Reading to escape
Kay James
Kay James, Kay's Comments
I am making a list of some books I want to read, and surprisingly none of them are fiction.
I read to escape so fiction usually is more distracting than nonfiction. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard a couple of books discussed on radio and television that I really should read.
The first on my list is Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Ehrenreich is author of “Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” If enjoy can be used to describe Ehrenreich’s book, “Nickeled and Dimed,” I would use it. Ehrenreich takes a series of low-paying jobs in different parts of the country and then tries to make ends meet. I think every high school student should read it before deciding not to get any further education.
Ehrenreich’s new book takes on the positive thinking movement. She started the book after getting breast cancer and the first chapter describes her contact with the positive thinkers, who she says in some support groups kick out those who have relapses — they spoil the positive thinking mood apparently. She also proposes that we would not be in this economic crisis if more people in large corporations had been willing to be negative or at least allowed to question risky decisions. As she points out, those who raise questions or can be construed as negative sometimes wind up without jobs. I can think of a few corporations who should be sent copies of this book.
I also have to read Gail Collins’ “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present,” that I heard discussed on public radio. Collins, a columnist for The New York Times, points out how much the world has changed since the 1960s. A graduate of Marquette University, she said when she was in college in the 1960s, women at Marquette could only wear pants when going bowling.
I had to wear dresses to high school and grade school. By the time I got to high school, mini skirts were fashionable, but girls had to wear skirts of a certain length. If your skirt did not touch the floor when you kneeled, the skirt was too short. A few girls got sent home for too short skirts, but not me. My parents would not let me out of the house with a short skirt on.
College, at least at UW-Madison, had changed by the time I got there in 1968. We could wear pants and most people did, but the first year, we did have curfews for women. Men and women did not live in the same dorm, let alone on the same floor. They were only allowed in our dorm during certain hours. Unlike campuses today, women were outnumbered by men.
My first job down South was at a newspaper where other women on the staff told me that just the previous year, the publisher had allowed them to wear pants to work. Today, in our office someone wearing a dress stands out as unusual.
I also arrived in South Carolina to discover that the state now allowed women to be on a jury. Wisconsin women had been on juries for years. I can still remember one pompous judge who when women were selected for the jury, made comments about women being able to do the job since blacks could.
Also on my list are “Hollowing Out The Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means For America,” by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, and two books by Daniel Klein and Tom Cathcart, “Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar,” and “Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates.”
Carr and Kefalas write about how some of the best and brightest young people in rural America leave small towns and what that means for the towns — they have aging populations with little hope for a future. I want to see if what they found in Iowa would be applicable to this area. I know the state as a whole has a problem with well-educated young people leaving. How many Wisconsin Dells High School graduates return after they complete college? I think the answer would be very few.
The two books by Klein and Cathcart are philosophy jokes. I dropped out of the philosophy course I took in college — I couldn’t get past the professor asking if we were real or just imaginary. After hearing some of the jokes on public radio, I think I need some philosophy sugar coated like this.
I will have to see if these books are among those in the price war between Amazon and Wal-Mart so I can afford them in hardcover. Otherwise it might be a long wait until they come out in paperback.
Kay Lapp James is editor of the Wisconsin Dells Events. Contact her at wde-editorial@capitalnewspapers.com or phone (608) 254-8327, ext. 3567.