully big adventure." I know that J. M. Barrie had these same sort of dreams as a child. The amazing thing is that he seemed to fuel them into his adulthood and wrote Peter Pan.

Neverland is familiar to anyone who had a backyard growing up. Things are not as perpetual in the Neverland of the book as they are in the Disney movie, where the Indians are usually spoofing when they catch the lost boys. Neverland is gloriously dangerous in the book. The pirates are out to kill the lost boys, the Indians are out to kill the pirates, and the animals are out to kill the Indians. Hook may kill a pirate simply to show his method, and when there are too many lost boys, Peter "thins them out." Yikes. Apparently, children on the mainland need to do some more clapping too, because not all fairies survive this tale.

There are plenty of other familiar things too. There is a wife's kiss that a husband can't ever quite catch. There is a boy's arrogance that makes him really believe that someone else's idea was his own, and yet his desperate need for bandages for the slightest of wounds. Above all, the book acknowledges that children are heartless; this is what makes them so attractive, because it shows an absolute faith in a mother's love. "Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time; and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be embraced instead of smacked."

If you enjoy the sort of word play and rhetorical flourish that you find in Alice in Wonderland, or A Series of Unfortunate Events, you will love Peter Pan. I must offer up an example: "It was the grimmest deed since the days when [Hook] had brought Barbecue to heel; and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised had he now paced the deck unsteadily, bellied out by the winds of his success?" Read and dream again.

Peace Like a River

One of my favorite songs is Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl." In that song, he describes watching a cowboy movie in which Gregory Peck is gunned down while riding across the desert. The townspeople want to string up the kid who shot him, but the dying gunfighter says the kid shot him in a duel fair and square. He says, "I want him to feel every moment what it's like to face his death." What a great line! Bob Dylan says that the scene keeps blowing "right through me like a ball and chain." I get that. I feel the same way about Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, which is a modern Western.

Peace Like a River is really about which of two kinds of heroes Reuben Land is going to become. His older brother Davy is the independent Lone Ranger type who takes matters into his own hands. Early in the book, Davy asks Reuben, "You think God looks out for us?" and when Reuben answers, "Well, yeah," Davy asks, "You want Him too?" For Davy, having someone take care of things for him goes against the grain. When Davy hears the story of how their father was flung four miles away by a tornado and God delivered him unbruised, it really bugs him. The truth is Davy is amazing. Reuben's description of Davy hunting is right out of a Chuck Norris poster:

"His right index finger is just whitening on the trigger, and on his face is nothing at all but the knowledge that the goose is his.
Not confidence--I understand confidence. What Davy had was knowledge."

Reuben and his little sister Swede idolize their older brother. Swede, a romantic eight year old, writes narrative poetry about Sunny Sundown, a lone hero from the Old West. At one point Sunny rides into town and threatens a whole mob of people who are about to hang an innocent man:

"His clothes and hat were black as ink, his dancing mustang pale,
His eyes were blue and hard enough to make the sun turn tail.
He said, 'You want to hang this man, I'll give you each the same.
I don't much like a mob,' said he, 'and Sundown is my name.'"

It's incredibly inspiring, but as the novel progresses and Davy becomes a vigilante, Swede runs into difficulty trying to make things turn out all right for Sunny.

Reuben's other hero is his father, Jeremiah, the quiet and steady janitor at his school. If Davy is like Chuck Norris, then Jeremiah is like Gregory Peck. He is concerned, but unruffled by threats against the life and well-being of his family. He prays, trusts in God, and teaches his children that retalliation only leads to escalation, but when it comes time to act, he wields his broom with a vengence. His faith doesn't come easy to him though. On occasions he has shouting matches with God, and one night seems to wrestle with him like Jacob. God works extraordinary miracles through Jeremiah, often ones he doesn't even notice himself, and some of them remarkably self-sacrificing. When a vindictive principal fires him, Jeremiah touches his face, healing him of a bad skin condition.

Reuben's own physical condition factors in the way he relates to his brother, his father, and ultimately God. He has terrible asthma and says that he couldn't be self-sufficient like Davy even if he wanted to. "The weak must bank on mercy--without which, after all, I wouldn't have lasted fifteen minutes." At the same time, he struggles with reliance on a God who miraculously saved him at birth, but left him with lungs like clogged dryer vents. When his father miraculously walks off of the back of a pick-up truck one night, Reuben wonders why God hasn't healed him. "For the first time the thought ingressed that if this man, my father, beloved by God, could work miracles--if he could walk on air--then fixing my defective lungs ought to be a picnic. Yes, indeed, a day at the old beach."

Reuben eventually meets Jape Waltzer, one of the creepiest villains in all literature. Jape is the epitome of self dependence. He scolds Reuben for thanking God for the food. "You are thanking God for the food when he did not give it to you. I gave it to you and did so freely. Thank me." He sneers at Reuben's timidity and tries to teach him how to breathe: "No, no. Make the attempt. Make up your mind and breathe." I wanted to reach into the book and smack the guy, but I know if I met him face to face, he would freak me out as much as he does Reuben.

Peace Like a River is an American classic that probes a value that Emerson made our most defining characteristic, self dependence. Enger writes with a beatifully poetic and yet boldly masculine style that often jumps off the page. I use this book for summer reading, and on the whole kids love the book and discuss it enthusiastically.

Watership Down

I wish I were a knight. I would have been a miserable one, no doubt; lugging heavy armor around has to be tough on a weak abdomen and a guy who has had four hernia surgeries wouldn't have lasted long, but I still wish I were a knight. A few years ago I read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and I think though I have wanted to be a knight all my life, that's when I realized it. A man is meant to face his worst fears, fight for truth and justice, kneel before a king, devote himself heart and soul to a lady, wear shining armor, ride out on impossible quests, make oaths that will eventually cost him his life--all that stuff. This brings me to Richard Adams's Watership Down, a book that unabashedly says that one should live on the edge. By the way, it's about rabbits, but don't be fooled into thinking it's a warm fuzzy story.

In Watership Down, Hazel and his compatriots encounter a warren of rabbits who have forgotten what it means to be rabbits. They are rich--filled full with flayrah (garden vegetables) every morning--huge, healthy, sophisticated, modern, and strangely depressed. In my mind they personify a lot of what's wrong with modern man. The more this society looks like our modern world, the more uncomfortable the visitors get with it. It's as though someone from Medieval England stepped into 20th century America, or I suppose England. Fiver, Hazel's little brother who has prophetic insight, wants to have nothing to do with the unnatural society from the start and is only dragged in against his will.

The downfall of their spirit begins with having security and wealth handed to them. A man walks by every morning and leaves them food. He shoots any predators that come their way. He pretty much leaves them alone to live in perfect bliss. The catch is that every once in a while a rabbit mysteriously disappears.

A whole culture develops out of this unnatural situation. The rabbits make no raids on neighboring farms. They have no leader because they don't need one. As they sit around in their warren with nothing natural to do, they develop into a "high society." For instance they greet each other with a strange dance, they sing their young to sleep, they store food underground, and they laugh in ironic situations. When Hazel tells Cowslip that he is going outside in the rain to eat some grass, Cowslip laughs, presumably because it is so unnecessary to eat in such an uncomfortable situation. Hazel is utterly freaked out by the laughter, which is totally alien to simple rabbits, and runs away from him. Even though the rabbits of the warren are huge, there is a weakness of spirit to them, and Blackberry says they just don't seem like fighters.

The difference between the two groups reaches a head when they tell stories. Dandelion's story is about the wily, adventurous El-ahrairah, the mythical first king of the rabbits who wages bets with Frith, the sun god, and raids his enemies' gardens. The rabbits of the warren call the story old fashioned and say they prefer dignity to trickery. Their "story teller," Silverweed, on the other hand, recites a poem in which he accepts death with an eerie romantic dignity and asks Frith to take his breath away as though it were the natural course of things--something Elizabeth Kubler-Ross might have written. Fiver freaks out when he hears the poem and tries to push his way out of the warren. When his friends question him about his rude behavior, he says, "Something can be true and dangerous folly at the same time."

This is why I tend to vote conservative, save the orange skins for our compost pile, and want to be a knight. I don't want things done for me. I don't want to be safe. I don't want to accept the circle of life and the inevitability of death. I'm with Fiver. "Though wise men at the end know dark is right," I want to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." William Wordsworth warned us two hundred years ago that as society becomes more sophisticated, people live less. He shook his head at aristocrats who had servants pour their tea and put their boots on for them. Why would doing nothing make one superior and happy? He was all for milking one's own cow. For the rabbits, that means foraging in dangerous grounds, stealing does from other warrens, and raiding farms--living with danger, courage, and trickery.

It's a wonderful life to live, and Hazel embraces it with such zest that when I turned the page to the final section of the book and discovered "Hazel-rah" in bold letters, I was ready to ride out with him in battle (or hop out). And pitched battles there are! I have not even mentioned the evil General Woundwort and his regime that "keeps his warren safe" with monomaniacal repression. I cannot recommend Watership Down enough. In my opinion, it belongs on the shelf between The Once and Future King and Lord of the Rings.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is an incredibly fun adventure story. It clips along, always engaging the reader with wonderfully creative things in the magical world such as trading cards with moving characters who leave their pictures because they have better things to do. The characters in the novel are absolutely Dickensian, from Vernon Dursley--the fat, blustering uncle who sells drills--to Hagrid--the gargantuan, but tender-hearted gamekeeper who desperately wants a baby dragon.

I think I personally liked the book best because it captures the spirit of a boarding school, a place where you are forced to sink or swim with teachers and fellow students. When Professor Snape picks on Harry, making fun of his fame from the very first day of school, Harry just has to tolerate it and try to get along as best as he can. Harry loves Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry though. He makes the best friends of his life there, and they spend endless amounts of time together, whether they are studying, hanging out, or sneaking around the castle.

At one point in the book, Professor Dumbledore tells Harry, "The Truth . . . it is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone does more than provide a great plot, setting, and characters. The themes in the book are universal, placing J. K. Rowling squarely on the side of absolutes, as opposed to say Lemony Snicket, who skates away from truth with brilliant negative capability in his postmodern series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. A study contrasting both series would create great discussions in a high school classroom.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry returns night after night to the Mirror of Erised until Professor Dumbledore warns him that the mirror gives "neither knowledge or truth. . . . It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live." There is at least a nod here to the idea that reality is not what we make it. Contrast this to the sort of blather you hear from mindless movies and TV shows: "You can be anything you want to be." Later, the man with two faces tells Harry that Lord Voldemort taught him that "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it," a central idea in the teachings of Nietszche and Foucault, among others, that has so dominated 20th century thinking. In opposition to this, Rowling elevates sacrificial love as the essence of what is good and what paradoxically has the power to transcend and defeat what Voldemort calls power, a lust for personal gain. Ultimately, if self sacrifice to the point of death is to be of lasting value, if life here on earth is not everything and the greatest good is not to live as long and as happily as possible, then there must be a greater reality beyond death. Professor Dumbledore explains that Nicholas Flamel and his wife have discovered just this: "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."

Finally, I love this book because I love conspiracy theories. What if there really were magicians all around us doing their best to hide all their fun activities? It's worth a second glance at the kitchen chimney to see if a letter will come flying out of it. Okay, I live in America and have no kitchen chimney. Where is America in all of this anyway? This is a very Anglo-centric book. The world of the series broadens to Europe later, but for all the Americans buying the series, you'd think Rowling would include us a bit more. I think we should demand a sequel of our own from her--I don't know--something like Harry Potter and the Connecticut Conspiracy. I'm seeing Harry, now an Auror, swooping over to New England to face the secret spawn of Voldemort who has infiltrated the CIA through a long lost tie to the Salem Witch Trials. . . naaah, doesn't work. Harry belongs in the world of shepherd's pie and crumpets.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

In Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Cody Tull wonders if you can "classify a person . . . purely by examining his attitude toward food." It's a fascinating idea. In my own immediate family, we have very different attitudes toward food. My daughter Joanna, for instance, eats the same thing for every lunch--a Dagwood sandwich (with turkey, Provolone cheese, tomato, cucumber, and mounds of lettuce), pretzels, and a cut up apple--with a kind of joy that I can only dream of. My other daughter, Emma, goes through stages in which she binges on one thing or another until she gets sick of it--bagels, Oreos, tuna fish on crackers, Michaelina's frozen meals, salads with tomatoes and mushrooms. My wife, Betty, could have the same menu every week and be perfectly happy. I, on the other hand, want at least one experimental meal every week and would be delighted if we rarely ate the same thing twice. As the shopper in the family, I buy the standards for Joanna and Betty, keep up with Emma's new trends, and look around for the one interesting thing that I want to enjoy that week. You thought I was going to start interpreting here, but I know better. If Cody is right, maybe you can figure us out.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is really about claustrophobic family relationships. The sins of the fathers are passed down to the sons. Things that happened ages ago keep getting drudged up. Narrow patterns of behavior from childhood are inescapably carried into adulthood and infect all other relationships. Ways of coping with sorrow and bitterness somehow feel like glossing things over. It's a world in which everyone lets each other down. And yet it is a world in which the family keeps getting together, and love is the scabs on our wounds.

If no one has labeled the idealistic family member an archetype, it's time someone did. Isn't there someone in your family that is bound to burst out, "I just wanted us to have a wonderful Christmas together," utterly surprised that the broil has begun again? In my family it is my father, bless him. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, it is Ezra Tull, who keeps planning the proverbial family dinner, sure that this time everyone will somehow get that Frank Capra feeling. You could actually see the main conflict in this book as the family vs. the dinner. Can they finally make it through a dinner all together, no one having thrown water in someone else's face or run out the door in a flood of tears?

I would never require a student to read this book: it might be so familiar to him that it would feel like being locked in a closet. It's that realistic. However, I would shove it toward any serious reader or writer. Both the writing style and the characterization are excellent, and any aspiring writer could learn from Anne Tyler.

Black Like Me

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus tells Scout that one person can never fully understand another person without stepping into his shoes. I don't think anyone has done that to the extent that John Howard Griffin did when writing Black Like Me. The "knee-knocking courage," as Dick Gregory puts it, of what he did--changing the pigment of his skin through taking pills (sounds like something out of a dermatological horror show), exposing himself to ultra-violet rays, staining his skin, and then walking around in the Deep South to see how it felt--is astounding. Because the book seemed as confessional as it seemed indignant, because he spoke as a black man, but also as a torn white man behind that black man, the narrative drew me in.

Griffin's experience pointed out things I had never considered in practical terms before. For instance, I had always thought that for every drinking fountain or bathroom for white people, there was one for black people nearby, that the problem was merely the insult. Griffin describes one situation in which he is not allowed to use a dilapidated outhouse for whites and has to walk fourteen blocks to the nearest bathroom.

One of the most compelling revelations to Griffin was the anonymity he felt as a black man. He determined from the start never to lie about who he was, but very few people asked. Most white people simply saw him as an old black man whose past they had no interest in. This anonymity of merely being part of the black mass, coupled with the stereotype that black men have an uninhibited sexual virility, revealed itself in an even uglier way. As he hitch-hiked through Mississippi and Alabama, Griffin had to endure conversations with white men who felt that they could tell him anything about their sexual desires and ask him equally indecent questions.

The reader feels the strain of the decent black man who has to smile submissively to the hateful and degraded white man who never the less feels superior. Griffin describes the feeling "a hate stare" from a white man in a bus station gave him: "Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: 'What in God's name are you doing to yourself?'"

I've imagined the mixed reception this book would receive in my classroom. For the most part the white kids think racism is now a non-issue and become resentful when the black kids still bring it up. There is a prevailing attitude that once laws were changed back in the sixties and seventies, the effects of hundreds of years of oppression were easily wiped out. They love reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I can't stress how much good that book has done in the Deep South, but it is to a certain extent inocuous because it depicts a white man helping a black man. Toward the end of Black Like Me Griffin points out that the civil rights movement had to move beyond this kind of paternalism. He describes how the paradigm of "fragmented individualism," in which a black man tried to fit into white society, gave way to the paradigm of a nation within a nation, in which black men built a society of social and economic strength of their own alongside white society in hopes that in time the two would merge gradually on an equal footing.

Late in the book, Griffin faults a white crowd for clapping for him while remaining aloof when a black man said essentially the same things. He says that "white men could not tolerate hearing them from a black man's mouth." Ironies like this were understandably difficult to deal with, and for the most part, Griffin presents a fair picture. Occasionally, a critic could see through some of his erasures. For instance, he condemns the white people's stereotype of the sexed up black man as totally unfounded, but later mentions that when he was white again, he had to guard against using the "semiobscene language that negroes use among themselves." He also spoke out against white people's notion that when black people bought homes in Atlanta, property values were bound to go down by saying, "In every instance, they have improved the homes they have bought from the whites and built even better ones." That seems overstated.

For all the talk about us having moved beyond racism in the Deep South, I believe teaching this book in my class would create heated conversations, maybe necessary ones. A few weeks ago I suggested to another teacher at my school that we teach The Red Badge of Courage, and she said, "It's hardly worth it because the kids get bogged down in arguments over the northern point of view." It didn't surprise me. A student walked into my classroom a few months ago and announced that he had carried a sign in a parade the night before that read, "My president is black, and so is my future." I asked him exactly what kind of a racist he considered himself, and he seemed surprised and indignant that I would accuse him of such a thing. I don't believe he is the norm, but the fact that he felt good about carrying that sign and telling all his friends about it shows me that we have a long way to go.