Finally Found What I've Been Looking For: on The Bell Curve

I like to think that I am the only anti-racist liberal in America who has actually read The Bell Curve, and that this gives me a certain cachet. I read it four or five years ago, when I came across yet another dismissal of it as "a racist screed," and became curious to know what it really said.

I found it fascinating. Charles Murray and his co-author were interested in questions of how a modern culture like ours deals with the fact that some people are not as smart as other people; how you measure intelligence; what can be done with the information. (Murray does this again in his book Real Education, in which one of his "four simple truths" is that "half of all children are below average.").

I did not find The Bell Curve to be a racist screed; I found it to be a carefully and thoughtfully written book that attempted to wrestle with hard questions. At the same time, after reading it, I wanted to read intelligent critiques of it to help me better evaluate it.

I couldn't find them. All the responses I found were accusatory, defensive, ad hominem attacks that equated the authors to early 20th-century eugenicists. "Did we read the same book?" I found myself wondering--and also found myself still at a loss to intelligently evaluate the book's claims and evidence.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with my friend Carla about Real Education. We moved on to The Bell Curve, and I lamented my failure to find non-hysterical responses to it. Carla is a social psychologist, and she said, "Oh, you should look up Richard Nisbett, he has done a lot of work on that book."

So I did. And my looking led me to a book called The Bell Curve Wars, which is a series of articles about the book, including one by Nisbett, most of them measured and useful. For instance, Jeffrey Rosen and Charles Lane evaluate the sources used, and find that much of the research on IQ that Murray and Hernnstein drew on was conducted by conservative foundations and think tanks; they point out that M & H do a poor job of tackling the question of rising IQs in the 20th century, which argues for the mutability of IQ, and that they ignore fairly extensive research on, for instance, black children adopted into white families, whose IQs tend to resemble those of their new families more than those of the communities they came from. Helpful!

At the same time, I find myself disagreeing with some commentators. For instance, Howard Gardner says that the authors are trying to "set up an us-vs-them dichotomy that eventually culminates in as us-against-them opposition" (p. 33). He says, "At literally dozens of points in the book, [the authors] seek to stress the extent to which they and the readers resemble one another and differ from those unfortunate souls who cause our society's problems" (p. 33--and the last bit of that sentence, from "unfortunate souls" on, is an good example of a writer attributing an attitude to Hernnstein and Murray that I did not find in the book, and distorting their ideas in the process).

As an example, Gardner cites this:

You--meaning the self-selected person who has read this far into this book--live in a world which probably looks nothing like the figure. In all likelihood, almost all your friends and professional associates belong to that top Class I slice. your friends and associates who you consider to be unusually slow are probably somewhere in Class II.

I cannot argue with the idea that Murray loves this little rhetorical trick. He does it again in Real Education, where he argues that most readers of the book likely have a certain kind of academic smarts which is shared by their family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. In Real Education, he argues that he, his readers, and people like you and me, don't actually have much notion of what a person of "average" intelligence is like, how they think, or what they're capable of--because we probably don't know any. Professionals and college professors who are asked to describe what they think a person of average intelligence can do with literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, logical thinking, and so on, tend to overestimate. (In Real Education, he argues that this leads to a utopian progressive educational notion that all children can succeed at a certain kind of academics which, culturally, we value).

I have a very different take on why Murray does this than Gardner does, though. As I read it, he is trying to remind his readers that they live in a certain slice of the world, and don't know as much about the rest of it as they think they do. That what they know about people and children and what they're capable of and what their strengths and weaknesses are does not necessarily generalize outside their cohort. To my mind, that's not divisive so much as giving affluent highly-educated people a much-needed reality check.

My favorite essay in The Bell Curve Wars is Thomas Sowell's "Ethnicity and IQ." Sowell is respectful of the book, and does a better job saying what I've been trying to say than I have. His essay begins:

The Bell Curve is a very sober, very thorough, and very honest book--on a subject where sobriety, thoroughness, and honesty are only likely to provoke cries of outrage. Its authors...must have known that writing about differences in intelligence would provoke shrill denunciation from some quarters. But they may not have expected quite so many, quite so loudly, and/or quite so venomously, and from such a wide spectrum of people who should know better.

The great danger in this emotional atmosphere is that there will develop a two-tier set of reactions --violent public outcries against the message of The Bell Curve by some and uncritical private acceptance of it by many others, who hear no rational arguments being used against it. Both reactions are unwarranted, but not unprecedented, in the over-heated environment surrounding so many touchy social issues today. (70)

So well said--particularly his understanding of exactly the problem I had finding rational responses to the book to help me think about its ideas.

Sowell goes on to take the authors to task for problems such as failing to adequately deal with the mutability of IQ, and relying on correlations without dealing sufficiently with confounding factors. At the same time, he has no trouble respecting them for their balance: "Even where the authors clearly come down on one side of a given issue, they usually present the case for believing otherwise. In such candor, as well as in the clarity with which technical issues are discussed without needless jargon, this book is a model that others might well emulate" (70).

Sowell--a conservative writer, by the way, whom I have come to respect a great deal after going beyond his newspaper columns and reading some of his books--has pretty much written the essay on The Bell Curve I would like to have written, had I been a bit more able to grapple with this huge book's complexity. He admires The Bell Curve where it is admirable (which it is in many ways, compared to so much writing on social issues), yet is not blind to its flaws, and he takes its critics to task for their own failures and distortions. I'll end with the conclusion of his essay:

In one sense, the issues are too important to ignore. In another sense the differences between what Hernnstein and Murray said and what others believe is much smaller than the latter seem to think. The notion that "genes are destiny" is one found among some of the more shrill critics but not in The Bell Curve itself. Nor do Hernnstein and Murray treat race as some kind of intellectual glass ceiling for individuals. As the authors say on page 278: "It should be no surprise to see (as one does every day) blacks functioning at high levels in every intellectually challenging field."

Critics who insist on arguing as if we are talking about an intellectual glass ceiling should recognize that this is their own straw man, not something from The Bell Curve. And if they refuse to recognize it, then we should recognize these critics as demagogues in the business of scavenging for grievances. The Bell Curve deserved critical attention, not public smearing and uncritical private acceptance. (78-9)

=============

Side note: I challenge my liberal friends to read one book by a conservative this year (and vice versa, but since I only have one friend who identifies as conservative--at least openly--and she's a big reader, I'm not sure she needs to take the challenge). Let it be someone thoughtful and measured, not a frothing, name-calling lunatic who is easy to dismiss. That is, no Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, but, say, Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, or Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, which helped me understand the lofty ideals that drive conservatism as much as liberalism. I'll add that reading liberal responses to The Bell Curve, which so often seemed dishonest and in bad faith about the content of the book, was one of the points over the last 10 years or so at which I lost faith in liberals and began to distance myself from them--very much the way Andrew Sullivan has lost faith in conservatives. Read his book!

Quick Pissed-Off Rant

I was just chatting with David about my breast reduction surgery, and realized that twice in the last two years a doctor has told me I couldn't have a certain treatment because I was fat, I have pushed and had the treatment, and the result has been a complete or dramatic reduction in pain: first knee surgery that completely eliminated my knee pain, which my (now former) doctor didn't want to refer me for because of my weight--although the surgeon, when I spoke to him about it, felt confident the surgery would be efficacious for me, and it was. And then my breast reduction, which the surgeon initially told me he wouldn't do unless I lost 70 pounds first, and which has almost eliminated a 15-year headache. How many people are suffering because they believe doctors who tell them treatment won't be effective for them, or that they don't deserve it? I'm lucky I'm a pushy bitch.

And you know what? If I had listened to my doctor and not insisted on being referred to a surgeon for my knee (after months of ineffective physical therapy), I'd still be in a lot of pain, my mobility would be increasingly restricted, and they'd say it was because I'm fat.

/end rant

Headache(s), or: Who Am I Without My Pain?

I've been periodically dipping back into my tape flags in Weaving a Family, and I've written many a dead-on-the-page false start in the last couple of months. This morning I sat down and went through my remaining tape flags, and realized that I don't have anything else to say back to that book right now. There are some topics in there, like the idea that we have an obligation to make our children culturally black, that I may find myself writing about someday. But for now, I'm done with that piece of this project.

What I want to talk about now is my health, because I find it interesting. You may not, in which case stop reading now, do something else more fun, and wait for another book post or cute story about my kids.

Many people know that I have chronic pain; I have had a headache for about fifteen years. Not "headaches." One headache. For fifteen years. It gets better and it gets worse, but it never goes away. Headaches are notoriously difficult to treat, but over the years I've had my share of tests and scans and trial medications. I've done physical therapy and had massages. I've meditated. I spent a week at a Pain Clinic ten or eleven years ago; that's where they send you when they decide you're going to be in pain forever, so you can learn how to manage it and live your life.

For a long time, I just lived with my headache, doing the things I knew helped, getting on with my life. My headache seemed complicated to me: my allergies affected it, for instance, but so did muscle tension (or it caused muscle tension--so hard to say). So does my tendency to grind my teeth, and TMJ problems. Getting treated for a vision condition called Vertical Heterophoria last summer was one of the most promising things I ever tried, but the improvement from my fancy new eyeglass lenses, though dramatic, was ultimately short-lived.

And then, in November, I had breast reduction surgery. I had thought about it off and on for awhile, but starting last year, all kinds of people I consulted for my well-being talked to me about it. My Pilates trainer, for instance, who told me that my efforts to improve my posture and mobility would be an uphill battle as long as I was wearing a K-cup bra, and a manipulating osteopath who undressed me, watched me stand and walk, and then said, "How attached are you to your breasts?"

Not very, as it turned out.

Now, I had heard from many women about the joys of breast reduction. "Your clothes will fit better!" they told me. "Your posture will improve! You won't get so many backaches!" So I expected some changes.

What I did not expect was that I would wake up from the surgery, and find that the constant pain, tension, and inflexibility in my neck muscles would be gone. Or that over the next few weeks, I would discover that the left side of my head, which for 15 years had been pain's last stronghold, the place that always hurt even when pain had receded from everywhere else, had also, for the most part, stopped hurting.

My head didn't stop hurting. But a headache that had always centered on my left temple moved to the top of my head.

What's more, it became clearly sinus-related.

This is what is interesting: it's as if removing the millstone I was carrying around my neck cleared away a layer of the pain's causes, like draining a lake to reveal the dead fish and trash heaped on the bottom. This is actually a big improvement; instead of this chaotic and confusing mess of pain from multiple causes, I can now identify pieces of it: this is because I was grinding my teeth; that is because my sinuses are really acting up.

Now, these identifiable pieces also feel more treatable. My doctor and I are beginning a plan to try to deal more effectively with my allergies, for instance--and we'll be able to tell if it really helps, I think, because this sinus piece of the pain will improve. I'm going to ask my dentist to check my bite guard; it might be time to go back to the TMJ specialist I consulted last spring, who suggested I start by getting checked for Vertical Heterophoria before we proceed with addressing TMJ issues.

The other strange thing that has happened since my surgery is that I seem to be having migraines, about one every two weeks. As migraines go, they're really not bad; I've seen really bad ones, taken David to the ER for them, so I know. Yesterday's headache, for instance, responded to migraine medicine and although I felt tired and a little out of it, I had a pleasant evening. Now I wonder if I was always having migraines, too, if they corresponded to some of my "bad patches," if that wasn't the reason that migraine medication sometimes--sometimes--helped if I was having a particularly bad head day.

Finally: sometimes, in the last 10 weeks, if I haven't especially been grinding my teeth and my sinuses are pretty clear, it has almost seemed like I didn't have a headache. "Do I not have a headache?" I would ask myself, and do a little inventory of my head. Always, deep deep in the stronghold of my left temple, I would find a starved and shivering remnant, a little bit of tight muscle or tendon, a spot that hurt if I pressed on it. "Does this even count?" I would ask myself. "If someone who hadn't had a headache for fifteen years had this very same tender spot, would they think they had a headache? I doubt it."

Yet I found--find--myself strangely unwilling, on those days, to say I don't have a headache. This is a very interesting phenomenon. You'd think I'd be dancing in the street, releasing a thousand balloons, calling everyone I know: "I don't have a headache!" You'd be wrong.

I can think of a few reasons why I might be unwilling to declare an end to pain. One is just that it's hard to let myself hope after 15 years. I've had promising stages before--right after my first set of prism lenses last spring, for instance--and the end of a promising stage is crushing. So I am not wanting to look head-on at the possibility of not being in pain; I'm only willing to kind of glance at it sideways. I'm not going to get my hopes up, no sir. I've been down that road before.

Another is that pain has been a part of who I am for a long time. Almost my whole relationship with David, for instance. Constant pain makes everything I've accomplished in the last 15 years: grad school, three kids, 13 years of college teaching, performing, leading workshops, babysitting, traveling, traveling with the three kids--much more impressive. I remember a few years ago, I threw one of the boys a birthday party in the middle of a really bad patch. There were, oh, eight kids at my house, and we did all the usual birthday party things: playing games, opening presents, eating cake and ice cream. When the last of the kids had been picked up, I turned to David, said, "I am a fucking hero," fell into his arms, and burst into tears.

Anybody can throw a party for 8 four-year-olds. Do it with the equivalent of a moderate migraine headache? That you've had for more than a decade? Best mom in the world!

I remember when I was being (very successfully) treated for a pretty serious anxiety disorder. When it was coming up on time to leave treatment, my therapist asked me to spend some time thinking about any reasons why I might not want to let go of my anxiety. That wasn't actually too much of a struggle for me--I was glad to put days when it was a triumph to shower, braid my hair, and walk to the mailbox behind me.

On the other hand, after that kind of drama, normal life, with all its unremarkable hair-washing and mail-fetching, can look a bit...pale.

I actually feel that more now with my pain than I did with my anxiety. Is it possible I actually feel some resistance to giving up being able to say, "I've had a headache for 13 years...14 years...15 years..." What if I never get to say "16 years"? Do I think I will somehow have failed to set a record? Was I planning a big party for our 25th anniversary?

I know that my friends and loved ones are eager to celebrate with me, should I become significantly pain-free. But will I miss their sympathy? Their admiration?

Will I lose some kind of moral high ground? Will I become...ordinary?

Will people expect more of me? Will I be able to live up to their expectations? Will I let everyone down?

What if it turns out that I really cannot do any of the things that I have thought I might be able to do, if only I didn't have this damn headache?

I'm scared that my optimism is misplaced, that this is just going to be another glimpse of sunshine through the endless clouds. I'm also scared that my optimism is not misplaced, that I am on the verge of moving into a new world, and that I will not know how to live in it.

They say I should write a book

I understand that when people say, "You should write a book," they mean, "I enjoy your writing. I enjoy it enough that I would read an entire book full of it. I think other people would enjoy a book full of your writing as well, and perhaps even pay money for it." But what I hear is: "Why the hell aren't you writing a book, you big loser? You are squandering your God-given talent!"

For much of my life, I expected to write a book. When I was about 12, and changed my name to Su Penn, a librarian who was very important to me said, "Wow, that is going to look really good on the cover of a book someday," and I thought that she had somehow miraculously divined this secret ambition I'd had for as long as I could remember. I also thought she was making a prediction that could not fail to come true.

In my 20s, I got an MFA in writing and literature, I published a few things here and there, I performed my work a lot, and I really thought all that was going to lead to a book. I was disappointed that it didn't. And then, at some point, I stopped being a public writer of that kind, for various reasons. And some time after that, I got very peaceful about it, and busy with other things, and didn't really think about it much. I don't usually think about it; writing a book is no longer one of my ambitions.

Until somebody says, "You should write a book." And I have a flare-up.

The thing that's new about this latest flare-up--brought on by several recent "you should write a book" incidents--is that I find that I am not only OK with not writing a book just now, but I am glad not to have succeeded at it ten or fifteen years ago when I was really trying. Some of the writing I did back then was pretty good, and I do not squirm when I happen to re-read it. I spent some time last week re-reading a few things, and mostly liked them.

But a lot of what I wrote back then would have been hurtful to, well, my mother. And right now, I would not hurt my mother for the world. So I find myself feeling glad that the ambition of my twenties never bore fruit, because I am more comfortable now living in a world that doesn't have The Book of My Twenties in it. Maybe this just means I'm a coward; do not all writers, after all, move on from their early work? Well, so be it.

I may yet have a book in me; life is long, I always say, and the road takes many a turning. But I am glad for the book I didn't write, and I am enjoying the book I'm not writing just now, and every now and then I spend some time not planning to write a book any time soon. It keeps me busy.

I say I write about books, but it's really mostly about me

I have been reading David Ellis Dickerson's House of Cards, a memoir about his days working at Hallmark. It is funny as all get out; I tape flagged the hell out of it, which is silly for two reasons: 1) It's a library book; 2) the humor and the story both build, so any one thing that I flag doesn't really stand up too well on its own.

Still.

Dickerson is a fun read but he's also a pump-primer for me--reading his book gets me wanting to write; it's a little free-associational, but here goes. One of the things that happens in the book is that Dickerson tries to figure out why he's failing socially with most people at the company: he's told he talks too much; he's told that people are complaining that he makes "too many literary allusions," which baffles him. And then he starts to figure it out. Here's a story from page 300:

I began to figure out some of my problems. One time, for example, in my wanderings, I was on the stairs from Nine to Eight and saw an artist I knew casually coming up as I was coming down. We nodded in passing. Two hours later, while down on the seventh floor, and coming down yet more stairs, I saw him again. My god, I thought bemusedly. It's like one of us is omnipresent.

"You again," he said, chuckling.

And I blurted out the first joke I thought of: "Yeah, I'm just working on my Omnipresence merit badge."

He continued to smile with his mouth, but his eyes froze, and he nodded quietly and we passed in silence.

My initial reaction was to say, Goddammit, that was a good joke! Why didn't he at least laugh? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it had been almost mean of me to spring that on him unawares. He was just saying hi and making social noise, and I had essentially asked him to suddenly process two distant cultural references and respond appropriately, and I'd done it unthinkingly, instead of just saying, "Ha ha."

This is familiar to me because I have killed many a casual conversation in exactly that way, and then I vow not to do it again…and then I do. Because it's hard not to when that's the way your mind works. I did it to some stranger in the toy aisle at Meijer the other day, and it embarrassed us both.

David, on the other hand, is, like me, always tossing off jokes that reference, say, the Norman invasion and simultaneously an old episode of ST: TNG. Years ago, when we were having a rough time, a therapist asked us to make a list of the things we liked about our relationship. #1 was "shared wit"--though, because of certain quirks of my handwriting, it looked like "shared ert" when we tried to read it to the therapist.

(We often have these "what the hell" moments because of my handwriting. The other day I was getting ready to go grocery shopping, and pulled the list off the fridge. "Coffee cake?" I said. "Why the hell would I think I wanted to buy coffee cake at Meijer?"

David said, "That's what I thought it said too."

It said "caff-free Coke.")

On the other hand, the last woman I dated before I got involved with David had no sense of humor at all. This was an eye-opening experience for me because I have always tended to associate quick-wittedness with intelligence, and I do think the intelligence of quick-witted people is flashy and easy to see (though on the other hand, some people might ask of me: "If she's so smart, why doesn't she know when to shut up?").

But this girlfriend could not be accused of not being smart: she was a philosophy professor. And yet, she was not funny, and she couldn't see that I was. Since I tend to think my funniness is one of my most appealing features, I found myself wondering why she wanted to date me in the first place--it would be like a blind person dating someone who had no positive qualities other than good looks.

My attempts at humor--reflexive, spontaneous, and irrepressible--were the source of many an awkward moment in the early weeks of our relationship. And then I would attempt to explain to her why what I had said was funny; she had, at least, a philosophic interest in the topic, and by late in the relationship, we had progressed to this:

Her, just after our dinner has been delivered to our table: We have no silverware!

Me: Well, that's OK. Lasagna is pretty much a finger food, anyway.

[pause]

Her: That was a joke, wasn't it?

No wonder we only made it six months despite all the mutual goodwill in the world.

We had the most amicable breakup in the world, agreeing in bed one Sunday morning that "the girlfriend thing" wasn't really working out for us, and then going out for breakfast as usual. But months later, over lunch, we had our only fight, and I have to say that I do not recommend fighting with a philosopher. Whether you are right or wrong makes no difference; she has spent her entire life thinking, and thinking about how to think, and constructing thoughtful arguments, and she will simply annihilate you with philosophy. I think it was four years before I could go back into that restaurant without sweating and feeling like an ant about to be stomped.

It occurs to me that although I think my sense of humor is one of my more appealing qualities, I suspect that it is also one of my more annoying. As David Ellis Dickerson learned as well.

On his 30th birthday, Dickerson lets the guests at his party vote on whether he should shave his head. He's in among a fairly conservative crowd, and the vote barely passes, but it does. And he shaves his head. "Shaving my head…" he says, "turned out to be a great move. Underneath that shaggy mane, it turned out, was a very nicely shaped skull. Everywhere I went the next day, I'd catch myself in the mirror and think, This is a good look. I might keep this around for awhile" (325).

Another thing we have in common. I shaved my head summer before last, because I had always wanted to. I looked for an excuse, in case it turned out badly, and ended up raising a couple hundred bucks for research into childhood cancers. But it turned out well. "I have a shapely head!" I kept saying for the rest of the day.

Like Dickerson, I haven't gone back--though I don't keep a full shave. I don't like the sensation of actually shaving my head. David trims it close with clippers every few weeks. This has been extraordinary for me. I have always had a very high forehead, and during my pregnancies it receded and my hair thinned; I've always been self-conscious about my hair, and yet entirely disinclined to spend time making it look good. Buzzing it is the perfect solution. I don't know that it's my best look, but I do think it's a good look for me--I like pictures of myself. But best of all, except when it's time to trim it (as it is today--I have let it go way too long), I just don't think about it. A huge part of my self-consciousness about my appearance just disappeared.

The only downside is that I am going gray in a very pleasing silvery way, and it doesn't show much when my hair is very short. I can live with that.

One final Dickerson thing: his explanation of why, after getting an MFA in writing, he didn't pursue it professionally (though now he has a book, so clearly he did eventually). From page 11:

[I]n writing stories for money, the way I was told to go about it was to submit to small nonpaying literary magazines, then get enough published that you could get a story collection with a small press, and then--on the basis of that or whatever small-press novel came next--get a teaching job at some obscure college no one much cared for. Yet even this simple plan seemed impossible. I could barely manage to submit ten copies of a story and send them off to various magazines (writing a different cover letter every time, making sure you got the editor's name right, including the SASE that was properly weighted, etc.). Just thinking about it made my limbs heavy, and my brain gasped for anything more exciting to occupy it. Mailing off stories involved actual suffering. And for what? For ten rejections to trickle in over the next nine months. And even if I made it (I'd succeeded once in the six mass mailings I'd managed to shoulder through), you got no money and no one noticed you were in this stupid magazine that only other MFA students had ever heard of. You were supposed to do years of this. I could barely handle it for two hours.

He took the words right out of my mouth.

2009 Book Report

David wrote a script that checks my library account every day, and if there are new items, downloads the list to my computer. I copy it into an Excel spreadsheet, and then as I finish with books, I rate them from 0 to 4. 0 means I didn't read it; 1 that I didn't finish it; 2 that it was weak; 3 that it was "good enough"; and 4 that something really stood out about it for me.

In 2009 I read 213 books. Of that 213 I gave a a 4 to 33. Here are some of the ones I think might be most interesting to others:

Fiction

Four of the six high-rated books this year were re-reads of the first four novels in the Aubrey/Maturin series: Post Captain, HMS Surprise, Mauritius Command, and Desolation Island. I can't remember whether this is the third or fourth time I've read the series since I first discovered it six years ago; so very good, full of moments so good that even as I read them, I am already looking forward to encountering them again next time. I love the development of the friendship between Jack and Stephen, the way something happens on one page that turns out to be the setup for a joke ten pages later, the depth of characterizations. I treat the technical shipboard stuff as if it were Geordi telling Capt. Picard that he's going to solve their problems by recalibrating the plasma matrix and modulating the shield harmonics; so much placeholder technobabble. But I understand that for people who actually care about the spritsail, the foretop, the ship's knees, the poop deck, and the cable tiers, O'Brien's expert grasp of the technicalities is a real joy.

O'Brien is the only writer besides Jane Austen that I cannot dip into. If I read two pages of Pride and Prejudice, I will not stop until I've been through all six novels; likewise, I will probalby not stop reading O'Brien until I've set down Blue at the Mizzen--the 20th novel--with a bittersweet sigh. So much left unfinished by O'Brien's death partway through the 21st novel! If only our favorite writers could live forever.

I also gave a 4 to The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos. I only started reading mysteries a few years ago, and this is one of the best I've read. Pelecanos also wrote for the TV series The Wire, and you will recognize style and theme--and even the occasional plot element, such as the recovering junkie living in his sister's basement and not allowed upstairs. Good stuff.

One of only a couple of books that kept me up reading past bedtime, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a young adult novel that is full of respect for its young readers, and for its characters. It is the story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who decides to transfer to a white school off the reservation in search of a better education. It's a small-ish book, a quick read, and yet so much is laid bare for us, with sympathy and humor. With terrific cartoon illustrations by Ellen Fornoy.

Memoir

I have always been a fan of the memoir, so the recent memoir trend has been very satisfying to me. Yet only one memoir made my hit list this year:Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner (click on the link and look at that picture: gay, gay, gay!). Hilarious and poignant.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

I don't actually read a lot of fantasy, but I really liked Brandon Sanderson'sMistborn Trilogy, although in some places it was too gruesomely violent for me. David enjoyed it, too.

And another re-read: Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, about which I can not say enough good. I find Willis a very uneven writer: Passage was barely readble, Promised Land is a favorite guilty-pleasure bad book for me, but Doomsday Book is a masterpiece. I would like to put together a reading group on sci-fi books that deal well with faith; Doomsday Book and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow would be the first two: a time-traveling historian encounters the Black Plague; and Jesuits make first contact on an alien planet.

Picture Books

I see that I have a few picture books in this category; I don't usually rate picture books because that would be silly--I don't think you can really count the approximately 700 picture books I read to the kids as "books I've read." But I do flag any we especially like. This year I flagged Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett; Duck! Rabbit!, an optical-illusion book that had the kids over the moon with glee; Brown Angels, a collection of found photographs of black children from around the turn of the 20th century;The Brain by Seymour Simon; and The Top of the World: Climbing Mt. Everest, which is one of the best non-fiction books for kids I've ever read.

Religious

I read 25 books on religion this year, and gave my highest score to four. Two are actually pamphlets: Arthur Larrabee's Experiencing God: Three Spiritual Practices, which I remember just electrified me when I heard him deliver it as a plenary speech at the FGC Gathering in (I think) 1998; and Reflections on Quaker Worship by Esther Greenleaf-Murer, a collection of articles she wrote for her yearly meeting newsletter on the experience of worship. A note in the "comments" field in my spreadsheet says I thought it was worth further study.

Another Quaker book I gave a 4 is Liz Oppenheimer's Writing Cheerfully on the Web: A Quaker Blog Reader. Liz (I can call her by her first name because she's actually a friend of mine) has been involoved in Quaker on-line community for awhile, and earlier this year she followed a leading to collect writings from Quaker blogs into a print anthology, which was released last summer. Like all anthologies, it's uneven, but overall it's very strong. I appreciated the inclusion of Quakers from more than just my own liberal unprogrammed tradition, and the expression of various viewpoints. There is a lot here to chew and savor--I expect to re-read my much-flagged copy this year, and I think it would be a great text for an adult religious ed group. I was happy to hear recently that it is one of the year's 10 best sellers at Quakerbooks because it is a book that I think can be edifying for Friends as individuals and as a body.

Finally, I gave a 4 to Sara Maitland's A Big-Enough God: A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology and commented that I thought it was "worth revisiting" and yet, even after peeking at a couple of reviews, I remember almost nothing about it. One of the hazards of reading so much, I suppose.

Non-fiction

If I had to limit myself to just one genre, it would be non-fiction. I love learning about things, and although I am now abstinent from higher education (for over 8 years now, after spending 12 of my first 18 years after high school as a full-time student at one institution or another), I fill that need with non-fiction. Usually fiction is only about 25% of what I read. This year my non-fiction reading was blessed with a number of humdingers:

Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. About the people who were so inspired by Whitman they put him at the center of their lives, including John Addington Symonds, who wrote to Whitman for 20 years trying, desperately, to get Whitman to admit that his poetry was about same-sex love (WW never did). A great read; good insight into Whitman and into the culture of the late 18th Century.

Class by Paul Fussell. Re-read after being inspied by this Atlantic article. I read it probably 25 years ago when it first came out, and remembered it--which is saying a lot, since, when you consider that I have been reading close to a book a day for most of the last 38 years or so, it takes a lot for something to stick with me. Back then, I read it as a spoof; this year, after I've spent a couple of years studying social class, it was more resonant.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. Stunt journalism at its finest: unable to get access as a journalist, Conover went through training and became a corrections officer at Sing Sing. A great example of a book that is sympathetic to its subjects, and not what you expect when you go in.

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington. Snake handlers are the butt of many a religious joke; Covington goes so deeply among them that he is led to hadles some snakes himself. The result is a very sympathetic, enlightening portrait.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeces of Martin Luther King, Jr. 'Nuff said.

Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption by Barbara Katz Rothman. The topic of this blog so far, mostly. I've been very unwell for about two months, but I do mean to get back to it in 2010. One of the few books I thought was worth buying after I'd read it (yeah, I know it's backwards, but that's how I do things.)

How to Keep Kosher: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Jewish Dietary Laws by Lise Stern. if there is anything more interesting than the vexed question of whether Israeli marshmallows are really kosher, I don't know what it is!

Columbine by Dave Cullen. One of the things I love about non-fiction is finding out how wrong or skewed what you thought you knew was. That can be especially true of anything that has been a media circus. I was inspried to read this after Susan Klebold broke 10 years of media silence with her essay in Oprah's magazine. The New York Times review the link goes to gets it right: "What intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con."

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriageby Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. I can't do two sentences on this book; would have to be a whole essay at least. Here is someone else's short essay on it.

And, finally, The Book of the Year: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. A fascinating and readble book about, of all things, cholera: specifically, the last big cholera outbreak in London, in 1854. Two million people crowded together with terrible sanitation; a model of the spread of disease that doesn't take into account poop in the water supply; and two men who start to have a new idea. It's a story about sewage, certainly, and politics. It's also a story about developing notions of how data can be collected and used. Sewage! Contaminated wells! Rice-water stools! Miasma! Maps! This page-turner has it all.

A Little Side Trip About Social Class

I’ve been keeping a little list of things that come to me that don’t fit into an entry I’m working on, and this is one: the Federal Adoption Tax Credit, and who it benefits.

The Federal Adoption Tax Credit provides almost $11,000 in tax credits to families who adopt. All adoptions are eligible. It was designed to make adoption more affordable, to help people who might not otherwise have been able to afford to adopt. Most states also offer adoption credits; Michigan’s is about $1100, and can used after the federal credit has been exhausted.

$11,000 is a lot of money. Our original estimate of our adoption expenses was only about $15,000: $11,000 for agency fees, about $1500 for our home study, around $2000 for birthmother expenses, plus travel costs to Chicago, four hours from home, to take custody of the baby and stay until receiving Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children clearance to remove the baby from the state. A federal tax credit of $11,000 would have paid for most of that.

However, the structure of the credit limits its usefulness for many families. It’s not a refundable tax credit; this means that in any given year, you can only receive as much of it as you have paid in taxes, with the remainder of the credit carrying over to future years. Originally, the credit was also time limited—you could only use as much of it as you accessed in four years.

By contrast, for instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit—this means that you get the whole credit even if it exceeds your withholding for the year. When I was eligible for the EITC, I often got, say, $4000 back on my taxes despite having paid only $1000 in withholding, The adoption tax credit doesn’t work that way; If a family has only paid $2500 in withholding, that’s the size of the refund they’ll get that year, with the remaining $8500 of the credit carrying over to future tax years.

Also, for mysterious reasons, expenses that quality for the credit cannot normally be claimed in the year in which they’re incurred, but in the next tax year. This is unlike every other deductible expense or tax credit; a friend of mine who does taxes for a living says she can't think of another instance where an expense can't be applied in the year it's incurred.

For our family, this meant that we paid adoption expenses as early as January of 2007—and received federal tax credit money to reimburse us for them in March of 2009. Furthermore, until three years ago when David’s income increased dramatically, our family had not had any federal tax liability for the better part of a decade. If we had tried to adopt during that time—and we weren’t poor, we were living on about $55,000 a year—we would not have been able to access the federal tax credit at all.

I know families who have not been able to use the tax credit because their federal tax liability is too low. I know families who have not been able to use the full credit because the time limit passed before they’d used it all (time limits have since been extended, or possibly done away with completely).

But even families for whom the credit is useable have to be able afford to pay expenses up front and then wait anywhere from 2 to 5 years for reimbursement.

The effect of the credit is, therefore, to make adoption more affordable for families who already could afford it, while continuing to exclude lower-income families.

People I know who’ve been involved with adoption since before the credit was instituted report anecdotally that agency fees went up across the board in the few years following its enactment. If agencies responded to the tax credit by raising fees, that means the money is probably going mostly to people who could, and would, have adopted anyway, rather than making adoption more accessible to lower-income families.

This is not about race; it’s about social class, and the way government either structured the credit to steer children into families with more money, or carelessly allowed it to happen. Either way, it’s a commentary on who deserves children and who doesn’t, especially when you consider that there is no corresponding Keep Your Baby Tax Credit, at least not for women like Yehva's birthmother.

One exception to the sweeping generalization I’m guilty of here is that the credit is available to families who adopt from foster care even if they have not incurred adoption expenses; out-of-pocket expenses for foster care adoptions are usually low, if there are any at all, so this could indeed be a big help to families interested in adopting some of the most hard-to-place kids.