12 September 2009
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Published on September 12th, 2009 @ 04:38:21 pm, using 618 words, 154 views
The sound you’re hearing is the Phat Lady singing here at SMILT. Real Life has called on all us creators of said blog, one at a time, and how it’s time to draw the curtain. We hope you’ve enjoyed or at least gotten something out of the reviews, stories, and ruminations we’ve put up here over the last couple of years. It won’t be as hard to leave as we might once have thought because it gets tough writing about what’s been going on in the last several years. If/when the economy starts recovering in a meaningful way for regular people, we have follow-up waves of weather, water, energy, food, pensions, and, you know, other countries to deal with. We’re at the leading edge of an historical phase transition, with all the implications of that that historians have chronicled for centuries now. Unfortunately for the US, the current administration is the second coming of Adlai Lieberman, with the same prospects.
But the US has faced phase transitions with bought-and-paid-for Congresses, right-wing courts, and the Pierces, Fillmores, and Buchanans and the Hardings, Coolidges, and Hoovers before and managed to come out on the other side. Too often we’ve embraced the stupid and vicious as a country and once in a while we’ve not only embraced them but spread our legs for them. That’s where we are now. But maybe a third salvation is possible. It may be tempting fate, especially considering the truly existential problems facing us (US) this time (see above), but maybe we’ll be able to get past the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas and find real wisdom and leadership when their atrocities are no longer tolerated. It’s just too bad that we’ve always waited until reality got too hard to blow off the way we always want to before we face up to our challenges and muster courage and brains rather than fear and bluster to address what needs to be done. They say God smiles on children, drunkards, and Americans. Let’s just hope he hasn’t been paying too close attention.
What does that have to do with this review of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg? Well, mainly because it places us in the context of blogging history, small a role as we’ve played, well discussed here in this review of the history, performance, and future of blogging. Why should you read it? Consider this catchy excerpt, which should be enough to entice:
Refreshingly, Rosenberg is a blog historian, not a promoter. He casts an even light around the blogosphere, noting the many instances when this self-expression tool has also promoted verbal thuggery. Rosenberg asks: “How much antisocial behavior are we willing to countenance in authenticity’s name?’’
In a style both conversational and compelling, Rosenberg describes how technology and the wider culture converged to help move blogs from their small orbit (“as the quip went, being ‘famous for fifteen people’ ’’ ) to being substantial enough to merit articles like the landmark November 2000 New Yorker article “You’ve Got Blog.’’
“Small orbit.” That pretty well describes us and the 150-300 of you kind enough to check in with us daily to see what “antisocial behavior” we were spewing today. We do appreciate it. But there are other places to visit, some of which we’ve recommended, and others to avoid (The New York Times Book Review [sic] comes to mind, for example). Enjoy. As the review concludes,
How could something done for free, with no guaranteed audience, become so big? Rosenberg puts it all in historical context, and in this context, notes, “Now that we’ve begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping.’”
Not for us.
Thanks again.
08 September 2009
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Published on September 8th, 2009 @ 05:37:22 pm, using 234 words, 114 views
I’m sure it’s not as easy as this review of Ellen Langer’s Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility makes it sound, but it may just be that you have it in your power to use your mind to overcome some serious health conditions. Not cancer, maybe, but listen to this experiment that was done:
Langer says by changing the way we observe and label our experience—specifically, by becoming more aware of the variability we often mindlessly ignore—we can improve our health and quite possibly prolong our lives. In a recent study that makes the point, Langer and a Harvard colleague, psychologist Alia Crum, told cleaning personnel in Boston hotels that the considerable exercise they got every day in their job satisfied government guidelines for living an active lifestyle. Their activity levels did not change, but their perspective did, and they soon lost more weight and body fat than control subjects did.
Langer attributes outcomes such as this one to the placebo effect: when people are persuaded to think mindfully about what they are doing, they adopt more positive and empowering beliefs about themselves, and they feel and perform better.
Another cool experiment situated older folks in an environment from their youth and actually affected the participants’ aging. Worth your time, will definitely make you think.
Wish I’d known this when I had allergies really bad. Imagine myself in the Arctic . . . .
06 September 2009
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Published on September 6th, 2009 @ 07:15:13 am, using 617 words, 130 views
Even if law and/or politics aren’t necessarily your favorite cup of tea, you should head over to the nat’l poli sci book review site, Law & Politics Review, this holiday to broaden your cranium. Why? Here are excerpts from a few of the really good reviews they have up right now, and we may have missed one you’d like:
In LAW’S ALLURE: HOW LAW SHAPES, CONSTRAINS, SAVES, AND KILLS POLITICS, Gordon Silverstein sets out to provide a narrative framework for understanding the judicialization of policy choices. Central to his inquiry are two questions. First, why and how has judicial involvement in policy-making expanded throughout the course of American history (especially during the twentieth century)? Second, how does judicial involvement in policy-making play out, and what are the consequences of judicial involvement in political policy-making? Through a discussion of the Supreme Court’s growing breadth of engagement with political policy-making and a series of careful case studies, Silverstein provides an insightful “roadmap” for future scholars interested in exploring the causes and consequences of judicial policy-making. Indeed, the analyses in this book should provide considerable grist for the mill as this line of literature moves forward.
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Because there is no dearth of books on the Bush administration’s (mis)management of the war on terror, future authors in this area would be well-advised to eschew the general for the specific. In two separate books, Harold H. Bruff and Peter Jan Honigsberg have done just that. BAD ADVICE: BUSH’S LAWYERS IN THE WAR ON TERROR, winner of the 2008 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, is a critique of the legal advice provided to President Bush. OUR NATION UNHINGED: THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR ON TERROR tells the personal stories of those individuals who have suffered as a result of the government’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its thesis is direct and oft-repeated: Bush’s war on terror has done enormous damage to American values.
BAD ADVICE begins with a question: “Given the indeterminacy of law, how can we minimize the provision of bad legal advice to presidents?” (p.1). Its author, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, is a former senior attorney-adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice (DOJ). That office occupied a prominent role in the Bush administration’s justification for certain tactics in the war on terror. Bruff dissects, and ultimately rejects, those justifications as being at odds with both American law and moral authority.
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[America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty] offers a collection of twelve essays on the current state of liberal democracy in the United States. Editors Robert Faulkner and Susan Shell, both political theorists at Boston College, state that the purpose of their volume is “to set forth and examine the most important dangers confronting America today.” Toward that end, they “sought out political analysts whom [they] had reason to think first-rate[,]” and asked “each to select a problem that he or she thought particularly serious.” Faulkner and Shell also note that we will not find in these pages the musings of any “visionary reformers, philosophic dreamers, angry revolutionaries, or gloomy reactionaries” (pp.1-2). While some readers might want to quibble with this assessment – I met one visionary reformer, albeit a right wing one, and at least two gloomy reactionaries – as a general matter this volume’s esteemed contributors do struggle mightily to steer judicious courses through our typically shrill and polarized political debates. In fact, the political orientations guiding these analyses range from conservative (sometimes of the Straussian persuasion) to moderately liberal (think Democratic Leadership Council).
See what we mean? Why haven’t you clicked over yet?
03 September 2009
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Published on September 3rd, 2009 @ 07:30:48 pm, using 495 words, 168 views
As a connas . . . connos . . . connoseu . . . fan of the well made teenage sex movie, I of course marvel at how much being a teenager has changed over the years, especially the sex part. I worked with a young woman (with whom my wife now teaches 40 years later) who seriously relayed how her nuns had warned them that girls, once they got going, were just incapable of stopping, so never start, girls. Even after you get married. I think it was the first time I ever snorted an ice cream cone out my nose. Every girl I had ever started had no problem stopping. And when I say every girl, well, my teen years were pretty sad. But at least the guys today had it so much better than me, every teenage sex movie assured me.
Hold on, says Bob Altemeyer in his new Sex and Youth, based on surveys of his students (admittedly not the most representative sample but amazingly well represented in teenage sex movies). If you define “sex” the way Bill Clinton did (and leave that yukky kind out), then today’s youth really aren’t that much more active than kids in 1984 (which, yes, is still well past my teenage years). There’s a brief review here, but a nice long interview follows, with some interesting stats at the end. Want more details before you commit your time to the whole thing? Well, okay, but only to titillate:
You would share the results of the secret survey with the class in February. What were they most surprised by? It was a highly anticipated lecture. There was a real tension in the air, so that the simplest wisecrack got roars of laughter. The students were very curious because they thought they knew what people their age were doing, but realized they didn’t. I think they were surprised by most of the results, but certainly the levels of virginity, the enormously greater experience of the women in the class, the fact that almost all sex was happening in romantic relationships while “hunters and gatherers” were getting very little, the level of cheating, the differences in women’s and men’s fantasies – all of these things usually drew audible gasps.
And some stats:
Less than 1 per cent of all intercourse happened during a one-night stand, found a survey of 265 students in 2007.
Year after year since 1984, 12 per cent of the first years were having oral sex while remaining virgins.
In 1987, the mean age of virginity loss was 16.5 for women and 17.1 for men. While those figures have dropped only slightly, the number of sex acts non-virgins have engaged in has skyrocketed. Women had doubled their count to 100 in 2008 from 50 times in 1987 while men rose to just 38 times from 30.
A 2008 query on what would make them “supremely satisfied sexually” revealed that women want sex with someone they are “deeply in love with.” Men, meanwhile, wanted a woman to take the initiative and be sexually aggressive.
Go on. Read it. You know you want to.
01 September 2009
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Published on September 1st, 2009 @ 06:40:35 pm, using 629 words, 93 views
When most of us think of studying history, at least those of us who don’t get instantly drowsy, we think about events and famous people and their impacts. But studying history can also mean studying history itself. What is it? How does it get created? How is it used and abused? The answers to these and related questions, of course, actually point us to how history, for all its gaps and innuendos and false trails, really can speak to us in times of need, such as now.
Which is the point in part of Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, a really nice (and short!) overview of the issues raised by thinking of history as a subject unto itself. A noted historian herself, she provides good commentary for those who have never thought of history this way before and for those who have. Here and here are a couple of the many good reviews the book has gotten, and below are bits of each for you to judge.
That sense of a malleable record reveals the essence of a universal problem: that history gets revised to serve the ideological ends of a regime, the political needs of a party, or the concerns of a group that has suffered subjugation or sheer omission from the record. More often than not, historical accuracy and legitimacy suffer in the process. On occasion, however, revisionism serves as a corrective to unworthy causes or lapses that need to be rectified. Late in 2007, for example, after historians, writers, and filmmakers had begun to explore the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the government in Madrid enacted a Law of Historical Memory that has led to the Franco regime being formally repudiated and removed from public commemoration.
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Historians, according to MacMillan, ought to do for countries what psychologists do for individuals: help them see the past for what it is, and make that knowledge the basis for positive action going forward. It’s worth asking then what afflicts the United States today. MacMillan suggests several familiar diagnoses, including guilt (reparations for slavery) and the general malaise that attends lost greatness. (She cites the reverential way we remember World War II and the correspondingly negative light cast on our current conflicts.)
It’s become oh-so-intellectual to talk about how “history doesn’t repeat” and how we can’t use analogies and so on. Bushwah. Maybe history isn’t exact every time, but neither is a chair, a car, or a bullet. There are, nevertheless, common lessons and uses to take from each of them. It may not repeat exactly, like my singing the same song as Willie Nelson doesn’t repeat exactly, but we can learn what’s good and to be valued and what’s not. The same “history doesn’t repeat” folks are the ones who tend to sneer at writing history for us plebes to read anyway. All it does is free those historians from having to engage the present and take the chance of being wrong. MacMillan shows we get history wrong, but, despite her clear misgivings, also how we get it right. As smarter people than professors have said, “the only lesson of history is that we don’t learn the lessons of history.” Ignore the “smart” people who tell you it can’t be done. It can, in varying degrees of accuracy. People misusing history in particular ways is one of the foremost ways history repeats. But keep in mind MacMillan’s general caution, though, that we should all remain humble in our predictions and perceived truths. We can be wrong, but that’s no excuse for not trying.
The alternative is to pay no attention to history. What does history tell us about that???
31 August 2009
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Published on August 31st, 2009 @ 06:21:24 pm, using 336 words, 128 views
Most of us are trying to make sense of the current economic disaster with historical analogies, primarily of how we compare with the Great Depression. One problem (among many) with that is simply that we aren’t now who we were then. Back then, the world power and economic center was Britain and we were the export nation with massive resources to exploit. Fast forward 80 years, and we’re now in the Britain role, whether we recognize it or want it. Who’s the us now that we were then? (Huh?) Well, most observers think China fills that role, at least to some degree, if imperfectly. So where can you go to find out as well as you can about that opaque nation what they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s likely to happen?
One place is Naked Capitalism, where she has up a book review essay on Asia in general and on China in particular. Here’s one brief excerpt to whet you, but go read the whole thing and feel qualified to speak intelligently. Or at least as intelligently as practically anyone can about China right now.
Midler identifies the process by which buyer demand for cheap products and the Chinese manufacturers willingness to meet the requirements lead to what he characterises in the chilling anodyne term – ‘quality fade’. This is the process by which manufacturers take increasing liberties with quality to eke out profits from unprofitable contracts. This entails cheaper components, altering chemicals, lower hygiene standards and, in general, lower everything.
Midler describes the process whereby manufacturers compete to gain unprofitable contracts to make sought after products. The sole reason is that access enables Chinese manufacturers to gain access to intellectual property allowing the manufacture of lucrative ‘knock-offs’ in places where patents and trademarks cannot be enforced.
Midler acutely records the tensions between buyer and manufacturers and the entire flawed system where ultimately the only true product control and testing is by the final consumer, sometimes, as in the case of the melamine contaminated milk, with tragic consequences.
30 August 2009
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Published on August 30th, 2009 @ 05:24:37 pm, using 367 words, 64 views
Put aside for the moment all the jokes that came to mind when you read the title. This isn’t a book about libertarians. No, this is a serious book about a serious subject. Alison Gopnik wrote her book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life, to talk about another myth that we human geniuses have held for millenia, that babies’ brains aren’t really very complex places. On the contrary, growing an adult brain looks to be a simplifying process, taking a complex vastness and whittling it down to what we think of erroneously as complexity. Here are a couple of excerpts of an interview over at Neuronarrative that should show what she’s found and why you should read the whole post and maybe even find the book:
You discuss the different sorts of intelligence that babies and adults possess. Briefly, what characterizes each and how do they differ?
The idea is that babies explore, and adults exploit. I argue that the very purpose of childhood is to give us a long protected period in which we can explore the world without having to act on it. Babies are designed to learn as much as they can about the world. Adults are designed to take what they’ve learned and act on it swiftly and efficiently.
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What’s your impression of the vast “make your baby smarter” industry that’s sprung up in the last couple of decades? Can we make our babies smarter, or are we just making the creators of these products richer?
I understand where it comes from. It’s probably the first time in history when most people who have children haven’t had much experience with children before – and they’re understandably anxious. But I do think it’s a sad irony that we spend billions on these basically useless products, and very little to support the caregivers – parents and preschool teachers and babysitters who actually make a real difference to how children grow up.
Gee, who would have thought that this highly advanced civilization [sic] could get things so bassackwards? Good thing we don’t have that problem in anything else. Go read.
29 August 2009
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Published on August 29th, 2009 @ 07:11:57 am, using 560 words, 59 views
One of the big buzzword phrases for the last few years has been “evidence-based practice” in services, public and private, such as health care, education, criminal justice, and such. Which should immediately make you ask, “well, what have we been basing practice on before????” Which is actually a very good and telling point. Most of what we do today is the leftover of practices, habit, and inertia begun decades and centuries before. Still, better late than never, we can decide.
The problem is that, as in most things, the talk is still better than the walk in practically every area where EBP has become the mantra, including even its starting home, medicine, where handwashing remains a big concern after a couple of centuries of evidence. Here’s a nice review of Healing the Broken Mind by Timothy Kelly, a book dealing with proposals to make EBP and improved outcome measurement a bigger part of improving our mental health care systems in this country. As you likely know, we managed to empty most of our mental health facilities a few decades back and turn a very large part of our jails and prisons into the new facilities. The expense was transferred to a great degree, not eliminated, and the need for mental health care has exploded, not faded. You get the feel for all that in this review, which should make you even more on the lookout for the book, shouldn’t it? Here’s a bit to get you going and understand why evidence still plays such a small role in what we do:
A recurring theme in Kelly’s road map toward change involves measurement. All levels of the mental health care system, he says, need improved assessment so decisions can be made based on data rather than tradition or conjecture. Right now, that rarely happens. When a person shows signs of major depression, a psychiatrist or psychologist might treat the patient using Freudian psychoanalysis — not because of anything that research says about the usefulness of the approach, but because that’s what the doctor learned during graduate school in the 1970s. Despite a growing body of literature devoted to the testing of mental health care methods, less than 15 percent of mental health consumers receive care based on evidence.
If Kelly had his way, every consumer (the politically correct term for “mental health patient") entering a therapist’s office would fill out a lengthy questionnaire, with follow-up information added on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on care received. Therapists would use that patient feedback — which would range from customer-service responses about treatment received to descriptions of the patient’s mental state — to deliver better services. Insurers could make certain the fees they pay are put to more cost-effective use. State mental health agencies might use outcomes reported during the questionnaire updates to decide where to deploy or cut back funding. Experts and professors could aggregate the data and use them to make better recommendations in training providers.
Kelly admits that outcome-oriented mental health care is far from reality: When he became Virginia commissioner, his staff couldn’t even estimate the number of patients using the state system, let alone provide him with figures on outcomes. His ideas on data-collection aren’t very popular now either: Patient advocates and doctors criticize the increased documentation as a burdensome, expensive administrative headache, and insurers fear consumers will game the system.
27 August 2009
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Published on August 27th, 2009 @ 06:57:57 pm, using 429 words, 55 views
Fun review here at one of the Science Blogs blogs, featuring Lee Kirkpatrick’s Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. It’s usually fair to challenge reviewers for inserting their personal temperament and style (rather than relevant factual info) into critiques, such as anything that basically says “I would have done it differently but who the hell am I???” But this review doesn’t take the “holier” approach and explains her reactions upon discovering the book, then spelling out the central points, then gives you why she liked it. Here are a couple of excerpts to show what I’m talking about and to get you interested in the book, too:
I actually wish there had been more explanation of evolutionary psychology, maybe more examples of its successful application to psychological phenomena and religion in particular. There was a chapter dedicated to it in the book, but really you could write several books on this idea. I realize that the book was not meant to be a list of different religious phenomena (prayer, gods, feeling better about death, etc), but rather a description of the kind of psychological endeavor that would allow for such descriptors, and more importantly, break them down in a manner which might promote further theorizing. While I appreciate this approach, I think some descriptive examples would have been illustrative of the main points.
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So…yeah…a review. Sci liked it! I found it well-written and pretty understandable for someone who doesn’t read a lot of psych. I found some of the stuff on attachment theory quite fascinating. But I have to say: he wrote the book backward. And he knows it. In fact, Kirkpatrick mentions it in the beginning. Rather than give a summary introduction of the overarching theory and then delving into the parts, he delves into the parts and gives the overarching theory last. I understand that this is probably close to how he himself came through the thought process, but I personally got a little lost, until I got to the last chapter.
So here’s my suggestion: buy this book. Or borrow it. Or whatever. Flip to the last chapter. Read it. Then flip to the front and read it all the way through. MUCH better. Hey, in mysteries you always have to resist the urge to do that, so be happy that you do it with psych!.
And how could you not like a book by a writer who signs this at book signings:
This is the best book you will ever read, on any topic. No, really. Seriously, not kidding. Enjoy! -Lee Kirkpatrick
25 August 2009
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Published on August 25th, 2009 @ 05:59:53 pm, using 371 words, 57 views
Lately I’ve pretty much sworn off the old blogs, A-list to X-list, primarily because of reasons Billmon predicted years ago, but I’ve been reading many more of the top finance blogs in order to get a clearer picture than the usual blogs and impotent media provide, just as I read foreign news sites to get the picture of what was really going on with Iraq. One of the best finance blogs is The Big Picture, and the main man there has a book out called Bailout Nation which is credited as being one of the very best descriptions of the immediate causes of this hellhole we’ve fallen into. The main man is not what you’d call shy, and that includes even linking you to recent reviews of Bailout. Here’s a bit from one of those links to show you what the fuss is about (the whole review is good), but go to The Big Picture to learn why it’s one of the blogs you should have with you if you’re ever stranded on a deserted island.
MANY people were outraged when Goldman Sachs returned $10 billion in federal bailout money just in time to report its biggest quarterly profit ever, along with a plan to pay $11 billion in employee bonuses. Barry Ritholtz, who writes The Big Picture, a popular financial blog, wasn’t heartened by the news, either.
Mr. Ritholtz, however, tried to keep his sense of humor. He posted a satirical story on his Web site by the comedian Andy Borowitz, titled “Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department: Sister Entities to Share Employees, Money.”
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THE book sometimes reads like a lengthy blog post, and occasionally drives home its arguments with rude trading-floor jokes. There are moments when it almost chokes on its own bile. “Adam Smith would not know whether to weep or retch were he alive to see this today,” Mr. Ritholtz says as he nears the conclusion.
Yet there is much to be said for the book’s irreverence. Mr. Ritholtz has written an important book about a complicated subject, and yet you could still read it at the beach. Here’s hoping that some policy makers in Washington take it with them on vacation this month.
22 August 2009
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Published on August 22nd, 2009 @ 07:41:20 am, using 658 words, 60 views
Right now it looks fundamentally hopeless that anything less than fundamental crashing and then picking up the pieces will make us start moving back in the direction of the American Legacy, if we ever do. Federal and state governments and the political parties that operate them are, for the most part, bought and paid for subsidiaries of the same corporate/finance ownership that has oligopolized the media through which we might plot a better way. We’ve already started seeing gun-wielders showing up at political events; the mobs, probably riding around conspicuously, are the next step before the shooting starts. In that context, we may be hoping for someone to come forward to mobilize the forces that could successfully push back through some new instruments of organization. But really, what are the odds of that?
Well, according to Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, maybe not as bad as we would think. (Yes, that was said on this blog. Pick up your mouth.) It doesn’t happen much, but history is filled with examples of combos coming together of events, resources, and key people at just the right time to produce at least some needed change (rarely as much as is hoped for, but change in the right direction nonetheless). This review will give you a well done account of the work of the remarkable Cesar Chavez and how that work came together despite the kind of reality that has repeated itself today and has us wondering how we will survive it in tact. Here’s a bit to show you why the review and the book are worth your time:
Ganz’s view of leadership is based on the idea that the main function of leaders is to set strategy, a combination of targeting, tactics, and timing. Unlike much of the strategy literature in organizational research (in which strategy has become equated with performance outcomes), Ganz is really interested in how leaders formulate strategy and adapt their strategies to fit the new challenges that face an organization. . . .
Leadership is about developing “strategic capacity” or the collective knowledge and abilities that allow one to effectively adapt strategy to changing circumstances. While certainly slippery as a causal mechanism, I see “strategic capacity” as a nice orienting concept that tells you what aspects of leadership are going to be most important for developing effective strategies. In the introduction he talks about various biographical sources (identity, social networks, and tactical repertoires) and organizational sources (deliberation, resources, and accountability structures) that shape strategic capacity. Ganz spends the rest of the book developing this concept through an historical analysis of the farm worker movement. The farm worker movement provides an interesting case because it was a movement created and sustained by a group of extremely disadvantaged people and yet it managed to survive and prosper for many years in spite of these disadvantages. The movement, which organized as the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), culminated in the success of several consumer boycotts and the establishment of collective bargaining agreements. The natural comparison that Ganz makes is to the Teamsters and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), both of which relied on highly centralized union structures. The Teamsters union was a direct competitor with the NFWA for some of their history, which makes its success even more intriguing.
The review is especially good not just for the thoroughness and intelligent writing. It also details how the book can surprise and expand thought beyond the overall topic area and thus appeal to more than the supposed target audience. I once had a student tell me she enjoyed my classes because she always learned something she didn’t expect to learn. It was probably the best compliment I ever got when I was a teacher. The reviewer basically says the same to Ganz. Which is enough to make the book one worth reading.
And to hope for the next Chavez.
20 August 2009
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Published on August 20th, 2009 @ 05:58:50 pm, using 256 words, 81 views
Interesting little review here that gives you a quick but common look at the actual thought processes behind what criminals do and why they give it up (hint: it’s rarely just the idea of going to prison):
In June of 1996, Wally Long was in federal custody on an indictment for mail fraud when his father passed away. “That was my epiphany,” recalls Long, “my moment of clarity. I was a three time loser, facing seven more years in prison, my son was three years old, his mother and I were not getting along, I had no education, no money, no future. . . And then something interesting happened. In the days following my dad’s death, I began to stop and think: my father’s last memory of me was that I was in prison again. Looking back, I realized how pathetic I must have looked in his eyes.”
At that point, Long decided it was time to start searching for an answer. He took solace in three books that would soon change his life: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, by Napoleon Hill, and Real Magic, by Wayne Dyer. “The lesson I took from these books was that we’re all completely responsible for our own actions. I had spent my entire young life blaming the judges and the prosecutors and all these other people, and never taking responsibility for my own actions.”
Check out the link for more and for a link to the entire story.
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