Caryl Rivers

It's 1963, and Mary Springer is just starting to feel confident in her abilities as a reporter for the Belvedere (MD) Blade. Blade photographer Jay Broderick is itching to do more with his talent than mundane local news photos. And Don Johnson, a young black writer who has just returned from the Freedom Rides, is torn between desire to pursue writing and commitment to advancing civil rights. Their lives intertwine as competing forces of personal ambition, passion, and growing civic and political awareness draw them together and push them in new directions.

And in interludes, we enter the mind of JFK as he deals with both national and personal issues as late summer and early fall pass, and his November trip to Dallas approaches.

This is a lovely meditation on the early sixties, the changes happening then, and the way they affected people's lives. The civil rights movement is beginning to feel its strength, and the first stirrings of the women's rights movement are coming to life. But nothing comes without price, and Mary, Jay, and Don all have painful choices to make, and suffer losses they can't avoid.

Rivers' sense of the feelings as well as the facts of the sixties, and delicately expert character development, make this a rewarding and interesting read.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.… (lisätietoja)

This is the re-release of a delightful mid-80s novel of mid-50s Catholic school girls coming of age.

Peggy Morrison, her friends and classmates Con and Molly, seniors at Immaculate Heart of Mary High school, and her neighbor and boyfriend, Sean McCaffrey, a senior at Sacred Heart of Jesus High School, struggle with the challenges of growing up and entering adulthood. Peggy and Con dream of being writers and journalists and living a glamorous life in New York City. Sean plans to be a priest, and will be entering the seminary after graduation.

It's an era in which there is no acknowledged place for women, and especially girls, with serious ideas. Individuality and creativity are not encouraged. If the stern, demanding Sister who is principal of Immaculate Heart is a little more sympathetic than she outwardly seems, the girls certainly don't notice. The girls and Sean struggle to explore their ideas and dreams without getting caught breaking the rules, and they all struggle with issues in their families. Con is living with a painful situation that leaves her unable to respect either parent. Sean's father, a professor at St. Anselm's College, is pompous, hard to reach, and a brave if somewhat clownish crusader against Smut. Peggy's father dies, suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving Peggy without her strongest support, and her mother to take over the family business and keep them afloat financially.

I can't really say much about the plot, because this book is about its characters, more so than what happens to them. The friends work their way through the challenges of sex, obedience, maturity, and taking responsibility. It's a world that had changed by the time I was growing up in the sixties, and has changed again, and yet again, since then. It's funny, it's moving, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the author.… (lisätietoja)

Are girls and boys really that different? Are their brains wired differently in important ways, leading to very different abilities and needs? Rivers & Barnett take a hard look at claims that the brains, and therefore the abilities, of boys and girls differ in major ways, making it necessary to teach them in very different ways. First they look at the claims, the proposals based on them, and the studies claimed to support them.

These claims include the idea that boys are innately less verbal than girls, because of their brain structure and wiring, and that they are thereby disadvantaged in the "verbally drenched" curricula of most schools and that this problem is compounded by the fact that most teachers are women. The corresponding claim, about girls, is that they are not equipped to do as well at math and science as boys, and really shouldn't be expected to even try to learn math in the same classrooms as boys. Girls need to be taught science through things that relate to girls' lives, such as using cosmetics to teach chemistry. Also, boys need to be spoken to loudly and forcefully, while girls need to be spoken to softly. Really, the proponents of this view say, the best thing for both boys and girls is to be educated in single-sex classrooms geared to each gender's natural strengths and weaknesses.

Rivers and Barnett take this position apart in great detail, analyzing and explaining the flaws and the limited scope of the studies claimed to support it, as well as presenting the substantial body of well-constructed studies that collectively present a much different picture, of girls and boys substantially equal in abilities and potential. These studies, precisely because their results are not as flashy and exciting, simply do not get the same media attention. What they show, however, is for more hopeful for both girls and boys.

Girls arrive at school with somewhat better verbal abilities, and boys with somewhat greater spatial, mechanical, and visualization abilities, because of the different ways that parents and other adults relate to young children. Even at very young ages, parents speak to their daughters more, and in ways that are more helpful for developing both verbal and interpersonal skills. Boys, meanwhile, are treated to more games of catch and other physical activities that develop their spatial, mechanical, and visualization skills. Because the human brain, especially in growing children, is extremely plastic, these differences in adult interactions with girls and boys actually cause their brains to wire themselves differently. Despite this, girls and boys rapidly catch up with each other in school--until, on the verge of high school, girls start to get messages that they don't really need calculus and advanced math, and shouldn't expect to do well in them. The most tragic part of this is that teachers perceive boys as doing much better in math that girls, even when their best students are in fact girls, and girls as doing much better in English, even when boys are their best students.

Rivers and Barnett's message is that what both girls and boys need is not to be separated into single-sex classrooms that play to their perceived strengths and downplay the areas where they are perceived to be weak, but rather to be challenged to learn from each other and develop all their talents.

For me, the saddest section of this book was the discussion of the startling re-segregation of toys. In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents, and aunts and uncles, put a fair degree of care in preventing all us cousins from getting the idea that there were "girls' toys' and "boys' toys." I had a cap gun, baby dolls, a Fort Apache set, a tea set, dress-up dolls, a chemistry set. . . When kids outside our normal social circles told us about this weird concept "girls' toys" and "boys' toys", we didn't believe them.

Rivers and Barnett describe toy departments where most toys, even such seemingly "neutral" toys as Legos or balls, are gender-typed with colors and patterns that relentlessly make them "girls' toys" or "boys' toys"--and mostly boys' toys, with little but the most stereotypically "female" toys left in the much-contracted girls' toy sections. Yet experiments show that a tea set in combat cammo pattern is perceived as a toy for boys by both girls and boys, while a toy gun in purple and silver is perceived as a toy for girls. It's not the toys themselves; it's what children of both genders have learned from adults around them about what signals girls' or boys' items.

This is an excellent and important book, clearly written yet also packed with documentation.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.… (lisätietoja)