Review - C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life

C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life by Ruth James Cording

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An enjoyable book, if a bit misrepresented, C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life is a quick read in a cute coffee table format.

I say misrepresented because the last five of the sixteen chapters in the book focus on his mid-twenties and beyond. Maybe I don't think of the mid-twenties as "early life" since I'm only twenty-five myself, but I would have liked to know more about Lewis' childhood, and in a format that had more continuity than this collection of anecdotes.

It also would have been more readable if the included letters would have been placed at the ends of chapters instead of right smack in the middle of the main narrative. In addition, I spotted a few sentence fragments. Which I found to be quite eye-stabbing. While I was reading.

Despite these complaints, I did find it to be quite a sentimental and aesthetically pleasing little volume. Good brain candy for fans of Lewis and those who long for the wonder in life.

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Review - The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream

The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream by Phyllis Moen

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow, this one took me a while. It's not often that I read books of a more academic persuasion straight through, but I found this on the library shelf while moving books at work, and it sucked me into its vortex.

The premise is that the American Dream is an illusion, but even that doesn't sum up the full complexity of this work. In 1963, there was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which gave voice to women's "problem with no name"--that they were expected to be full-time wives and homemakers with no option to be anything else.

Now, our society has developed the "career mystique" of the title--that anyone and everyone can follow the "lock-step" pattern of education, full-time employment, and subsequently leisure-filled retirement. The folly of this is that being able to work full-time depends on having someone to take care of domestic duties. Is the problem becoming clear?

The authors elaborate:

...jobs remain designed as if employees were able and willing to focus exclusively on them. Jobs, schools, medical services, and many other aspects of contemporary life continue to assume that someone (a wife) is available during the typical workday to care for children ... to have the refrigerator fixed or the new stove delivered; to engage in the civic activities that build communities. But the wives who facilitated men's careers now have careers of their own, as do the sisters, mothers, grandmothers, friends, and neighbors that working women relied on as backup in the past. p.190

This is not to say that we should go back to the breadwinner/homemaker model, rather that the way American working society functions has not caught up with contemporary reality. This has severe consequences for the very poor, for healthy family lives, and for the future of our population. Some quotes:

Risks of poverty associated with single parenthood are now exacerbated by welfare reforms that assume that (1) jobs are available to low-skilled people, and (2) such jobs pay enough for people to work their way out of poverty. p.192

Time has become a scarce commodity in American life. This is especially problematic given the equating of work time with work commitment and employers' expectations of high commitment. As a fixed commodity, time allocated to employment is necessarily unavailable for other activities, including family relations. When all adults in families are paid employees, the family gains in income. Employees themselves may experience a sense of productive engagement and self-esteem. What is lost when everyone is earning a living is time for living. (emphasis added) p.192

Today, even in educated households, taking time out of the labor force or working a reduced schedule to raise young children, to care for aging parents, or simply to have a saner lifestyle can wreak havoc on seniority, salary, security, retirement income, and possibilities for promotion. Many workers try to solve the dilemmas of managing job, family, and personal life by controlling what is in their control: by delaying childbearing, having fewer children, or having none at all. This is a key point: Advanced nations, including the United States, are experiencing record lows in fertility precisely because most women and men want or need to be productively engaged in the workforce, and neither men nor women can figure out how to synchronize family-care work and paid work. p.194

The solution the authors suggest is that the United States must rise to the challenge of creating "integrative, flexible careers--occupational paths that acknowledge rather than ignore personal and family goals and obligations, (re)educational goals and needs throughout adulthood, and midcourse inclinations for second acts, including postretirement and civic engagement." p.199

This book was a challenge to me and I hope that its premises become a challenge to our entire country. The authors predict that, in a characteristically human way, we will not change the system until crisis necessitates it. I, for one, hope that they are proven wrong. Workers need to be respected regardless of gender and given society's blessing to pursue whatever life choices they wish--whether it's to do family-care work, paid work part-time, paid work full-time, or a mix of those at different periods of their lives. We are people who love our families and need time to rest--not antisocial robots who can dedicate our full attention and life servitude to a corporation or institution.

As individuals, we can do what is possible to focus on our loved ones rather than our jobs, but not all of us are guilty of pursuing stuff we don't need--some of us need to work like crazy just to get by. This is why some of the changes need to happen on the corporate level, where income is not keeping up with rising costs of living, and the government level, where dysfunctional programs foist unrealistic expectations on what single parents with little education can do to pull themselves and their children out of poverty. On a personal level, couples should not have to choose between both having a secure career on the one hand and the destruction of their relationships on the other.

There is anger here, and a call to action. Let's all hope that action won't be too late.


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1947

This is odd... it kind of seems like librarians haven't changed that much since 1947, aside from the technology aspect. And the director being a man with an army of women to command.

Review - 7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life

7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life: How to Rapidly Relieve Back and Neck Pain by Robin McKenzie

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The writing was pretty redundant and every case study had the annoying style of a blaring advertisement, but the exercises really work. Get this book and you too can be pain-free!


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Review - Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie: The Unexpurgated Edition by Theodore Dreiser

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sister Carrie, written at the turn of the 20th century and considered one of the "great American novels," also has an infamous history of censorship which is fascinating in its own right. I chose to read the free online version of the restored Pennsylvania edition. I understand that the "unexpurgated edition" is based off of that one.

On the surface, the novel is the story of Caroline Meeber, who moves from rural Wisconsin to Chicago in hopes of seeking her fortune. Unhappy with her work prospects due to her lack of experience and the less-than-enthusiastic welcome she gets from her sister and brother-in-law, Carrie is tempted away from a hand-to-mouth existence by Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman who buys her nice clothes and gets her to live with him. Eventually she realizes the shallowness of Drouet's personality and casts in her lot with George Hurstwood, a (unbeknownst to her) married man. This sets them on a path that leads to Carrie's stardom as an actress and Hurstwood's very steep downfall.

The book is dense and not easy to get through, but in the end I did like it. There are two things in particular that I noticed:

1. It is a major commentary on American society. Our society is based around the idea that if we could just have more money, fame, a different lover, or a bigger place to live, we would be happier. Ultimately, Carrie is not happy with her money and fame, and chasing her eventually leads Hurstwood to indifference and suicide. Drouet continues to be his oblivious self, but arguably he is never satisfied either--he can never have meaningful relationships with anyone. This passage in Chapter 49 in which Carrie is talking with Bob Ames, a cousin of her friend Mrs. Vance, sums up this thesis:


"Your happiness is within yourself wholly if you will only believe it," he went on. "When I was quite young I felt as if I were ill-used because other boys were dressed better than I was, were more sprightly with the girls than I, and I grieved and grieved, but now I'm over that. I have found out that everyone is more or less dissatisfied. No one has exactly what his heart wishes."

"Not anybody?" she asked.

"No," he said.

Carrie looked wistfully away.

"It comes down to this," he went on. "If you have powers, cultivate them. The work of doing it will bring you as much satisfaction as you will ever get. The huzzas of the public don't mean anything. That's the aftermath--you've been paid and satisfied if you are not selfish and greedy long before that reaches you."


2. It is not necessarily a work about morality. The author, Dreiser, does mention evil in it, but his characters are not deliberately evil--they suffer because they are driven by their whims and lack understanding of what their actions do to those around them. One might argue anyway that this is a better definition of sin than the overly simplistic list of "lying/cheating/stealing." But I still don't think Dreiser was trying to teach morality in this story--just depict in a naturalistic way that people tend to do what's in their own best interests and that "fate" can lead them in different directions. He sums this up in a rather heavy-handed passage:


Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey for their sole delight. They have no feeling that any result which might flow from their action should concern them. They have no conception of the necessity of a well-organized society wherein all shall accept a certain quota of responsibility and all realize a reasonable amount of happiness. They think only of themselves because they have not yet been taught to think of society. For them pain and necessity are the great taskmasters. Laws are but the fences which circumscribe the sphere of their operations. When, after error, pain falls as a lash, they do not comprehend that their suffering is due to misbehavior. Many such an individual is so lashed by necessity and law that he falls fainting to the ground, dies hungry in the gutter or rotting in the jail and it never once flashes across his mind that he has been lashed only in so far as he has persisted in attempting to trespass the boundaries which necessity sets. A prisoner of fate, held enchained for his own delight, he does not know that the walls are tall, that the sentinels of life are forever pacing, musket in hand. He cannot perceive that all joy is within and not without. He must be for scaling the bounds of society, for overpowering the sentinel. When we hear the cries of the individual strung up by the thumbs, when we hear the ominous shot which marks the end of another victim who has thought to break loose, we may be sure that in another instance life has been misunderstood--we may be sure that society has been struggled against until death alone would stop the individual from contention and evil.


From what I hear, the original edited edition of the book removed most of the philosophy from it, made Carrie a mindless, untalented fool, and removed most of the sexual references (which I had trouble detecting anyway, but I guess by early 20th century standards they would have been blatant). Carrie doesn't fret over moving in with Drouet, Drouet doesn't pursue other ladies while living with her, and Hurstwood doesn't frequent prostitutes before he leaves his wife. In other words, the characters were significantly changed.

I enjoyed this book for the depth and the tragedy of it, but it was a very heavy read. I can see after reading the historical notes included on the website that the restored edition is superior to what was originally published and probably closer to what Dreiser intended, although I would have switched the final two chapters--49 reads like an ending, and 50 like an afterthought.

And now, my only remaining question is... whatever happened to Carrie's parents? She goes to live with her sister in Chicago, but I don't remember the book even once mentioning her contacting her parents, thinking about them, or what they thought of her leaving. In fact, I don't think it mentions her parents at all. Either she had an awful relationship with them, or she was just so self-absorbed that she didn't care if her mother was worried sick about her.


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