Books of Interest

As a new feature in each newsletter issue, we will review books that CEW staff members have found interesting, thought provoking or useful. We invite you to read along with us. Our next newsletter will include reviews of A Jury of her Peers: Women Writers from Ann Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter and A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah.

Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1990

One of the books we occasionally recommend at CEW is Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson. It delivers a message that resonates with women, giving them a way to think about their lives not as straight lines to personal and financial success, but as a series of complex and interwoven stages that add richness to their lives. Bateson writes, “Life is truly an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic.”

Bateson began to explore this idea as a way to make sense of her own life after a revolution in Iran dislocated her and her husband and robbed them of years of work, their papers and their home. Forced to leave with nothing, she struggled to start again and to make sense of the new direction her life had taken. Bateson discovered, and explores in this book, “the value of lifetimes of continual redefinement.”
Bateson expands on this idea of “improvisation and change” in the lives of five women friends, showing us in rich detail the conflicted effects of gender, race, relationships, financial success and personal failure.

Through these five examples of “lives of multiple commitments and multiple beginnings,” Bateson urges us to see that even when we don’t recognize that some new path is part of a larger pattern, we can trust that what we are weaving, through our commitment to embracing change, is a richer and fuller life. But she understands how difficult that change might be. She says, “If change were less frightening, if the risks did not seem so great, far more could be lived. When you watch people damaged by their dependence on continuity, you wonder about the nature of commitment and the need for a new and more fluid way to view the future.”

In our current economic reality that pushes many people unwillingly toward the edge of personal and financial crisis, it may seem paradoxical to be discussing value not in continuity and safety, but in risk and change. But if we step back from our immediate fears and needs, and are willing to look long, Bateson’s book, although almost twenty years old now, is still an excellent guide for modern times. What is ultimately appealing about this book is the realization that the life we create for ourselves, and how we define the success of that life, is really, wholly in our hands. Eilisha Dermont

The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation by Marian Wright Edelman.
New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, spoke at the University of Michigan’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Symposium about The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small, her recent book calling for “charting a course for the next generation.” While Edelman’s focus is on children, improving women’s lives has a positive impact on the lives of children as well, she notes.

The book includes a series of letters to groups Edelman considers essential to improving the lives of children in the U.S. and the world, ranging from parents and educators to national leaders and citizens. Early in the book she states her concern that “our nation and world have…become less safe, less just, more precarious and balkanized,” resulting in negative effects on children’s lives.

Edelman presents a frightening overview of a single, typical day in the lives of American children, with four children killed by abuse or neglect and 3,477 children arrested. Much of the book refers to what she has called the “cradle to prison pipeline” affecting poor children, especially poor children of color. She points to the child welfare system (foster care), lack of maternal and child health care, underserved schools, and an increasing criminalization of children’s behaviors as contributors to this pipeline.

As Edelman calls us to action, she compares America to a wealthy family with six children, of whom only five are fed, clothed, sent to good schools with after-school enrichment opportunities, and provided with good medical care and abundant love. She describes the sixth child as cold, hungry, neglected, often ill, and falling behind in school. Edelman urges a reprioritization of U.S. commitments, with children’s welfare at the top.

The Sea is So Wide… combines data on issues ranging from pregnancy and childbirth risks to educational opportunities for poor children with a faith-based perspective grounded in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Edelman’s vision for the future draws on her many years of research and work as a children’s advocate, her personal perspectives on raising children and a belief in our society’s responsibility to care for all. Jeanne Miller