For the first 20 years of my teaching career, I taught self-contained special education.  I chose special education as a career for two reasons.  The first was the book A Circle of Children, by Mary McCracken.  It is a memoir of McCracken's time teaching in a school for children with severe social/emotional disabilities. The second reason was my experiences volunteering at a day camp for children with special needs in the south suburbs of Chicago as a teen.  Not only was I fascinated by the puzzle that these children presented to educators, I was deeply moved watching them grow from year to year, and I knew that I wanted to be a part of that process.

During those years, I met and worked with many, many children.  Quite a few were diagnosed with autism, both the more stereotypical "hand-flapping, spinning-objects" kind, and the varied forms that we have come to recognize today as part of a spectrum of symptoms.  Some of the children were non-verbal, some of them talked non-stop, though usually only about whatever obsession they were currently stuck in.  I learned all about the difference between asphalt and concrete from Keeler, and more about Uh Gi Oh than I would ever need to know from Nick.  Kameron mostly just repeated what other people said to him (called echolalia), but when he did verbalize his own thoughts they almost always had to do with basketball.  I knew children with autism who didn't like to be touched at all, and some who wanted nothing more than deep pressure all the time.  I knew children with autism who never demonstrated self-stimulation, and some who would bounce on their toes or flap their hands non-stop without intervention.  And no matter which child I was currently working with, I always, always wondered what they were thinking about.  Were they content to be left alone?  What made them suddenly take off running?  Why did they insist on wearing the same clothes, day in and day out, regardless of the weather?  Why could they echo whatever was said to them, but not tell us their own thoughts and dreams.

We know so much more about autism than we ever have before.  We know that the issues people with autism have with touch and sound and light has to do with differences in their sensory integration.  We know that people with autism can exhibit different behaviors based on where they fall on the spectrum, and that some disorders that we called something else previously are in fact related to autism spectrum disorder.  But there are also still lots of mysteries.  No one knows the cause of autism (but we know it is NOT childhood vaccines, in case you've heard that in the media).  No one is entirely sure why the repetitive and obsessive behaviors exhibited by many people with autism are so comforting to them, nor do we know why not every person with autism has these behaviors.  But we may now have a better idea about what people with autism may be thinking about, thanks for a remarkable 13 year old Japanese boy.  Naoki Higashida shares his thoughts and experiences as a person with autism, and takes some guesses about how things may be with others who have autism, in his bookThe Reasons I Jump.  He gives us insight into the internal life of people with autism in a way that I have never seen before.

 There are many noteworthy things about this book.  It has an interesting format, in that Higashida starts each section with a question that neurotypical may ask about autism (and probably have asked), and then proceeds to answer the questions according to his own experience.  The book is also interspersed with short stories that demonstrate some aspect  of Higishida's inner life.  But the thing that makes this book truly amazing is the fact that Higishida is non-verbal. He can speak, but the process is so difficult for him that he uses a communication grid he devised himself, or a computer, to write what he wants to say.  Without those adaptions, he would most certainly be trapped inside his own head, unable to communicate at all.  No one would ever have had access to his insight into living with autism, and that would be a tragedy.


Essentially, his message is one that I think probably resonates with anyone who has a physical or mental illness.  Have compassion, have patience, and have understanding, because people with autism or other disabilities don't have control over that disability.  He acknowledges over and over that he knows it can be taxing and frustrating to take care of people with autism.  He knows that having to say the same things over and over again, only to have the person with autism forget what they were told is difficult.  He knows that it worries his parents when he suddenly runs away from them, or when he doesn't notice the world around him and its many possible dangers.  But he tries, and he wants to be recognized as a person with needs, a person who does not always live up to his own expectations for himself, but who is honestly, truly trying to understand how to live in a neurotypical world.    He also reveals a deep sense of self-awareness and insight that I think many people working with people on the autism spectrum would find unbelievable.  Some people living with autism are so distant emotionally and cognitively from the world us neurotypicals live in that it is hard to believe that are thinking about much of anything at all.  How many times have I heard the words, "He's in his own world" used to describe someone with autism?  I've thought it myself often enough over the years.  And for some people with autism it may be true that their experience of the world are so different than mine that it really is like another world, but I suspect more often people with autism are looking for the same things all of us are-safety, comfort, and meaningful human connection.

The Most Terrifying Book I've Read All Year...

...is about a corporation.  That's right-not zombies or vampire or werewolves or serial killers.  The most frightening book I've read all year-in fact, in the last several years-is about a technology company.  Now, plenty of people are scared of technology, in the "I don't know how to work this" sort of way, but this fear goes right to the heart of so much of what is happening in our world right now regarding internet safety, social media, and privacy.  This particular nightmare is brought to us by Dave Eggers in his 2013 book, The Circle.

The titular Circle is the largest and most powerful corporation in the world.  Calling it a technology company

is a little like describing the Louvre as a building with some paintings on the walls.  The Circle has their fingers in everything.  Imagine if Mark Zuckerburg suddenly owned not just Facebook, but also Instagram, Ebay, Amazon, Twitter, and Google.  The Circle has access to every post, comment, like and dislike (which they call smiles and frowns), customer review, photograph, document, and piece of electronically collected health information in the world.  They also control most of the country's surveillance feeds, with an eye to attaining the information from every country in the world.  They built this empire one piece at a time, adding features and combining services with the aim of making things more safe, efficient and convenient-at least, that's their stated aim.  Their goal is something they call "completion"-that moment when every person on the planet is connected with every other person on the planet, and everyone on the planet knows what every other person in the planet is doing and thinking, all in real time.  (Scared yet?)

The main character is Mae Holland, a young woman in her 20s who at the start of the novel is working at the utility company of hometown.  Feeling discouraged, like her life essentially has no meaning, she is thrilled to be recruited by The Circle. After all, with their beautiful corporate campus, gobs of cash, and prestige, who wouldn't want to work for them.  She goes to work in their customer service department, and quickly begins working her way up through the ranks of the company.  Her friend Annie-a very important executive at The Circle-gives her a leg up whenever she can.  As she takes on more responsibilities, she is given more and more "screens".  She is expected to communicate with customers, answer/comment on people's posts and comments on The Circle's social media platforms (the Inner Circle and Outer Circle), answer endless survey questions designed to gauge consumer habits, and attend on-campus social events, all with the goal of increasing her participation rank, so that she can be given more responsibilities and more screens.  (How 'bout now?  Scared now?)

At one event, she meets a mysterious stranger named Kalder, who says he works for the company, but she can't find him in the staff directory, nor does she ever see him working on any projects.  She feels very drawn to him, but there is something about him that she senses just isn't right?  Is he a corporate spy?  Will she get in trouble for being seen with him?  Her life becomes less about her, and more about they ways in which she can help the company attain "completion".  When strange things start to happen to her friends, she is troubled, but is always able to push away her doubts-usually by what I would call hypnotizing herself by spending hours on social media, "smiling" and "frowning" and "zinging" (their equivalent to tweeting).

Essentially, what makes this book terrifying is the fact that it is not at all implausible.  This may technically be science fiction, in that the technologies that make The Circle's complete domination of every aspect of life have not all been developed yet, but they are all technologies that could exist.  It would not surprise me if there are companies around the world experimenting with some of the very same concepts that The Circle has perfected in this book.  And the arguments that The Circle used to infiltrate the private lives of every person, regardless of whether they use The Circle's social media or not, are ones that I can see swaying Americans now-in fact, they are arguments that do sway people now, arguments about curtailing civil liberties to "keep us safe" or to "expand human knowledge".

The most frightening part for me was the complete erosion of the separation of private and public spaces.  The masterminds behind The Circle were able to convince the world that everyone has the right to ALL knowledge-even things that people would traditionally keep private.  So not only can The Circle access the feeds from cameras placed all over the world, but so can everyone else.  In true Brave New World fashion, they come up with some slogans for what they believe, the most pertinent one for this conversation being Privacy Equals Theft.  People begin to feel that they have the right to know what everyone is thinking all of the time, because according to The Circle Secrets Equal Lies.  It creates a society where everyone is constantly reaching out to everyone else, but no real connections are made.  Personal communication and private relationships are replaced by smiles and frowns and comments on a newsfeed.  And what does The Circle get for all of this knowledge?  A way to monetize everything, a way to keep tabs on what people buy, who they spend time with, where they go...I sincerely hope that we NEVER end up living in the world of The Circle.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's book A Visit from the Goon Squad was all over must-read lists last year.  I am usually so behind in my never-ending quest Someday!"

to get through my to-read list (this will never actually happen, but hope springs eternal) that I'm just getting around to the Best of  Two Thousand Whatever two (or three or five or eight) years later.  Thank goodness for book clubs!  Without the lovely ladies of the Unitarian Universalist book club, I would probably still be looking wistfully at the cover of this book every time I went by my bookcase, thinking "

A Visit from the Goon Squad uses the music business as a metaphor for modern society, telling stories of loss, betrayal, love, and family through a series of vignettes from the perspective of different characters. They are all connected in some way to each other, and to the music industry in Los Angeles.   The novel goes back and forth through time, jumping from decade to decade, highlighting all of the modern pressures that people feel to fit in, be connected, create meaning in life.

Not only is the non-linear structure of the narrative unique, but each vignette has a distinct personality, a different way of storytelling from the others.  Time and again, the characters show that despite all striving to the contrary, most of them (us) are never able to live up to the image of themselves that they have created in their own minds.  Often, the things that the characters do to try and make-up for their previous shortcomings make things worse instead of better, and there are plenty of unintended consequences throughout the book. Egan spends most of the book demonstrating how difficult it can be to have truly authentic relationships in the modern world in which we live, where it is theoretically possible to stay connected with everyone all the time through social media, but where in reality most people are living shallow public lives, keeping most of their deepest selves hidden.

The last part of the book describes a future New York where infants and toddlers drive consumer tendencies through the use of social media, and where trends are determined artificially through people whose job it is to promote brands they may have no real experience with or knowledge of.  This topic, the false reality of social media and the lack of privacy in the digital age, is reflected in others books gaining popularity recently, most notably Dave Egger's The Circle (review coming soon!).  I hesitate to say that what it means to be human is changing so drastically that humanity itself may be high unrecognizable in the next 50 years, but I do hope that gifted writers such as Egan continue to raise questions about how our relationships to each other and to the world in general will change when all of human knowledge is available with a few keystrokes, and whether the seemingly endless ways we now have to connect with other people really deepens our connections to each other and our own best selves.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Jesus famously said "The poor you will always have with you" (Mark 14:7).  Two thousand years later, this statement remains a sad truth about the state of the world we live in.  Poverty is a blight on human civilization, rendering huge swaths of the population unable to do more than work tirelessly for subsistence level existence.  The causes of poverty are many and varied, and fighting poverty is made that much more difficult by the attitudes that people have about the poor.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, there are many people around the world who choose a "blame the victim" mentality when thinking about those who live in poverty. They are lazy, or dissolute, or ignorant.  Obviously they must be making bad choices, or they feel a sense of entitlement to government assistance that keeps them from "working hard", "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps", or "climbing the ladder" of economic success.

While some of these prejudices are stated openly by people who seem to have a dearth of compassion towards their fellow human beings, they are more insidious than that.  Often, well intentioned people who believe it is their "Christian" duty to serve the needs of the poor reinforce these stereotypes in the way that they structure their social action around poverty.  Throughout the history of the United States, there are a multitude of examples of churches, governments, or social service organizations who espoused a particular policy to fight poverty that actually caused more harm than good.  "Indian schools", where Native American children were sent after being (forcibly) removed from their families to be re-educated in the "Christian" way are one example.  Another is the subject of the book Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.  For a period of about 70 years, trains full of orphaned and abandoned children were sent to the middle of the country, where farmers, factory owners, shopkeepers, and yes, some loving families were able to adopt them by signing a piece of paper on a train platform.  The stated goal was to provide for these children, the products of the teeming, filthy streets of cities in the northeast, a fresh start in a wholesome environment where they could learn the values of hard work and clean living that so obviously escaped their vile, low, lazy parents (please read sarcasm into that last sentence).

Orphan Train is the story of two women-Molly, a Penobscot Indian teenager in the foster care system in present day Maine, and Vivian, a 91 year old woman with an unexpected past.  When Molly volunteers to help Vivian clean out the attic of her large seaside home, she discovers that she and Vivian share a history of being judged by people who do not understand who they are, and of being shunted around from place to place, never really feeling secure.  Vivian was one of the children sent west on the Orphan Train, an Irish girl with red hair and freckles.  The Irish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America were looked down upon much like many immigrants of Mexican descent are today (like poverty, this tendency to revile newly arrived immigrants who are coming to "take our jobs and ruin our towns" is always with us).  Her father was an alcoholic who gambles away much of the family's money, and her mother has what would today be diagnosed as clinical depression.  When most of her family is killed in a fire, she is sent from New York City on a train to Minnesota.  Too old to be easily adopted, and her obviously Irish features and name (Niamh), she is not taken into the arms of a loving, Midwestern family, but sent to what is essentially a sweatshop.  The story follows Niamh, who will change her name several times in the course of the novel, through the 20th century and the many times she had to move from place to place, never really feeling as though she belonged anywhere.

The book highlights an important period of American history, and the story is very moving.  What makes it more than just a well-written historical fiction novel is the relationship between Molly and Vivian.  These two women, who have felt alone and misunderstood for much of their lives, find kindred spirits in each other. In Vivian, Molly finds a model of what it can look like when someone decided not to let their past or the prejudices of others define them, and Vivian discovers that family connections can survive despite tragedy, separation, and the passing of nearly a century of time.

The Sister, Poppy Adams

Poppy Adams' book The Sister is an odd little novel.  It follows the story of one family from the English countryside-the husband, and entomologist who studies moths; his lonely, alcoholic wife; and their two daughters, Ginny and Vivian.  The novel opens with an elderly Ginny waiting for her younger sister Vivi to return to their enormous country estate for the first time in 50 years.  Ginny, who has become a recluse, is at once excited to see her beloved sister, and anxious about the effect her presence will have on the quietly ordered life she has created for herself.  Through Ginny's flashbacks we learn the troubled history of her family, and the series of events that led Vivi to leave the house, not to return for five decades.

Adams does a great job setting the mood for the novel with her descriptions of the decrepit estate where Ginny now lives.  Once a beautiful, vibrant country house, over time the furniture has been sold off, the grounds allowed to go to seed, and an air of decay lies over everything that is left.  This unsettling mood persists, despite the fact that at first, the story itself seems fairly benign.  However, as Ginny takes her walk down memory lane, it becomes clear that there is something not quite right, both with her and with the things that happened in her family.  Ginny doesn't seem to feel emotion that same way that other people do, and she has trouble reading other people's emotions and social cues.  I suppose if her childhood had been set in the present day rather than the 1950s, we might have said that she has Aspergers Syndrome, but if there was a name back then for her quirks Adams never reveals it.  As the story unfolds, the reader begins to question whether they can trust Ginny's recollection of events, tinged as it is with her own inability to analyze other people's motives and feelings.

This novel ends in such an unexpected way that I actually went back and read the last 20 pages or so again to see if I had missed something that would explain the ending, and to be honest it does feel like there were a few gaps in the story that caused the reader to have to make a few leaps in order to get to where Adams eventually took us.  But if you are looking for a moody, slightly chilling read, then I think that you will enjoy this debut novel.

Sisterland, In Which Psychic Twins Still Manage to Have Screwed Up Lives

People have always been fascinated by identical twins.  Twin studies have shown that often they have a
deeper connection than normal siblings, developing their own language to communicate and sensing when something is wrong with the other.  It is this idea that Curtis Sittenfeld explores in Sisterland, his 2013 novel about two identical twins who end up taking very different paths.

Kate (born Daisy) and her sister Violet grew up in a small town near St. Louis, Missouri.  They knew from an early age that they had abilities that they could not explain, what they called senses.  Their "senses" gave them feelings about things that were going to happen in the future, things that it would be impossible to know. Raised by a mostly absent father and a mother with untreated clinical depression, there was no one that the girls could turn to when it came to understanding the power they possessed.   After a sleep over with some friends during which Kate felt a malevolent presence in the room, she actively tried to ignore and quash her senses.  This became especially true after she married and became a mother. She wanted nothing more than to be normal.  Her sister Vi, on the other hand, turned her senses into a career, which began after Kate and Vi helped find a kidnapped boy while in college.  Vi is a handful-loud, brash, crass, and pushy, she requires almost as much attention from Kate as her own children, or her aging father.  When Vi predicts a major earthquake would hit the St. Louis area, the story is picked up by the major networks, and her life becomes a series of interviews and psychic readings, embarrassing her sister Kate and driving the whole family into virtual hiding from reporters.

Sittenfeld does a wonderful job with the backstory of the sisters, which he tells by alternating between present day and past.  Kate is a fully developed character, though to be honest I didn't find her a particularly likable one.  I found her suburban attitudes about her gifts, her sister's choices, and her family history to be sort of obnoxious, in fact.  Sittenfeld did not do quite as well with some of the other characters-Kate's husband, for instance, is a little too good to be true-but I thought he captured the Midwestern sensibilities of a small city pretty well.  Overall I found the story engaging, and was drawn in enough to ignore my chores for the day and keep reading (though, in truth, this is not exactly hard to do).  In the end, though, I felt like this novel, as engaging as it was, failed to deliver anything truly unique.  For an earthquake does come, thought not in the literal ground shaking sense.  Kate's life ends up being rocked by her own very questionable choices, and while there is a certain symmetry to her getting her comeuppance after all of the years she judged her sister and others, this particular earthquake was entirely preventable.

One Soul, by Ray Fawkes

I'm pretty new to the world of graphic novels.  I might not have ever picked on up at all, except that as a

reading coach at the elementary school where I work I have to keep up with the latest trends in children's literature, and they are very popular there right now.  But I have found that despite the "picture book" format, graphic novels for adults are able to tell very insightful and substantive stories that engage me as a reader in a very different way than more traditional formats.

One of my book clubs recently read One Soul by Ray Fawkes as our monthly pick, and the premise itself is intriguing, even for a graphic novel.  The book follows 18 distinct lives, from prehistoric times through the 20th century, with one panel from each life on each two page spread.  The people come from all different geographic regions and backgrounds.  There is an Egyptian priestess, a Sumerian warrior, a medieval doctor and a 19th century dance hall girl.  There is a mix of men and women, and two of the characters are gay.  As you read each page, the panels are sometimes completely independent of each other, and sometimes when read together they form a longer thought or theme that only has full meaning when read together.  The art work is almost rudimentary, and the lack of color only adds to the general stark portrayal of the lives of the characters.

The overall theme of the book seems to be humankind's search for meaning in a world where oftentimes meaningless things seem to happen.  Each of the characters has their moments of struggle and of triumph.  Some of the characters are sympathetic, and some are violent and hard to love.  There are oppressors and the oppressed, yet despite the sometimes vast differences in their perspectives and experiences, they all go through essentially the same journey-the search for love, the search for self, the search for acceptance, the search for meaning.

The prevailing opinion of my book club ladies was that the book was pretty depressing.  And it is true that there are not too many moments of transcendence.  Most of the people led rather short, sometimes violent, often unfulfilling lives.   But woven throughout the book are glimpses into a deeper meaning, and it is often the characters who have died that provide the deepest insights into the struggles of human life.  In the end, all of the characters in the book meet death, and become one with the universal consciousness that Fawkes must imagine exists outside of our mortal lives.  While I can't say I found the stories hopeful, I did find some comfort in the idea that all human beings are engaged in the struggle together, even while in the end we are each so desperately alone.