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Kathleen C. Engel & Patricia A. McCoy, The Subprime Virus: Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps: The driest and most wonkish account of the current economic crisis I’ve read, with substantial attention given to possible fixes for the broken system—if we have any political appetite for them, which is unclear—instead of much in the way of personality/human interest. This is not a criticism, but it does make for tougher reading. It’s also nicely comprehensive, except that there’s very little on the emerging aspect of the disaster that involved poor recordkeeping and failure to transfer the mortgages, leading to broken gears in the securitizations; I expect that most of the revelations on that came after the book went to press.
Richard Arum & Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses: Sad but great quote: “‘With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evalutes restaurants,’ Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. ‘We ask, “How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?” With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, “Is it safe to eat here?”’” Basically, most college students aren’t improving their analytic or writing skills in the first few years of college, though there are substantial differences based on how elite their colleges are, their level of academic preparedness beforehand, race, and whether their parents went to college. And, it turns out, working off campus is associated with not improving, as is being in a fraternity or sorority, as is studying mostly in groups.
The authors report that coursework, especially in the dominant fields of business and health, rarely requires students to do significant reading or writing, and argue that this prevents them from developing the skills they really need. Students also spend substantially less time studying than they did 20 years ago, even controlling for demographic variables in who goes to college. The blame goes to lots of places: administrations that don’t value teaching, students who don’t know what they want other than to coast through (and may be working a fulltime job at the same time), professors who make minimal demands in order to get good student evaluations, parents more interested in credentialing than in instilling skills or a desire for knowledge—basically, no one has a real incentive to fix things. Depressing, but not clear that you need to read more than the Chronicle summary to get the picture.
Naomi Cahn & June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture: This book was depressing for a different, though related reason: it reminded me just how far any discussion of action towards economic equality is from being politically acceptable in America. The red family model emphasizes early marriage and childbearing within marriage as a means of integration into the larger community, along with penalties for extramarital sex including the burden and stigma of out-of-wedlock births. Unfortunately, early marriage doesn’t work very well when divorce is readily available, and when even evangelicals are having plenty of premarital sex. The blue family model emphasizes waiting for economic security, which works really well for those who can achieve such security (and means their girls are less likely to get pregnant as teens or young adults; public tolerance coincides with private control over reproduction) but leaves out those for whom economic success won’t come at age 27 any more than it did at 20, and also puts fertility at risk even for the lucky ones. As the authors note, economic insecurity has rotted the foundations of heterosexual marriage, but somehow we’re talking about gay marriage. They advocate “pink” and “light blue” and “purple” solutions: focusing on increased access to contraception instead of the divisive topic of abortion, marriage counseling/education, federalism (by which they mean letting each state decide whether gay couples can marry), and increased attention to work/life balance—and that last is the weakest tea of all, only noting that right-wingers want to give employers more flexibility (as if that were the same as giving employees more flexibility) and left-wingers (the few of them left) want more requirements and not really suggesting what the middle ground might be. And of course there is no middle ground, any more than our politicians are going to agree to work together on improving access to contraception. Or, you know, economic equality.
Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever: Mac first came to Ireland in search of the killers of her sister … Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Anyhow, she quickly finds out that she’s a rare sidhe-seer, which means she can see through the glamour cast by Seelie and Unseelie fae who roam around mostly hurting humans; there’s an increasing Unseelie presence that portends bad things for the human race, including sexual threats against Mac specifically (and the implication that similar bad things happened to her sister, who died bloody). Mac likes sex, but (at least in this volume) doesn’t like any of the attractive male prospects she meets, though I have my guesses about which overbearing, violent and violently attractive, rich and powerful guy she will end up with. I largely enjoyed the story, and will probably read more, but one thing annoyed me—the author’s solution to the problem of self-description in a first-person narrative, which is admittedly a serious problem, especially in a book like this. But, is it credible for a narrator to repeatedly say things like “my long blonde hair” and “my full breasts” and “my tanned, slim legs”? Or is that a relevant question? I find it much more hard to suspend disbelief for that than for Unseelie fae. I think it has something to do with adjectives, in that I can easily imagine a first-person narrator explaining that a hairstyle or outfit goes really well with her hair/legs or showcases her breasts, but it’s much harder for me to imagine her reiterating the adjectives so often. Possible that if it continues in the second volume I will give up unless she’s really managed to suck me in with the supernatural invasion plot.
Jim Hines, Goldfish Dreams: Sexual abuse recovery narrative, where going away to college allows the narrator to come to grips with the abuse she faced (and also spend some time freaking out and not coming to grips). The secondary characters largely seemed to have stories of their own as real people do, even if they were set up to perform specific functions in the narrator’s arc; I think my “meh” reaction is simply because there was no f/sf content and thus this is outside my genres.
Richard Arum & Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses: Sad but great quote: “‘With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evalutes restaurants,’ Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. ‘We ask, “How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?” With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, “Is it safe to eat here?”’” Basically, most college students aren’t improving their analytic or writing skills in the first few years of college, though there are substantial differences based on how elite their colleges are, their level of academic preparedness beforehand, race, and whether their parents went to college. And, it turns out, working off campus is associated with not improving, as is being in a fraternity or sorority, as is studying mostly in groups.
The authors report that coursework, especially in the dominant fields of business and health, rarely requires students to do significant reading or writing, and argue that this prevents them from developing the skills they really need. Students also spend substantially less time studying than they did 20 years ago, even controlling for demographic variables in who goes to college. The blame goes to lots of places: administrations that don’t value teaching, students who don’t know what they want other than to coast through (and may be working a fulltime job at the same time), professors who make minimal demands in order to get good student evaluations, parents more interested in credentialing than in instilling skills or a desire for knowledge—basically, no one has a real incentive to fix things. Depressing, but not clear that you need to read more than the Chronicle summary to get the picture.
Naomi Cahn & June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture: This book was depressing for a different, though related reason: it reminded me just how far any discussion of action towards economic equality is from being politically acceptable in America. The red family model emphasizes early marriage and childbearing within marriage as a means of integration into the larger community, along with penalties for extramarital sex including the burden and stigma of out-of-wedlock births. Unfortunately, early marriage doesn’t work very well when divorce is readily available, and when even evangelicals are having plenty of premarital sex. The blue family model emphasizes waiting for economic security, which works really well for those who can achieve such security (and means their girls are less likely to get pregnant as teens or young adults; public tolerance coincides with private control over reproduction) but leaves out those for whom economic success won’t come at age 27 any more than it did at 20, and also puts fertility at risk even for the lucky ones. As the authors note, economic insecurity has rotted the foundations of heterosexual marriage, but somehow we’re talking about gay marriage. They advocate “pink” and “light blue” and “purple” solutions: focusing on increased access to contraception instead of the divisive topic of abortion, marriage counseling/education, federalism (by which they mean letting each state decide whether gay couples can marry), and increased attention to work/life balance—and that last is the weakest tea of all, only noting that right-wingers want to give employers more flexibility (as if that were the same as giving employees more flexibility) and left-wingers (the few of them left) want more requirements and not really suggesting what the middle ground might be. And of course there is no middle ground, any more than our politicians are going to agree to work together on improving access to contraception. Or, you know, economic equality.
Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever: Mac first came to Ireland in search of the killers of her sister … Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Anyhow, she quickly finds out that she’s a rare sidhe-seer, which means she can see through the glamour cast by Seelie and Unseelie fae who roam around mostly hurting humans; there’s an increasing Unseelie presence that portends bad things for the human race, including sexual threats against Mac specifically (and the implication that similar bad things happened to her sister, who died bloody). Mac likes sex, but (at least in this volume) doesn’t like any of the attractive male prospects she meets, though I have my guesses about which overbearing, violent and violently attractive, rich and powerful guy she will end up with. I largely enjoyed the story, and will probably read more, but one thing annoyed me—the author’s solution to the problem of self-description in a first-person narrative, which is admittedly a serious problem, especially in a book like this. But, is it credible for a narrator to repeatedly say things like “my long blonde hair” and “my full breasts” and “my tanned, slim legs”? Or is that a relevant question? I find it much more hard to suspend disbelief for that than for Unseelie fae. I think it has something to do with adjectives, in that I can easily imagine a first-person narrator explaining that a hairstyle or outfit goes really well with her hair/legs or showcases her breasts, but it’s much harder for me to imagine her reiterating the adjectives so often. Possible that if it continues in the second volume I will give up unless she’s really managed to suck me in with the supernatural invasion plot.
Jim Hines, Goldfish Dreams: Sexual abuse recovery narrative, where going away to college allows the narrator to come to grips with the abuse she faced (and also spend some time freaking out and not coming to grips). The secondary characters largely seemed to have stories of their own as real people do, even if they were set up to perform specific functions in the narrator’s arc; I think my “meh” reaction is simply because there was no f/sf content and thus this is outside my genres.