Reviews
LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: SAVING OUR CHILDREN FROM NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER by RICHARD LOUV
Nonfiction review for Bookslut by Jessie Tierney
After reading Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv, it is my humble opinion that this nonfiction book should be required reading for every American, whether you consider yourself a diehard tree hugger or a cosmopolitan urbanite.
Louv, who has been studying the relationship between children and the outdoors for the duration of his career as a journalist and author, poses the term nature-deficit disorder, which at first glance annoyed me: we are already an over-diagnosed, over-medicated culture. Why add another diagnosis? But his argument cuts deep: time outdoors is something that Louv proves should be looked at not as “recreation” but as essential to the health of our society suffering from childhood obesity and increasingly medicated youth. His arguments are vast. And convincing.
Because of TV, video games, computers, “lack of neighborhood parks, or lack of… time and money for parents who might otherwise take them out of the city,” to name just a few reasons, children are spending less time outdoors and more time plugged in. Louv sites studies that suggest this decreased time outside, where kids can engage in “unstructured, imaginative play” is directly related to childhood obesity and a host of illnesses, including ADHD, anxiety and depression in today’s youth. Louv shows that today’s young people are growing up in a world comprised of “detachment from the source of food, the virtual disappearance of the farm family, the end of biological absolutes, an ambivalent new relationship between humans and other animals, new suburbs shrinking open space, and so on.” But Last Child in the Woods is not a doomsday warning; rather, it is a collection of the evidence and proof that a major shift in how we deal with education, land development, city planning and cultural attitudes toward nature is in store. Louv provides ample solutions throughout the book in addition to a well-developed section titled 100 Actions We Can Take and lists of resources. Prepare to be motivated and inspired.
Louv pogniantly shows that the childhood obesity epidemic is an obvious indicator that “current approaches aren’t working.” Interestingly, the incidence of childhood obesity coincides with the greatest increase in organized sports in history. Louv asks, “What are kids missing that organized sports, including soccer and Little League, cannot provide?” While he admits that “[a]dditional rigorous, controlled studies are needed to sort out correlation, cause and effect,” Louv suggests that we don’t need to wait for the research: “Playtime — especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play — is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.”
One of the most fascinating sections of Last Child in the Woods was the chapter “The Boogeyman Syndrome Redux.” Louv unveils some of the underlying reasons parents feel the need to “protect” their children from perceived dangers of the outdoors. Fear drives much of our culture and shapes our perceptions, often unrealistically. The parents Louv interviewed said things like “the world is full of crazy people… There’re nuts running loose. People that need to go through years of therapy and need to be incarcerated. They’re out there driving around in cars with guns on their seats. They’re out there.” Louv, while sensitive to the urge to protect our children, debunks many of these inflated perceived threats and argues that the risks to our children’s health — mental, physical and emotional — by keeping them inside far outweigh risks of being outside. “Teach your children to watch for behaviors,” Louv recommends in an add-on section, “Suggestions for Transforming Our Communities,” “not necessarily for strangers. According to family psychologist John Rosemond, “Telling a child to stay away from strangers is relatively ineffective… Instead, children ought to be taught to be on the lookout for specific threatening behaviors and situations.”
Louv blends statistics and studies with the stories of the children, parents and experts he has interviewed to create a vivid, engaging read. I found it difficult to put the book down at times, as I discovered more and more reasons why this issue should be taken seriously, and how it relates directly to my life as a twenty-five year old woman (I don’t even have kids). There is a wide appeal. In an unexpected benefit of reading this book, I found myself revisiting previously forgotten memories from my own childhood: building tree houses in vacant lots using “borrowed” 2x4s and nails, learning to bait a hook, catching frogs in neighbors’ window wells, walking through fields of tall grass with no destination in mind. Louv helps the reader to realize what a formative impact the natural world had on all of us — even those who grew up in an urban environment — and how nature enhances creativity. Some of his personal story is woven into this book, without getting overly-sentimental: we watch as his children learn to fish, and listen as his son, Matthew, poses this question: “Are God and Mother Nature married, or just good friends?”
Richard Louv asks, “Where will our next naturalists come from?” Addressing the trend away from teaching natural history, the drive toward technological advances, and the shrinking demographic of people who support environmental and conservation groups like the Sierra Club (who “look increasingly old and white” to a culturally and ethically diverse youth), he suggests that getting children involved in the conservation movement may be the most logical and essential tactic to sustain their existence and support their campaigns. Kids know more about obscure endangered rainforest creatures across the world than they do about the flora and fauna outside their classroom windows. “To urbanized people,” says Louv, “the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract.”
“We should do everything we can to encourage the incipient movement of what is sometimes called ‘experiential education.’ We should also challenge some of the driving forces behind our current approach to nature, including a loss of respect for nature and the death of natural history in higher education,” explains Louv. School programs that utilize the land around schools and the greening or re-vegetating school lots with native plants have been proven to increase children’s performance in school and attention in the classroom. This type of school, which utilizes green space and incorporates time outdoors into the school day, is the exception to the rule, but according to Louv and other experts, it should be the norm. As should more interaction between environmental organizations, nature preserves and wildlife sanctuaries — and schools.
Parents, educators, students, business professionals, attorneys, healthcare providers, government officials and members of any community will find resources within the pages of this book that guide toward solutions and a bright future.
Last Child in the Woods was, for me, a hopeful book. Yes, the American obesity rate has increased 60 percent in a nine-year span. Yes, suburban sprawl is eating up open space at an alarming rate. Yes, between 2000 and 2003, “spending on ADHD for preschoolers increased 369 percent.” But here, in Louv’s book, is what we can do about it. And we can start today.
Keep up with Richard Louv’s blog here: http://www.childrenandnature.org/blog/
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
Algonquin Books
156512605X
390 pages
THE AFTER-DEATH ROOM: JOURNEY INTO SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM by MICHAEL MCCOLLY
Nonfiction Review for Bookslut by Jessie Tierney
Some may cringe at the thought of reading a long memoir about one man’s journey into the heart of the AIDS pandemic, but The After-Death Room is more than that. HIV-positive journalist Michael McColly travels through South Africa, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Chicago, and Senegal to document the lives of activists, sex workers, and people living with the virus. He also tells his own story, humanizing the disease and making it accessible in an intimate and compassionate way.
Unaware that his trip will eventually spur him to travel through five different countries, Michael packs a box of yoga mats and lands in South Africa, where he teaches yoga at the International AIDS Conference. After an intense encounter with an HIV-positive woman from one of his sessions, McColly decides that he needs to travel around the world to tell the stories of people involved with the AIDS struggle. Along the way, he deals with his own spirituality and sexuality (he is a bisexual man), as he, too, experiences life with HIV. “When I got rid of my belongings,” McColly writes, speaking of his decision to travel against his doctor’s advice, “it wasn’t the things themselves I released, it was me.”
McColly’s involvement in the book sets it apart from other AIDS documentaries, and the fact that he is HIV positive — and struggling with whether to reveal this to the people he encounters — brings the reader deep into the story. His honesty inspires trust in those he speaks with, giving each a distinct voice, instead of presenting them as one block of nameless sufferers. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to realize how important it is to relate to others in order to both heal and live. McColly evokes a strong sense of intuitive connections, mindfulness of the body, and awareness of the implications of touch—or lack thereof. “I am drawn to her body: the deep eye sockets, the black needle stains down her arms, but mostly it is the deep mechanical rise and fall of her breath that upstages the drama of her husband’s account of their life. Each time her chest collapses in its exhale, I wait in sympathetic terror, holding my own breath, thinking that it will be her last ….”
McColly’s careful crafting blends scene and internal observations in a way that moves the vantage point from a feeling in the body to the exterior world, then out to a global perspective, taking the reader with him. Imagery and perception combine to make this not only an important sociological study of multiple struggles (sexuality, AIDS, poverty, healing), but also a literary work. He incorporates facts so that they become a part of the story without losing momentum, allowing the reader to step away from this book with a greater understanding of the scope of the AIDS pandemic. “[Doctor Tuong] tells us that Vietnam is struggling to come to grips with its growing AIDS epidemic. Each month they have more cases, but he has no antiretrovirals to dispense; only those with money and power have access to antiretroviral treatment. Remarkably, he admits that as far as he knows only seven people in the entire country are using the combination therapy I take. I can’t believe it when Tuong tells me. I have to ask him to repeat it. ‘Seven,’ he says.”
Posing poignant and at times painful questions throughout his memoir, McColly challenges the reader to confront complex issues. In an interview of AIDS sufferers in Ho Chi Minh City, he writes, “Ever since sitting down in this café, I’ve found myself trying to hide my health by contracting my body, hunching over, crawling into the black ink scribbles in my notebook. I have to ask myself again and again: Why did you come? Why do this to them? Why show them a future they aren’t allowed to have?”
The book is both disheartening and inspiring as McColly’s journey deepens. In Chennai, India, he interviews a man heading AIDS education for sex workers who says, “We are trying to make the young men … into a cohesive, self-sustaining community. It’s the only way they are going to survive not only this disease but this life.” This becomes a subtle theme through the book: those who become active in helping others find that reaching out gives them a way to cope with the disease. At times, the story is devastating. Multiple viewpoints and approaches toward the treatment of AIDS help to put the struggles of various countries into a very real perspective.
The After-Death Room is a modern portrait of the diverse spectrum of the AIDS landscape. But the ultimate message does not just apply to AIDS. It is universal: the importance of connecting, understanding, loving, and helping others—which, in this world, is harder than ever to realize, is certainly a thing worth living for. In McColly’s words, “[O]ne question came to represent the request that animated this odyssey: for your sake as well as ours, please, we don’t need you to talk about the importance of acting or healing, we need you to act and to heal.”
SHYNESS AND DIGNITY by DAG SOLSTAD
Fiction Review for Bookslut by Jessie Tierney
Similar in theme to Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity confronts ideas of identity and the understanding of self. However, Solstad does this in a more isolated manner as we follow the main character, Elias Rukla, during the course of one day through his long, almost obsessive internal deliberation over his life.
In the school courtyard where he teaches, Elias Rukla’s umbrella fails to open, and in a fit he smashes it over and over against a fountain. Then, to the surprise and horror of on-looking students, he verbally berates a tall blond who “was looking at him in amazement.” Rukla knows that his career is finished: “This was his ultimate downfall. He knew that now he was leaving the Fagerborg school behind him for good and that he would never teach again.” He wanders downtown, brooding over how he will ever tell his wife, Eva, “whom had spread out a bit too much and with whom he had breakfast every morning,” that he has surely lost his job and means of supporting them. It is with this pondering that the novel embarks on a careful, meditative analysis through Rukla’s introspective perception of his world.
Shyness and Dignity relates to the present human condition, using Rukla as a means of accessing the possibility that we are more isolated and alone than we may wish to perceive. An intimate third person storyteller allows us to be very close to Rukla, sharing his meditations while still seeing him from the outside. “‘But I imagine that he [Thomas Mann, a German author whom Rukla admires] might have derived a certain pleasure from describing my wanderings across the floor tonight, in my apartment in Jacob Allas gate, where I’m walking back and forth, plagued by the fact that I am a socially aware individual who no longer has anything to say’, Elias Rukla thought.” This proximity draws the reader nearer to his personal analysis, causing us to ask some of the same existential questions of ourselves.
Part of what draws the reader in is the rhythm of the prose. “It must have been because his love had died. His love had died, and even though he cherished the child they had together more than anything in the world, it did not suffice to make him decide to take the child with him to the USA because then he would also have to take along the child’s mother, and his love was dead. How long had his love been dead? Johan Corneliussen’s love, which had died. How long ago?” Repetitious language creates the methodical pace for the novel, having an almost meditative effect on the reader.
The prose has an elegant simplicity, surprising, considering this is a translation. Dag Solstad is a prominent Norwegian author who has earned such honors as the Nordic Prize for Literature and is the only three-time recipient of the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Award. Shyness and Dignity, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, is his first English-language work, and this translation surely does him justice.
Shyness and Dignity works on a universal level; it is not pigeonholed into Norwegian culture. Its simplicity may feel a bit patronizing at first (Okay, Dag, we get that his love was dead), but as the repeated images play out, the reader experiences a building effect, slowly gaining insight to Elias Rukla’s world through the methodical pattern of his thoughts. Throughout the novel, we begin to gradually realize that in some ways his world is not much unlike our own.
Elias Rukla comes to no ground-breaking conclusions, he simply notes of his current state of affairs “it is dreadful, but there is no going back,” which seems to be no different from the rest of his lonely life. Solstad has touched on a theme that resonates, and has succeeded in publishing a worthwhile read for anyone interested in themes like isolation and who appreciates subtle yet strong prose.