Category: Reviews by Marcy Luft

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt

If your child were given an invitation to join a colony living on Mars, would you let her go? What if she begged and pleaded? What if she reassured you that all her friends’ parents were allowing their children to go? What if several well-respected scientists chimed in, saying that it was probably safe, but they weren’t really sure because they hadn’t done any long-term studies about how life on Mars might affect her future growth and development? Would you let her go? Of course not, explains author Jonathan Haidt, in his compelling introduction to The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt goes on to explain that children, of course, were never being sent to colonize Mars, but that we took a comparable gamble with our children’s mental health and social development when we handed them smartphones in the early 2010s. And our children are the ones who have lost.     

Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at NYU, has amassed a staggering amount of research into an absorbing and highly readable book. He argues that the generation born since 1995 are experiencing a mental health crisis, citing alarming statistics about increased loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, and rates of suicide and self-harm.

Although his statistics are terrifying, Haidt’s examination of the cause of this mental health crisis is fascinating. He effectively argues that the linchpin of this mental health epidemic came in the early 2000s, when we became overzealous in the protection of our children in the real world, while simultaneously underprotecting them on the Internet and on social media.  Haidt takes on the role of historian and sociologist as he describes how the ‘play-based childhood’ of the 1980s and prior decades faded away and gave rise to what he calls the ‘phone-based childhood.’ He becomes an anthropologist and psychologist as he explains basic human biological needs for risky play, independence, and rites of passage in order to become fully-realized adults. Haidt closes the book by offering hope and practical suggestions for the rehabilitation of our skewed relationship with technology, but the overall effect of the book is sobering.

The Anxious Generation has spent over a year parked on the NYT bestseller list, and Fareed Zakaria called it the “defining book on the generation that grew up with technology in the palms of their hands.” This book is engrossing, timely, important, and highly recommended for anyone who wants to help the children in their lives develop into mentally healthy, emotionally well-adjusted adults.  

— Marcy Luft

A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

What lurks beneath the surface? This question rears up in every chapter of A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley’s searing reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Updated to 1979 and moved to a thousand-acre farm in northern Iowa, the story starts with Larry, the family patriarch and a king among the farmers in Zebulon County, abruptly deciding to divide his land among his three daughters. Just as Cordelia did in the original play, the youngest daughter, Caroline, expresses doubt about the wisdom of this move and is summarily disinherited. Left to manage the farm are our narrator Ginny and her sister Rose, along with their husbands, the dutiful and hardworking Ty and the onetime musician turned reluctant farmer Pete. 

Smiley’s writing brilliantly captures the beauty of the tranquil landscape and the stoic nature of the farmers who tend it. “A thousand acres. It was that simple….But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck.”

This is a familiar backdrop to our group of readers. We see the rolling fields of corn and neatly planted rows of soy beans Smiley describes daily as we drive even a few minutes outside the city. As the story unfolds, however, we become aware of the poison flowing through the fertile soil. Smiley describes monoculture, use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers, the practice of planting to the very edge of fields with no borders to capture and filter toxic runoff, and large hog confinements – all standard farming practices today that were just starting to appear in 1979.

And just like the land they tend, the stoic, upstanding members of the Cook family hide the poison that flows under the surface of their family dynamic. Bit by bit, Smiley pulls back the facades that hide the true nature of their relationships and interactions over the years, which are yet more toxic than the pesticides and fertilizers that form the foundation of their livelihood.

Just as Shakespeare did in King Lear, Smiley introduces side characters who complicate established relationships and drive the plot forward to its tragic end. Unlike Shakespeare, however, she gives sisters Ginny and Rose a voice and a backstory that make us wonder whether Lear’s coldhearted Goneril and scheming Regan might have had motivations we never saw. Smiley ultimately leaves us with a blistering family portrait and their beautifully-narrated, heartbreaking inability to avoid their own tragic demise. 

— Marcy Luft and Jeanie Smith