Emergency readiness goes boink: on The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink, is an "epistolary novel". That is, it's told as a series of letters and emails and journals and paperwork and drawings, by or to or concerning 12-year-old Thaddeus, who has been placed in In-School Suspension for the entire second semester of the school year. Thaddeus is the Misunderstood Victim of a Massive Injustice, and he writes primarily to himself, his lawyer uncle Pete, and especially his school principal Frank Cooper, who has never encountered anything like him. He is of course concerned with his own vindication, but he is selfless about it: even in exile, he shares his school improvement (and church improvement) (and scout-troop improvement) schemes, plus his handy educational Thaddeus Fun Facts, and even the official rules of Slug Bug with his persecutors.

Cooper and Pete share their own perspectives, which for some reason aren't always in exact accord. They seem over-worried about discipline forms where the "cause for referral" is a scrawled "HE TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE!", and too little interested in the perspectives of, say,

Inflicting excitement on others: eight observations on Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

1. The two great insights of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham were that monologues are more interesting if your characters move rapidly across a wide and dangerous array of terrain, and that you can tell a compelling story using only 50 different words. Bill Watterson was powefully influenced by the first of those insights, and not at all by the second.

2. Mo, the bully who torments Calvin, later went on to be Donald Trump's Nickname Strategist Timmy Jenkins, as interviewed by Steven Colbert. In kindergarten, of course, he was not normally that articulate, but he already had promise ("Hey twinky, give me a quarter... for the Let Calvin Live Through Recess Fund"). And the self-awareness to answer Calvin's philosophical challenges to his bully role with "Because it's fun".

Potemkin charm and wit: on Balsamic Dreams by Joe Queenan

(Originally written/ posted 2004. One of my favorite of my old reviews, of a book I bottom-lined as "Funny, rude, sometimes right, sometimes insightful ... (T)he first 50 pages are both interesting and a blast. Sadly, it's 200 pages long." The review starts with an extract from Queenan's introduction.)

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”Late in the summer of the Year of Our Lord 2000, I began to suffer from a nagging cough... [it] had me thinking in terms of lung cancer. Confronted by my own mortality, I began to lament all the things I had not yet accomplished with my life.

Cast off like the dorky sweater her mother made her wear: on the Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

(Originally written summer 2006 for a now-defunct website. I'd've written it a bit differently now, as a divorced father of two sons. But I think it holds up well, and my parenting experience strengthens, not weakens, my belief in the book's premises.)

" 3. The advantage of twins is…

a. Having a spare in case one blows out.

b. Having both a control and experimental group to test out your theories on nature versus nurturing, love versus neglect and human parents versus wolf pack.

c. Fooling your neighbors into thinking you’ve mastered the science of teleporting children across the room.”


- from ‘Parental Standardized Aptitude Test’, by Francesco Marciuliano

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Judith Rich Harris’s the Nurture Assumption – a book about why people end up with the personalities they end up with – may well be, in my opinion, the single most brilliant work of scientific argument I’ve ever read. I mean brilliant in the sense of “original”, of “superbly constructed”, of “fun to read”, and, especially, of “persuasive”.

Keeping warped minutes: on Popular Crime by Bill James

While this review will be unwieldy — I'm not sure I've ever reviewed something about which I had so many conflicted things to say — and parts of it will be negative, my basic attitude towards Bill James’s 2011 book Popular Crime is enthusiasm. It is fascinating, insightful, and fun. I recommend it highly.

It is not an easy book to summarize, and later I will take my time helping you through its odd structure. But to start with samples of its topics, my favorite sections include the ones where Bill James, who made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in 2006, argues

* that Lizzy Borden was innocent (she never took an ax and gave her father forty whacks);
* that John F. Kennedy was accidentally killed by a Secret Service agent who was flustered by Oswald’s shots;
* that Sam Sheppard, the kindly doctor-on-the-run who inspired the TV series the Fugitive, in fact hired and collaborated with the killer of his wife;
* and that JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were definitely innocent of her killing, and likely framed by an intruder deliberately trying to ruin the dad’s life.

That would seem an immodest project already, perhaps. More ambitiously, and to varying degrees of success, James