THE DISCUSSION in this entry about books has turned to the importance of reading aloud to young children and adolescents. Jill Farris wrote:

I grew up in a reading household with no TV in the 1960s and 70s when, even then, TV was dominating many homes. I married a man who is extremely intelligent but who spent many hours in front of the TV as a child. He had what I consider to be an impoverished childhood even though his parents were college educated. (more…)

A FRIEND OF MINE once attended a meeting of the Piscataway Township, N.J. school board. One of the schools in the district was well known for its drama productions. (more…)

LAST WEEK’S PIECE in the New York Times about the dearth of women in corporate executive positions should be retitled, “Despite Decades of Favoritism and Reparations for Male Success, Women Still Have Not Reached the Top.” Here is the article by Phyllis Korkki with my remarks inserted.

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READER N. writes:

As bizarre as this story of a woman giving birth in an art gallery is, I prefer it to the “abortion as performance art” notion. Still, there are so many things wrong with this it is difficult to know where to start.

Excerpt:

“A pregnant Brooklyn performance artist is planning to have her baby in an art gallery in front of an audience as part of a piece examining childbirth. (more…)

MY SON was recently talking to a college student who bragged that he had never voluntarily read a book in his life. That he had never voluntarily read a book is less disturbing than that he bragged about it. I have talked to a number of students like this. A book arouses their condescension, but even more strange and perplexing is that the written word seems to make them angry.  When they speak about a famous, long-dead author, they usually mention whether they “like” him or not. Typically, it’s not. “Oh, I don’t like Shakespeare,” a student at a well-regarded university told me. And when he said it, his lip curled. He didn’t mean that he found Shakespeare difficult, though certainly he did. He just didn’t like Shakespeare. He was angry at Shakespeare.

This attitude is not surprising. At the institution where a person should learn to revere the book, he is taught to despise it.  Schools will choose anything over the book, replacing it with the pseudo-book, the textbook, the anthology, PowerPoint, games, worksheets, music, Internet chatboards, and movies. Even at fancy prep schools, you may find high school students watching Saving Private Ryan in English class.  I know a third grader who has a regular class in “rapid research.”  He is in third grade and has reached the point where he can read a chapter book on his own. He is bright and curious, but his attention is now being scrambled. “Rapid research” does not call for sustained reverie or thought. He will hate the book someday too.

The problem with the book is not so much that it is difficult to teach, but that it is not a tool of social harmony. It doesn’t serve the aims of collectivism.The modern school is an elevated form of crowd control. For this job, a real book written by a single person gets in the way. As Richard Allen, wrote in The Leaning Tower of Babel: (more…)

  AT Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson writes about a Swedish female prison guard who was beaten to death by an inmate. In some Swedish prisons, the majority of the guards are women. On the face of it, this seems stupid and dangerous. However, a reader who operates detention centers for adolescent male offenders in this country said in a previous discussion here that male inmates tended to be less violent when guarded by an all-female staff. He wrote: We in fact see less violence to the female staff but I personally don’t think it has anything to do with communication but rather is due to the fact that the patients (inmates) relate better to women as this has been their experience. Moreover, many of them view the women staff as potential sex partners and/or someone they can manipulate and subsequently they are not often overtly aggressive. He also said women guards have more difficulty handling the stress of the job.

IN AN excellent piece at Youth for Western Civilization, Kevin DeAnna describes the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters. He writes:

Much like the May 1968 protests in Paris that almost toppled de Gaulle, the action in the streets is as much driven for a search for meaning as it is a search for economic justice. (more…)

DAN writes:

The persecution of the Church in Dar al-Islam, specifically Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan, is generally known to anyone with a basic following of recent world events. In each case, Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out for these Christian populations, many of them nearly two thousand years old. Now the violent jihad being waged against Christians in “moderate” Indonesia has garnered the attention of the bishop of Rome. (more…)

  AMBER MILLER finished the Chicago marathon in six hours and 25 minutes Sunday and then delivered her second child a few hours later. Good for her. She was 39 weeks pregnant, had the approval of her doctor and had run throughout her pregnancy.

  IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with Time magazine, Gloria Steinem was asked what she would do if she knew she had only two years to live. This is a strange question to ask a 77-year-old woman, but this is what she said in reply: Mainly seeing friends, my chosen family. And writing about what I believe, which is that things are a circle, not a hierarchy: the women's movement and the antiracist movement and the gay movement and the environmental movement are all linked. And maybe living with elephants. I do still want to live with elephants.[emphasis added] Steinem is refreshingly honest. She would fit in better with a herd of elephants. In a herd, she would find some of the uniformity and sameness she longs for. However, leaving aside the difficulties of a 77-year-old urbanite fitting in with such different creatures, I believe Steinem would still have trouble locating that pure, elusive circle. Life is hierarchical even among elephants. Correct me if I'm wrong, but male elephants don't do 50 percent of the child care. Aren't they bigger and stronger? Steinem would be tooting the feminist horn in her elephant existence too. Elephants have reproductive freedom but not in Steinem's sense, which is the freedom not to reproduce. Also, elephants don't "choose" family and they don't feel guilty about liking elephants better than giraffes. In that sense, they are like millions of ordinary human beings. Choice has nothing to do with it.…

DAN writes:

A Wisconsin man was attacked at his home by a Muslim allegedly angry that the man had criticized the Islamic religion, though the attacked man denied he ever said anything insulting or offensive (though as we have seen, Muslims have a very low threshold when it comes to what words or pictures “offend” them). The price that the once free citizens of America must pay to maintain the liberal’s illusionary beliefs in their false gods “diversity” and “tolerance” is the loss of their liberty to speak and ultimately think freely. (more…)

IN the previous entry, a female reader who says she has been hit by her husband many times explains why she has no sympathy for Barbara Sheehan, who shot her husband to death and was acquitted last week of murder charges:

As the wife of a “nasty man” who has a bad temper and has physically hurt me many times, I can say that this woman is in no way justfied in this murder. I don’t feel sorry for her at all. She had many options to take; this country is obnoxiously anxious to help the “battered wife.” The reason she is talking about it so much is obvious; she knows she was wrong, and she feels guilty for getting away with it. She’s desperate to feel better about it and having the approval of the masses is what she thinks will fill that void. It won’t. She will have to face God. (more…)

THOUGH a close relative said he never saw injuries on Barbara Sheehan, she was acquitted yesterday of shooting her husband, Raymond, 11 times with two guns. The acquittal is a victory for those who claim that a woman who testifies that her husband hit her is justified in killing him.

Raymond Sheehan, a former police sergeant, was murdered in the bathroom where he was shaving; the water was still running in the sink when he was shot. His wife said that he pointed his gun at her during an argument. It is unclear why she did not run away instead of riddling him with bullets, using one gun and then reaching for another. If he was about to shoot her, how was it that a trained policeman was a worse shot than his wife? And wouldn’t one shot have incapacitated him? Proponents of “battered wife syndrome” claim that a woman loses free will and Mrs. Sheehan’s attorney, Michael Dowd, who specializes in defending abused women, said she had been justified because she was terrorized by her husband. (more…)

I WAS very saddened to hear of the death in August of Elizabeth Wright, the eloquent and impassioned defender of black self-reliance who occasionally commented here and whose writings were collected at her site, Issues and Views, which now appears to be in disarray with many of her archives lost. Jared Taylor wrote a brief remembrance of Wright at that time. It can be read here.

Wright, who was black, claimed that white liberals and black intellectuals had all but decimated the dignity and work ethic of ordinary black men. One of her best writings on this theme is her two-part 1993 series, “Destroying Black Male Authority.” In , “Black Men: They Could Be Heroes,” she wrote:

How did the men who are today’s vagabonds become so bereft of a sense of mission, if only for themselves? How is it that most of them have no knowledge of the black men who, long before America’s official slavery ended, long before anything called an Emancipation Proclamation, had the confidence to make the most of their free status and sustained their families in dignity? What force of circumstance so totally cut off today’s derelicts from that tradition of blacks who would have preferred to die rather than be viewed as anything except a “credit to the race?”

The very real restrictions on black economic mobility in the past have been recounted in many sources. Historian John Sibley Butler describes the mass of legislation, especially in the South, that was designed to limit the black man’s ability to effectively compete in the marketplace with whites. Such laws forced blacks into what Butler calls an “economic detour,” as they attempted, like members of all other groups, to create economic foundations through business enterprise. Biased laws denied them the ability to expand their enterprises beyond the borders of black communities.

Yet, in spite of these legal maneuvers, over the generations, tens of thousands of black men mastered the economic principles that drove American society. Under the guidance and encouragement of leaders like Booker T. Washington, a great many managed to prosper even within a limited economic niche. Butler reports that between 1867 and 1917, the number of black-owned businesses increased from 4,000 to 50,000.

All of this business activity is evidence of the family bonds that were strongly in place as brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and offspring worked together to maintain the family businesses. In economist Thomas Sowell’s studies, he describes the critical importance of trust among members of various immigrant groups, as they re-establish their lives in new countries, pooling resources and putting off immediate pleasures. Sowell claims that a sense of trust among members is the key to any group’s future progress. Among blacks, in this early period, the examples of familial cooperation are legion. (more…)

EVER SINCE SHE was 18 years old and a freshman at Yale, Joyce Maynard has made a career out of writing about herself, earning both applause and intense derision. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post once stated that, encountering Maynard’s work, “you may . . . find yourself struggling to comprehend self-infatuation so vast and reckless that the victim cannot imagine a detail of her life so minute or trivial as to be of no interest to everyone else on this planet.”

In 1972, Maynard debuted as an autobiographical writer with her essay, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” which appeared in The New York Times Sunday magazine and was instantly hailed as an important statement from the baby boomer generation. The piece did contain witty and perceptive insights, and was indeed reflective of its generation, especially in its probing of the personal for larger meaning. Many were charmed by her precocity, a mirror image of the girlishness Maynard possesses as she now approaches old age.

After dropping out of Yale, Maynard wrote her first memoir and had an affair with the writer, J.D. Salinger, a subject she would later publicly explore to more applause and derision. (more…)

THE CATARACT OF LODORE

                            — Robert Southey

“How does the water
Come down at Lodore?”
My little boy asked me
Thus, once on a time;
And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.
Anon, at the word,
There first came one daughter,
And then came another,
To second and third
The request of their brother,
And to hear how the water
Comes down at Lodore,
With its rush and its roar,
As many a time
They had seen it before.
(more…)

DAN writes:

In Iran, a Christian pastor, Yousef Nadarkhani, is awaiting execution for the crime of leaving Islam and embracing Christianity (though the Iranians are trying to cover their backs by backing away from the apostasy charges, and instead fabricating charges that Yousef Nadarkhani committed rape, extortion, and spied for Israel). (more…)