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

On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old, by Parker J. Palmer

Parker Palmer describes an exchange he had with his friend and long-time editor Sheryl Fullerton. She asked him if he was interested in writing another book. His reply, “I don’t have the energy for it. But I’m really enjoying short-form writing—brief essays and a little poetry.” She went on to suggest weaving the essays and poetry into a book. His reply:  “…a book has to be about something. My short pieces have been all over the map.” She went on: “That’s not true….Parker, do you ever read what you write?” Parker: “Of course not. Why should I? I write the stuff. But, OK, I’ll bite. What pray tell, have I been writing about?” Sheryl: “Getting old! That’s what you’ve been writing about. Didn’t you know?”

Thus, the genesis of this little book. As our group read along, we had many criticisms. Some thought the writing was not as good as it should have been. More critiqued the editing. Each of the seven sections of the book has an introduction, a collection of two or three essays, perhaps some poetry, and a conclusion. And the seven sections are preceded by a Prelude and followed by a Postlude! It’s sort of “First I’m gonna tell you what I’ll tell you. Then I’ll tell you. Then I tell you what I told you.”

Interestingly, however, much as many of us found things to criticize, we also found much to admire. There are gems here, some from Palmer himself and some from those whom he quotes, notably Thomas Merton. 

From a commencement address he gave in 2015: “To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success…Everyday, exercise your heart by taking in life’s pains and joys. That kind of exercise will make your heart supple, so that when it breaks—which it surely will—it will break not into a fragment grenade but into a greater capacity for love.”

From his musings on being contemplative: “Catastrophe, too, can be a contemplative path, pitched and perilous as it may be. I’m still on that path, and daily I stay alert for the disillusionment that will reveal the next thing I need to know about myself and/or the world.”

And on how we take on tasks: “As long as we’re wedded to results, we’ll take on smaller and smaller tasks, the only ones that yield results. If we want to live by values like love, truth, and justice—values that will never be fully achieved—‘faithfulness’ is the only standard that will do. When I die, I won’t be asking about the bottom line. I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the way I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could.”

For me, specially, I was much affected by this poem from Parker J. Palmer:

Waving Goodbye from Afar
(for Angie, Ian, Vincent, and John)

One by one, their names have been
exhaled in recent weeks, fading into thin air
on their final breath: Angie, Ian, Vincent, John.

I talked, laughed and worked with them, we
cared about each other. Now they are gone.
No, they do not live on—just watch the world

keep turning in their absence, a tribute here
and there depending on the fame of the fast-
fading name. I’ve always thought it would

be good if a few who loved me sat with me
as I died. Now, as I learn from friends who’ve
taken sudden leave, I’m glad all I can do is

wave goodbye from afar, knowing they can’t
see me. It feels right to offer them an unseen
final salute, seeking no attention, unable to

distract them from a journey each of us must
make alone. It must be a breathless climb, the
kind I’ve made many times in the mountains

of New Mexico. The last thing I wanted there
was someone who just had to talk, when it was
all I could do to climb, to breathe, then stop—

marveling at the view, wondering what’s up top.

— Jeanie Smith

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