An important examination of dismaying social and cultural trends.
Overprotecting children hinders them from confronting physical, emotional, and intellectual challenges.
Noting a rise of anxiety and depression among teenagers and threats to free speech on many college campuses, Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, 2012), an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and social psychologist Haidt (Ethical Leadership/New York Univ.; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2012, etc.) offer an incisive analysis of the causes of these problems and a measured prescription for change. The authors assert that many parents, teachers, professors, and university administrators have been teaching young people to see themselves as fragile and in need of protection: “to exaggerate danger” (even from words), “amplify their first emotional responses,” and see the world as a battle between good and evil. Particularly regrettable is “the creep of the word ‘unsafe’ to encompass ‘uncomfortable,’ ” as students seek to institute trigger warnings on course curricula and to lobby for “safe spaces” where they feel sheltered from ideas they deem emotionally or intellectually difficult to confront. “We teach children to monitor themselves for the degree to which they feel ‘unsafe’ and then talk about how unsafe they feel,” the authors write, and to interpret unpleasant emotions as dangerous. The authors present detailed accounts of the “meltdown into anarchy” on college campuses when “political diversity is reduced to very low levels, when the school’s leadership is weak and easily intimidated,” and when professors and administrators fail to uphold free speech and academic freedom. “Many professors,” write the authors, “say they now teach and speak more cautiously, because one slip or one simple misunderstanding could lead to vilification and even threats from any number of sources.” Social media outlets have inflamed these attacks. The authors offer practical suggestions for parents (allow children independence and nurture self-reliance) and teachers (cultivate intellectual virtues and teach debate skills) to guide children into adulthood.
An important examination of dismaying social and cultural trends.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2489-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Tannen, who has gained celebrity for analyzing male/female verbal exchanges, moves into a broader realm in this often interesting but sometimes vague book. We live in a polarizing ``culture of critique,'' maintains Tannen (Sociolinguistics/ Georgetown Univ.; You Just Don't Understand, 1990, etc.) as she explores our compulsively combative rhetoric in such predictable areas as the mass media, politics, and the law (with the latter, as she points out, often marred by litigators' ``pit bull'' tactics). To specify the problem and better pursue a cure, she coins a new term, ``agonism,'' defined as ``using opposition as a required and ubiquitous way to approach issues, rather than as one of many possibilities of getting things done by talk.'' And she calls agonism too popular and prevalent, an almost automatic confrontational tactic. Though accurate enough, such observations are in themselves a trifle familiar. More searching are Tannen's comments on male and female styles of conflict resolution and on ``ritual fighting'' in such places as Bali, Crete, and Ireland's Tory Islands, as well as her reflections on the implications of pervasive debunking and one-upmanship in academic life. ``When there is a need to make others wrong, the temptation is great to oversimplify at best, and at worst to distort or even misrepresent other positions, the better to refute them. . . . Straw men spring up like scarecrows in a cornfield.'' Tannen is a fine, crisp writer and very skillful in succinctly synthesizing her material and advancing her argument. But her main point isn't new, nor does she look far enough beyond the culture of language to explain the phenomenon she describes. Consequently her solutions (such as advising that people talk about all sides, as opposed to both sides, of an issue) feel insufficient. Perhaps our polemical society is too far gone in fetishizing the often harsh culture of American capitalist individualism for such rhetorical nostrums to have much effect.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45602-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
Suskind, a journalist, tells the story of one African-American youth’s rise from poverty-stricken Anacostia, in southeast Washington D.C., to the ivied halls of Brown University. In 1995, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize for two articles he wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Cedric Jennings, an African- American student at one of the poorest schools in the capital, whose studiousness and ambition earn him a place in MIT’s summer program for minority youth. Suskind’s book expands on that story, extending it to Cedric’s admission to Brown University and first year there. Suskind weaves interviews with Cedric, his family, teachers, and friends into a narrative that shows the challenges facing a ghetto youth bent on academic achievement. Paradoxically, both the inner-city code of youthful male behavior and the teachings of the Pentecostal church Cedric attends with his mother conspire to discourage intellectual distinction. The drama of the story is in the mediations Cedric learns to make between the inherited and the chosen, yet “unseen,” parts of his life. Suskind plays to the sense of closure and, in this case, a happy ending the very format of a book (unlike a newspaper article) encourages, but cannot really achieve here, since Cedric’s life at college, and beyond, is still in process. By the end of the book, the young man has forgiven his high school nemeses, been reconciled with his absent father, and found social acceptance at Brown. Left hanging is the question of the ultimate success of Cedric’s quest, which he is still only beginning. One senses the existence of conflicts unresolved and questions unanswered. This engaging success story leaves behind a troubling aftertaste of personal and social wounds that appear to have been too artfully healed. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-7679-0125-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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