Month: February 2006

No, it’s not an hors d’oeuvre cookbook for cannibals. Consuming Kids is a book about the multi-bajillion dollar industry of marketing all kinds of things –clothes, hair care, food, violence, lifestyles– to kids and teens. Now that my own daughter is old enough that I’m reasonably sure she’s not going to die of SIDS or get carried off by a hyena, I’m starting to worry about these things.

While Consuming Kids deals with an inherantly interesting, even sensational topic, the presentation is actually pretty tame and almost academic. The author, Susan Linn, devotes each chapter to a specific topic like violence, food, smokes and alcohol, marketing in school, and so on, always dealing with how marketers try to get at kids and the parents who control their money. While I appreciate her restraint and thoughtful presentation of the topics, Linn could have punched things up a little with more narratives and more entertaining descriptions of the situations and absurdities inherent in treating children like little adult consumers. The most entertaining and snappy chapter of the book is the first one, where Linn describes her experiences infiltrating a conference for marketers specializing in children. The rest of the book kind of bogs down in statistics and dry expositions that probably belie the author’s true outrage.

Still, if you read through them, all those statistics and expositions are convicing and thought provoking. I found myself periodically looking up from this book to reflect on my own experiences being marketed to and what I plan on doing to insulate Samantha from it. In short, I came away from reading this book with some solid and well defined intentions that I’ve already started putting into place. Things like limiting television time and content (thank God for TiVo, which lets you skip commercials), limiting brands and movie/TV tie-ins when possible (this means you, Elmo), and even resolving to make our house soda-free to set a good example.

In a way, this kind of sucks. For example, I was just talking with someone the other day about how much I’d like to show Samantha classic Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White –movies that are really magnificent in terms of film making and animation. I also want to take Sam to Disney World, which is within driving distance for us and which I think she’ll soon be old enough to enjoy. The problem is that I fear unleashing the marketing juggernaut that Disney has linked to all these classics. I want to watch Alladin with my daughter, but I don’t want her to throw a screaming hissy fit when I won’t buy her ten thousand and one pieces of Disney Princesses junk.

Parenting is just going to get harder, I know. Baby-snatching hyenas I can deal with; nobody’s spending billions of dollars a year to convince Sam that she needs to be dragged off by carrion eaters. Fatty foods, alcohol, and skank-tastic clothes for pre-teens? That’s another story, one that’s told pretty convincingly in this book.

When it comes to geniuses, a few archetypes generally come to mind. They’re often characterized as under appreciated geeks with hearts of gold (think the entire cast of Revenge of the Nerds) or as slightly spaced out but cuddly old men (think Einstein). Or they’re quixotic coyotes forever trying to nab that pesky road runner. In any case, the word “noble” probably applies, at some level, to most conceptions of the intellectually gifted.

This is not true of John Nash, the subject of the biography A Beautiful Mind. He’s a total a-hole.

In fact, judged by the contents of the quite detailed book, Nash is a grade A jerk, the kind of guy you’d rather punch in the teeth than appreciate or get to know. Here’s a guy who constantly belittled those around him, refused to support his illegitimate son in any way, demeaned his wife, harbored jealous grudges against those few who bettered him, periodically erupted in violence when thwarted, and was generally contemptuous of you or anyone like you. Really, his ego, misogyny, racism, arrogance and general prickishness knew no bounds.

Thing is, the same could be said for his intellect and his ambition. He was apparently one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the last century, and his character is made more interesting by the fact that he often went about solving mathematical problems in unique and revolutionary ways that broke new grounds in various fields. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be that smart, but it’s fun to try. The author of his biography, Sylvia Nasar, does a great job of making his life’s story interesting, even before we get to the part where the brilliant mathematician tragically plunges into the dim depths of schizophrenia, only to slowly awaken years later just in time to receive a long-overdue Nobel prize. Though age and mental illness have mellowed him greatly, Nash was an interesting character all through his life (and he is, in fact, still alive). Nasar makes this all accessible by stitching together many fascinating episodes into one whole narrative, repeatedly using themes of “genius, madness, and awakening.”

Parenthetically, this book is much more complete than the 2001 movie of the same name. In fact, there’s really very little overlap between the two. The movie contrives scenes for the sake of drama and totally glosses over critical aspects of Nash’s life, such as his bisexuality, the ignoble way he treated his first family (including an illegitmate son) in Boston, or even that whole “math” thing he was so good at. Also, Nash’s general “jerk-ishness” is really toned down in the movie, despite being on center stage in the book. And that whole “imaginary best friend/roomate” thing from the book? Apparently never really happened in the book or real life, dramatic as the reveal was in the movie. So even if you’ve seen the movie, I recommend the book; there’s lots more to learn. The only downside of the book relative to the movie is the conspicuous absence of Jennifer Connelly.

I’ve mentioned that one thing Stephen King does well is build up a slow burn and then have things explode towards the end of a book. In Cell, he does just the inverse. You open up the book and immediately see that King has his arm cocked way back and he’s holding that proverbial pile of you-know-what that he immediately flings into the fan. By the end of page 7 the world is ending in violence and madness as cell phone users are infected with a kind of insanity-provoking thought virus. Unfortunately, the energy doesn’t hold up and book ends abruptly in an unsatisfying sputter.

One of the other things King usually does really well is develop characters that you feel that you know and sometimes care about. Not so here, as all the characters are pretty uninteresting and not very well developed. For example, one Amazon.com reviewer noted that if you replaced half of the “Clay said” with “Tom said” most readers wouldn’t notice the difference. King is also flagrant in his over reliance on a know-it-all 12 year old to narrate key plot points that the boy should have NO way of knowing. The kid sees like one or two things and then immediately infers a host of truths about the world’s conditions just because King apparently can’t think of a better way to communicate them to the reader. It’s quite annoying, made doubly so because of the ineffective techno babble that makes no sense, even in the context of a horror novel.

I won’t say much about the ending for fear of spoiling it for anyone who does read the book, but suffice to say that it’s extremely open ended and doesn’t resolve much. We’re left completely hanging as to the fate of the principle characters or the nature of the Pulse that kicked off the end of the world in the first place. My guess? King just got tired of writing and decided to wrap this sucker up.

On a side note, while reading the book I kept thinking that King was trying to make some points, or at least parallels, about the Iraq war but from a point of view that you might not think of. The heroes are, in effect, insurgents fighting against an occupying force of “phone crazies.” They use guerill tactics and improvised explosive devices like car bombs. The phone crazies, on the other hand, start their occupation of the world with extreme –and overpowering– violence, but then take on the role of liberators who want to free the “normals” from their perceived insanity by organizing an event where they are brought into a collective (pure democracy?). Only toward the end the phone crazies start to unravel and the situation deteriorates. Ah, maybe I’m really reaching here, but these kinds of parallels just kept coming up.