By Steve Rhodes
You’d think a book about a year in the life of Walter Payton High School might merit a cover story in the Tribune book review, but no, it’s not only relegated inside the flimsy little journal of nothingness, it’s relegated to the second half of a review that pairs it with a book about life in a Los Angeles school.
I understand the thinking, but I also understand the lack of imagination; a book inside Payton High – whether good or bad – offers an opportunity to check the clips about clout and the theories about magnet schools to fill out a larger picture. Sometimes, in other words, a book review can be – and should be – more than just a book review.
Instead, we merely have another missed opportunity because two books share a broad (and familiar) method (let’s spend a year inside a school!) but precious little else, resulting in the forced transition of “In Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool: A Year in an American High School, [Elisha] Cooper sets up camp in a lauded Chicago school but shows that even it has distinct pressures.”
Even a high-performing college prep school has pressures? The kids at Payton aren’t all that different than the kids at an L.A. ghetto school after all!
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“Payton is anything but a typical American high school,” reviewer Carolyn Alessio writes. “Choices abound – students can take a seminar in Zulu on Thursdays; others direct their own plays; a prominent author visits.”
The questions schools like this raise in a system like Chicago’s are significant. It would be nice to know if the author addresses them or not – and in either case, the reviewer should. For example, what does it mean for neighborhood schools that lose their most talented and committed students to the magnets? And what sense of community is lost?
“Emily is a soccer star and superb student from Hyde Park; Daniel, president of his class, commutes from the South Side each morning; Diana lives and works in Little Village; and Aisha, a transfer student recently relocated from Cairo, lives in a Lincoln Park condominium.”
Doesn’t this just widen the gaps we want to close? I’ve never been a fan of magnet schools for just this reason. Strong neighborhood schools are a linchpin to community, and they should all offer interesting programs, if not necessarily Zulu.
In other words, is Payton High a symbol of success in the Chicago public school system, or a symbol of a two-class system? (I wonder if the L.A. school featured in the other book has lost its best students to magnet schools . . . )
History Lesson
We all should know by now that the history many of us are taught in school is, basically, propaganda perpetuating national myths. But just what do any of us really know about some of the most basic facts of our country? Tony Horwitz asked himself this question as he went back to study America’s founding, and what he found managed to surprise him – and should us.
It’s not just that, as Andrew Ferguson recounts in his New York Times review, “The Pilgrims probably didn’t eat turkey or pumpkin pie at a Thanksgiving dinner that they didn’t consider a thanksgiving and to which they didn’t invite the natives, who were in any case weakened with disease, which made them vulnerable to looting,” though we should get that through our heads. It’s that “the Pilgrims . . . weren’t the first American settlers fleeing religious persecution; that was the Huguenots. The Pilgrims’ arrival in America was, on balance, a calamity, which is why, nowadays, even Plymoutheans mark an annual ‘Day of Mourning.'”
Horwitz loses me, though, when he writes that “I could chase after facts across early America, uncover hidden or forgotten ‘truths,’ explode fantasies about the country’s founding. But I’d failed to appreciate why these myths persisted. People needed them.”
No. People needed – and still need – the truth. After all, to offer just one small example, we’re in a presidential campaign that once again venerates John F. Kennedy’s presidency even though the record shows it to be a disaster, not to mention the peculiar dynamic that excuses JFK’s torrid White House womanizing while castigating the small potatoes indiscretion of a more media-exposed president, as well as a campaign that has revisited Ronald Reagan’s mythical presidency, which hid a dark reality that doomed millions of Americans to poverty, despair, and in some cases, death.
Myths kill. It’s the truth that sets us free, and it’s truth that should be the stuff that history is made of.
Clinton Time
One of my favorite writers has long been Carol Felsenthal, the best profilist I know. Felsenthal’s work for Chicago magazine, including absolutely compelling examinations of Rod Blagojevich and Donald Rumsfeld, is superb, as is her biography of Katharine Graham. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited her most recent project, Clinton In Exile, a profile of the post-presidency of Bill Clinton.
I’m sad to say to report that it isn’t up to Felsenthal’s usual standards – especially because I know how hard she worked on it. As much as I would like to out of loyalty to Felsenthal, it’s hard to disagree with Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times that panned the book for its “gossip and malice, above and beyond the biographer’s legitimate concerns. Packaged with a particularly hangdog picture of the ex-president on its cover, this book explores loaded subjects like Mr. Clinton’s last-minute pardons, imperiled legacy, flashy new billionaire friends and business connections. It’s a book with chapter headings like ‘It’s Monica, Stupid!’ and ‘Philanderer in Chief.'”
I found the most fascinating sections to be those describing Clinton’s depression and absolute sense of loss, and loss of purpose, after he left the White House, as well as the story, such as it is, behind his charitable work and the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton’s torrid speaking schedule, resistance to sleep and insatiable need for human contact also shine through, but the kind of psychological portrait Felsenthal is usually so good at drawing never quite emerges, and the rehash of what we already know and obsession over Clinton’s rumored post-presidential sex life smack of a tiring and unsubstantiated hit job.
(Slate called the book “often catty, occasionally malicious, and overly reliant on unnamed sources.”)
I can tell you that Felsenthal is much, much better than this, and I can only speculate that the book was published ahead of its time in order to get the most salacious goods out there during the current campaign.
Carol is one of the best, and I look forward to what’s next. This one, though, just didn’t work for me.
Quantum Leap
In May 1968, Arthur Hailey’s Airport led the New York Times’s best-seller list for fiction. This week, by comparison, it’s Hold Tight, in which “The aftermath of a high school kid’s suicide rocks a New Jersey suburb.”
On the non-fiction side, Haim Ginott’s Between Parent and Child led the list in ’68; David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, about a father struggling with his son’s meth addiction, leads the list this week.
Posted on May 6, 2008