Title: Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems Authors: Williams D. Eggers and Donald F. Kettl ISBN: 9781647825119 Pages: 289 pages Publisher/Date: Harvard Business Review Press, c2023 Deloitte Services LP and Donald F. Kettl
The thesis of this book is simple: governments at all levels can more effectively tackle society’s toughest challenges by collaborating with bridgebuilders who bring together different parts of government and tap into other sectors of society. (1)
I found myself harkening back to my nonprofit management classes in grad school where we broached these concepts of wicked ideas, private/public partnerships, and silos and stakeholders. Obviously intended first for classroom use, the second appendix “How to Teach This” includes takeaways, classic reading suggestions, case examples, and discussion questions. I think most individuals who are interested in politics, social issues, or public service would still glean some information and be much more invested than if they had to read some of the drier, more academic texts that I read in school. An easily accessible read, ten key strategies are presented in the first chapter that bridgebuilders can use to “transform governance from hierarchy to networks, from authority to collaboration, from process to mission, and from fuzzy responsibility to accountability for results.” (6) The subsequent chapters are filled with examples of people who have enacted each of these key strategies successfully, ranging across the world, through time (historical like the Manhattan Project and relatively new efforts implemented in fighting COVID-19), and from hyper local to internationally collaboratively. Some will be very recognizable like September 11th responses and the attempt to eradicate measles, but others like EARN Maryland or Mobile Loaves and Fishes out of Atlanta, Georgia are relatively unknown outside of their service area. Each chapter ends with a list of ten ways bridgebuilders can implement the key strategies, including the presented examples to help with remembering, recognizing, and relating the concepts.
The book was brought to my attention by a nonprofit book club originally affiliated with a non-profit promoting bi-partisan collaboration.
This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. Nonfiction Monday was originally started in 2007 by Anastasia Suen and became a weekly kidlitosphere round-up with a different blogger hosting the round-up each week. It was moved to a central location and then migrated to it’s current website to avoid ads in October 2018. The blog appears to now be run almost exclusively by Anastasia Suen.
Title: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted Author: Suleika Jaouad ISBN: 9780399588587 Pages: 348 pages Publisher/Date: Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, c2021.
“On my last morning in New York, lemon-colored light filtered in through the kitchen as I made coffee, the angry bleats of taxis and sighs of buses down below faintly audible. I tiptoed into the bedroom, collecting a few last articles of clothing and shoving them into my suitcase. As I zipped it closed, I looked over at Will’s lanky figure tangled in sheets, his face angelic with sleep. He looked so peaceful lying there that I didn’t want to wake him. A childhood spent on the move had made me weary of goodbyes. On my way out, I left a note on his shoes saying. Thanks for the unexpected fun. Inshallah, our paths will cross again someday.” (10)
Little did Suleika Jaouad know how predictive those words would be of what was supposed to be a chance meeting outside a party waiting for a taxi. Just days before her departure from New York to Paris for a paralegal position, she meets Will, who plays a unenviable role in her life after she discovers in Paris, at the age of almost twenty-three, that she has leukemia with a 35 percent chance of survival. Loosing her job, her apartment, and her independence, she travels back to New York and begins chronicling her struggles for The New York Times. While their relationship is inextricably linked to her diagnosis, it also isn’t the defining attribute of her story, as she struggles to regain the momentum that her life held prior to her illness and sets off on a 100-day, 15,000 mile road trip across country to meet the people who reached out to her in empathy, sympathy, and understanding. This memoir is about her struggles with guilt, resentment, sickness, loneliness, grief, and hope.
With the book release coinciding with the release of the movie Nomadland (based on a book by the same name) and the rise of the telework options, the appeal of the open road has never been stronger. But although a third of the book is about her travels across country, this should not be confused with a travelogue like Eat Pray Love or Wild. Instead, it’s about a person finding the courage to start over, start anew, and decide what she wants to keep and discard from what was left of her old thoughts and practices. “Before my diagnosis, the phrase “carpe diem” had always struck me as cliché, something you heard in that sappy Robin Williams movie or in college graduation speeches. Now, as the transplant neared, each day felt like a carpe diem countdown. I felt a need to make the most out of every single thing I did. Every day, every hour, was invaluable and not to be wasted.” (114) What no one talks about though is when the countdown reaches it’s end, and your still here, what do you do after? How do you keep going? Suleika is faced with those questions and more.
A decade ago, I read Hate List by Jennifer Brown, a debut novel which blew me away and conveyed the shifting and conflicting feelings of multiple characters in a fictionalized account of the aftermath of a school shooting. While the subject matter is very different, the two are similar in their skillful rendering of the multiple emotions and viewpoints. Readers can’t help but empathize with both Suleika, who is forced to give up so much at such a young, promising age, and her parents, Will, and other caregivers who exhaustingly try to provide what she needs while still maintaining their own sanity and strength. Suleika recognizes in hindsight the demands that her illness placed on everyone and the times she fell short in her appreciation of their care. However, she also struggles with defining herself separate from her illness, something she was never given the chance to do and which became more and more difficult in a relationship so rooted in the changes the illness had wrought on her. Readers come away with a deep admiration for Will’s selflessness, but also Suleika’s recognition (even if it is sometimes after the fact) of the trials and impact her relationship had on both of them
Readers will question her actions as much as Suleika does, but I think most will come to the similar conclusion that while she made them under extreme pressure, she did not make them in haste. She writes, reflects, and agonizes over decisions post illness in a way that is not conveyed in her description of pre-illness, possibly because she by then recognizes the weight they hold. Could things have turned out differently with different decisions? Most definitely. But the haste and ease and free-spirt of youth is harshly contrasted against the starker and bleaker time when her life is on the line and mortality is much more evident and pressing.
While Suleika’s illness is horrible, her wonder lust and resilience is enviable, and anyone struggling with their own hardships, conducting their own soul-searching, facing a similar situation of mortality in either themselves or in others, or simply wondering where life is taking them, should read this book and appreciate the thought-provoking reflection and introspection it provides.
This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. Take a look at what everyone else is reading in nonfiction this week.
Title: Encoding Space: Shaping Learning Environments That Unlock Human Potential Author: Brian Mathews and LeighAnn Soistmann Pages: 175 pages ISBN: 9780838988251 Publisher/Date: Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, c2016.
This review is longer than most as I’ve quoted heavily from the book in order to remember some of the concepts presented. Possibly more note taking then actual review, if you’d like to preview more American Libraries Magazine printed an excerpt last year that prompted my interest in the title.
Can we create environments that inspire people to be more creative, collaborative, reflective, or engaged?
As libraries shape-shift in response to digital migration and other seismic changes, our spaces have emerged as experimental landscapes fostering personal growth and multimodal expression. Our buildings are active laboratories for human progress.
Our goal is to create opportunities for people to engage with multiple streams of information and data and to interact with each other in new and different ways. We want them to learn to break down complex problems and transfer skills, tools, concepts, and mind-sets across many different situations. (12)
Using research from studies from the marketing, retail, and psychology industries, as well as his own observations, Brian Mathews provides some aspirational and inspirational food for thought for librarians. Although written four years ago, it’s an eerily timely read as post-pandemic libraries are struggling to regain their footing in their communities after having to close their doors and reimagine their contributions.
Some of the aspects of design that he advocates for are not new, such as providing transitional spaces, adaptable furniture, and focusing on libraries finding their offered value “beyond the outputs they enable.” (23) His urging to “Anticipate needs – don’t just meet them.” (62) seems a little trite by today’s standards, as we find ourselves adapting to nothing anyone could anticipate. I also disagree with his assertion that “The goal of assessment should be to find more questions, not just answers.” (62) I understand his intent with that statement, that we should always consider the implications of our findings might impact other aspects and the pursuit of knowledge should never stop. However, as a manager and a community collaborator, there are times when I need answers, and regardless of the good intentions, more questions can slow down the process of moving forward.
These points do serve as a good reminder that we need to continuously think outside the box when encountering challenges. For instance, my library has been without internet the last two days. This not being my weekend to work, I just found out about it on Sunday night. My suggestion is that if it’s still down Monday morning, we utilize one of our hotspots to provide internet to at least the staff stations, and idealistically to the public stations as well. Mathews is encouraging this pattern of brainstorming and evolution in patrons and sees libraries as an instigator, an enabler, and a satisfier of patron curiosity.
The critical concept is that providing spaces, collections, and services is not enough. […] We embrace an active role in shaping the program, stimulating the activities, and guiding productive outcomes. (93)
“A shift from transactional mind-set to one that aims to be transformative. […] I’m more interested in a broader mission: improving well-being. Can we use our building to enhance people’s lives? […] Just as gyms advocate for fitness and provide pathways to a healthy lifestyle, libraries can promote personal and professional development and offer the means to cultivate curiosity and intellectual growth.” (114)
“Consider ways that you can expand people’s capabilities instead of just aiming to satisfy some of their needs.” (116)
“It is essential to build environments that are learner-initiated and learner-directed.” (126)
“People go to libraries for new encounters – new people, new ideas, new technologies, new directions, new possibilities. But I think there is also something subconscious happening. We go to libraries to become better versions of ourselves. […] We go to grow.” (139)
Libraries sure are trying to encourage that “grow” mentality. I’m thinking of all those mission statements that libraries use to expose values like imagine, engage, educate, entertain, inspire, etc. Mathews offers up as conversation starters four transitions that he encourages libraries undertake in order to meet those goals.
From Third Place to Magnet Place: The commonly held metaphor that equates libraries, parks, coffee shops, and bars as third places, spaces between work and home where people congregate. “Space becomes a place when it rises above being a mere utility. Places have social and personal significance. They mean something to us. […] It is through the process of accruing experiences that a space transforms into a place.” (17) Instead of being a “third place”, which Mathews argues doesn’t convey a sense of importance, he encourages us to think of libraries as a “magnet place,” where people can be drawn together, learn from each other, and attract and satisfy our sense of belonging.
From Commons to Community: Instead of focusing on the stuff that the library offers (the buildings, the bells and whistles, the technology, etc.) libraries should focus on the substance, the people who use us, and the state and shared experiences we encourage.
From Transactions to Transformations: In our data driven society, I think this will be one of the hardest for most professions. As quoted above, the previous trend shifted our thinking to quantify everything we could, from check outs to building visits, number of reference questions and program attendance. Now, as he quotes Scott Bennett “It’s not about providing materials (books, databases at your service) but about structuring motive and meaning to nurture the young.” (115) And while we attempt to act towards resetting the way we are evaluated, our community members may still see declining qualitative data as a sign that we need to “fix” something, when really what we are doing is changing our focus to meet the community’s needs. “If our focus is only on service then it restricts the interactions we can create. A service orientation positions us as a commodity rather than a catalyst. It keeps us busy, but passive.” (116)
From User-Centered to Learner-Centered: This is the transition that is the most academic library focused. His experience with academic libraries means that his assertions that people “visit libraries because they want to make a change” or “become better versions of ourselves” (139) skews heavily towards students pursuing degrees, information, or completion of homework. There are many people who visit my public library to print, check email, or get the latest best seller, none of which go towards bettering themselves but is more in line with completing a task or seeking an escape. Our best attended events pre-pandemic were those that were purely entertainment, such as live music performances or popular author visits. Mathews addresses that idea by encouraging libraries to learn from startups and offer a “wide range of specialized services” instead of “swapping out stacks for books for rows of computers, groups of tables, and soft seating [indicating] we’re becoming vulnerable and remaining passive.” (118)
As much as I want to whole-heartedly subscribe to Mathews’ philosophy of giving the people what they want, of enabling collaborations, provoking invention, and currying knowledge to the masses, he only briefly recognizes the very real concerns that a lot of librarians have regarding their future stability in the community. As we move forward, there is value in determining how best we can serve the community, but in this highly polarized environment we also, I think, must recognize and resign ourselves to the fact that limited resources mean we can’t serve every need.
The biggest takeaway from this book is how Mathews encourages a reimagining and a rethinking of the services we offer and the way we engage our patrons and the general public. I actually took a picture of this quote for future reference.
“We should be cautious when saying that libraries are about more than just books. Instead, I have been saying that we’re all about books and so much more. Personally, I think it is a better strategy to build upon our past, rather than dismiss it. Books remain a powerful currency. They represent knowledge, and we should continue to celebrate what they symbolize, even if it means more of them are being published digitally. This keeps us grounded in the ideals of reading and thinking. We can build other layers upon that foundation, but always honor the core. (151)
Mathews outlines four settings that I think can directly apply to libraries, both now and in the future, as they move forward in pursuit of their and their community’s goals.
Knowledge Showrooms: Stimulating environments designed to celebrate intellectual and creative endeavors. Examples include the World’s Fair, but I likened it to a Apple Store or a car dealership/showroom, where you can test out the equipment, see a demo, and perhaps borrow something for a few weeks.
Knowledge Studios: A collection of offices, labs, and service centers bringing together diverse projects. I likened this to maker spaces as they currently exist at many libraries, where you can work around and with people to develop something new and share information.
Knowledge Boutiques: Offers specialized services tailored to specific audiences, providing personalized assistance. Mathews uses the examples of data consultants and grant writers, but I see a public library offering this as technology one-on-ones or immediate assistance with accessing our databases, printing, or editing/creating a document.
Knowledge Salons: Hubs for intellectual gatherings and spaces that spark curiosity. Libraries encourage patrons to attend a lecture or experience an immersive exhibit, this style of learning can be seen at TED talks and conferences, although I get the impression that Mathews is hoping for a more interactive style in the future, like a focus group where people can teach and talk as well as learn and listen.
As I prepare to present on our minimalistic maker space practices (we don’t have one, but we use circulating kits to provide equipment to patrons), it’s interesting to note just how well libraries are already achieving these settings, but it also prompts new thought about what else we can do. And that seems to be the primary focus of this book, is asking the hard questions of “now what?” and not only “where are we headed” but also “where should we be headed?”. Concrete suggestions on how librarians can change their own way of thinking (and by extension the public’s view of them and their experience with the space/place) help start that process. In another passage his thoughtful suggestions on merchandising technology tools provide something that library staff can immediately implement.
I’m surprised that I want to buy a copy for myself as a reminder to continue to question and reevaluate our frame of reference and way of thinking. I recommend this book to anyone who is reevaluating their own library’s focus and initiatives and need to jump start a marketing, renovation, or strategic plan. I think paired with either Simon Sinek’s Start With Why or books on design thinking (full disclosure: very few of which I’ve read at this point but I used the concept with a former employer’s remodel project), it can be used to spark conversation between change/decision makers and inspire a rethink of community and patron engagement. Ideas presented in this book should be allowed to percolate and stew and be revisited. Who knows? Maybe in the process, we’ll unlock not only patron potential, but also a new library potential.
Title: Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing Author: Olga Mecking ISBN: 9780358395317 Pages: 250 pages Publisher/Date: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, c2020.
Many people have asked me, what does niksen mean? Do I do nothing when I browse Facebook? When I sit on my couch and worry about my children? When I’m thinking about an article I want to write? When I meditate? The answer is no. You might call those things nothing, but in reality, they are not. These things are not niksen. To do niks does not mean to work, to perform emotional labor, or to be mindful. (6)
Olga Mecking ends up using synonyms and the words of others to define the concept of niksen, or — as this slim book is subtitled — “the Dutch art of doing nothing.” She quotes Elise de Bres’ explanation of lanterfanten, in that “you can just do as you please and there is no aim in whatever you do.” Another synonym is luieren, which she quotes a Dutch online dictionary as defining as “to consciously do nothing or not very much.” (28) While Mecking also mentions other similar movements, such as mindfulness and zen, she’s adamant that this is different because niksen is not meant to promote self-reflection, but rather a feeling of zoning out or comfort. Mecking repeatedly uses imagery like sitting on a coach with a cup of coffee or watching a sunset.
The minimalist presentation on the cover and small size of the book reminds me of Marie Kondo’s newest Joy at Work or The Happiness Institute series by Meik Wiking and is likely an intentional allusion that we’ve been seeing a lot of with lifestyle books. Think of Adam Grant’s books or the similarly titled Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee published ironically at the start of the pandemic and 2020’s stay at home orders. After beginning with a brief study of some of those recent movements that encourage self-awareness, slowing down, and focusing on the moment, Mecking spends each chapter focusing on a question or feature of niksen, including the Dutch culture, the difficulties of niksen, the biological benefits of niksen, tips on how to incorporate the practice in your own life, and finally but recognizably conversely, incidents when niksen might not be right for you. She digressed topics several times and quoted so extensively from “experts” and other sources that her bibliography was 16 pages long. While I appreciated her thoroughness and will likely seek out some of the books mentioned (Tony Crabbe’s Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much for one peaked my curiosity), it read more like a conversational thesis rather than a presentation of unique ideas. If you are looking for a how to guide, this is not it, as Mecking at one point admits there is not right way to do nothing and in fact that it might not work for everyone.
I think the last chapter is one of the more surprising but also one of the more beneficial to the book. Unlike most movements, Mecking recognizes that niksen won’t be for everyone, especially for those who are depressed and might require a reason to get moving, when doing nothing could get you in trouble, and if slowing down just doesn’t suit your lifestyle and personal preferences. I admit I might be one of those people, who has struggled during this pandemic to slow down and who feels the guilt that Mecking mentions early in her book that sometimes creeps in when we take time to slow down and do nothing. She encourages being unapologetic and owning the fact that you are “doing nothing” instead of compounding the stress that never ending busyness of most cultures, especially American, but there is little advice in how to do that.
However, I also recognize the benefits I experience when I do stop and smell the roses, gaze across the water at the beach, or simply go for a walk by myself. And that’s a point that Mecking tries to repeatedly make, that “doing nothing” will look different to people. For some, it will be literally sitting on the couch staring out the window or at a wall and loosing yourself not in your thoughts but in just being. For others, it will be coloring or walking or listening to music. It doesn’t even require solitude, as Mecking mentions having a niksen party where people are encouraged to not fill the silence that can naturally occur in a conversation. I think I most connected with equating niksen with the feeling of coziness and comfort, of crawling into fresh sheets and listening to the birds or staring at a fireplace without thinking about anything. Whether that’s the right interpretation doesn’t seem to matter too much to Mecking.
I’m going to end this review with a second quote from the book:
Many people get caught up in an almost reckless and stressful pursuit of happiness. I recommend that instead we strive toward something the Dutch do very well: contentment. They are happy, but not abundantly or extraordinarily so. Their happiness is generally more subdued, quieter. In fact, it’s contentment that comes from them having ample free time, feeling like appreciated members of a community, and knowing they have a stable support network to fall back on should disaster strike, for instance in the form of sickness or unemployment. […]
Niksen gives us time to reflect, tune out, and think a little about what we like and don’t like doing with our time. Niksen gives our lives meaning because it prioritizes what is important to us and encourages us to decide how we want to participate in society. (199-200)
I think, especially during the pandemic, we need to give ourselves that permission to sit and find contentment in whatever way fits our personality, our lifestyle, and ourselves and just…. be. In a way that is unrelated and untied to our profession, our productivity, or other people’s perceptions. For some people, this book will give you that permission. For others, it will spark skepticism instead of the acceptance that they might have been looking for. Mecking recognizes that, and doesn’t try to convince you otherwise.
Title: The Year of Less
Author: Cait Flanders
ISBN: 9781401954871
Pages: 189 pages
Publisher/Date: Hay House, Inc., c2018.
“If I was only saving up to 10 percent of my income, where was the rest of my money going? Why was I continually making excuses for my spending? Did I really need 90 percent of my income or could I live on less? I had been asking myself similar questions at the end of every month for 12 months in a row, and I still didn’t know the answers. All I knew was that I seemingly had everything I wanted in my home, in my career, and in my life, and it never felt like enough. I was never satisfied. I always wanted more. But since more of anything wasn’t filling me up, maybe it was time to challenge myself to go after less. (xviii)
By her late twenties, Cait Flanders had paid off her nearly $30,000 of debt, but she was still having trouble finding happiness. So rather than trying to buy it, Flanders goes the route of “less is more” in search of happiness. She declutters her apartment, donating 70 percent of her belongings, institutes a buying ban that only allows purchasing consumables, and even at one point disallows mindless television consumption. She offers advice to others who want to follow her lead in finding joy without the overly promoted consumer culture that dominates today.
Reading this book during a pandemic and stay at home orders resulted in what probably isn’t a typical reaction. I found myself in a position where I along with most of the population were in a forced position of accepting less instead of intentionally pursuing less. We weren’t buying things because we weren’t doing anything or going anywhere and we were worried about spending too much, not because of a self-imposed challenge in an effort to better ourselves.
Instead of coming across as a self-help book, Flanders writing style mimics that of a memoir. We find out how she became absorbed by debt and alcoholism in her earlier years and she expounds repeatedly on her journey to do away with both vices over the course of the previous years. Her annual challenges, although more intentional and self-beneficial, reminded me of the social experiments of A.J. Jacobs. He “lived Biblically” for a year, Flanders lost 30 lbs. Jacobs read the encyclopedia, Flanders paid off her credit card debt. Jacobs goes around thanking everyone and Flanders stops buying anything and starts getting ride of everything. Flanders mentions Marie Kondo’s famous The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published after she started her experiment, but by the time this book has published the idea of minimalism is not new. She borrows heavily from others, quoting concepts from several now famous TED Talks, like Brené Brown’s “Listening to Shame” (guilt equals “I did something bad” and shame equals “I am bad”), Simon Sinek’s “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (find your why), and Andy Puddicombe “All It Takes is 10 Mindful Minutes” (change the way you experience/perceive life). There are other books that also discuss giving things up in pursuit of happiness, including The Me Without by Jacqueline Raposo, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, and The More of Less by Joshua Becker to name only a few (none of these I’ve read, but they were some of many listed on websites as books about minimalism).
By the end of the book, Flanders has gotten rid of between 75 and 80 percent of her belongings, saved 31% of her income, spent almost 20% on travel, and spent the remaining 50% on expenses, quit her job, cut down drastically on her media consumption, and started toying with the idea of homesteading and “simple living” practices. Was she successful? She certainly seems to think so. But was she successful in relaying the source and steps towards happiness in a manner that others could follow? That seems more debatable. Most of the book talks about what happened in her life not only during the year but also what previous life events led her to the state where she feels the need to get rid of everything. Some of her successes, such as finding a new job, seem less tied to her new found “less is more” philosophy and more tied to a belief that now she deserves happiness. She finds that happiness in pursuing more meaning in the stuff she did have, including relationships, travel, and career. While I agree with her that you can get more done when you cut out television spending 1/3 of the month watching television, that wasn’t tied to her shopping freeze. Her television binge began as a result of her parent’s divorce, and while cutting it out was tied into the book as part of the mindless consumerism she was trying to cut out of her life, it seemed like a detraction from the ultimate goal of the book. While watching television mindlessly probably doesn’t add to your life goals, it seemed like it – along with her other actions – were accomplished cold turkey. She simply stopped, which I don’t think is going to be solid advice for everyone trying to replicate the experience.
I was curious what other details or advice her blog offered (and how much of the book’s content was original versus already in her blog), only to discover that she’d decided less than a year after the book was published to “retire” her personal blog, deleting almost every post she’d ever written. The website that she totes at the back of her book as a “community” where you can “share your story” is still functional, but it encourages readers who make it there to search for the hashtag, which is primarily photos of her book in various settings. I don’t see any interaction between “community” members and little in the way of encouragement or aids.
Speaking as someone who has cut out television for over five years (no Netflix, no Hulu, no Disney+), dropping a form of consumerism does not lead to instant enlightenment after a certain amount of time, like Flanders seems to suggest in her “how I …” subtitle. You still may find things that mindlessly fill the void, like Internet or food. However, if you are conscious about your decision making, as Flanders recommends but gives no advice on achieving, then you may find the time to pursue the life you really want. While that state of satisfaction might take different forms for different people, readers will have to look elsewhere for a complete road map on how to get there. This book allows readers the travelogue of Flanders’ success, and that may be enough inspire some people to one day add that accomplishment to their bucket list.
This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. Take a look at what everyone else is reading in nonfiction this week.
Title: Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
Author: Stuart Brown, M.D., with Christopher Vaughan founder of the National Institute for Play
ISBN: 9781583333334
Pages: 229 pages
Publisher/Date: Avery, a member of the Penguins Group Inc., c2009.
Far from standing in opposition to each other, play and work are mutually supportive. […] We need newness of play, its sense of flow, and being in the moment. We need the sense of discovery and liveliness that it provides. We also need the purpose of work, the economic stability it offers, the sense that we are doing service for others, that we are needed and integrated into our world. (126)
I first became aware of this book from a webinar Bringing Play to Adult Services Programming: It’s Not Just for Kids hosted by Library Journal in October. It was surprising to me that this book was 10 years old, as we’re facing the same questions it poses almost a decade later. Brown asserts “The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships and being a creative, innovative person.” (6) Some libraries in pursuit of play are conducting Nerf wars, coloring (remember that craze), board game gatherings, and “Recess” programs for adults, allowing them the chance to rediscover and recapture that innocence of doing something because you want to have fun. My library recently put out a community puzzle, and it’s lovely to see people who pass by, then come back and find one piece, then two, then inevitably sit down and work on it diligently for five or ten minutes (or something longer).
Brown lists seven priorities of play
Apparent purposeless — no apparent survival value
Voluntary — not obligatory or required by duty
Inherent attraction — fun, makes you feel good, exciting, and cure for boredom
Freedom from time — so fully engages us that we loose sense of time
Diminished consciousness of self — fully in the moment and not worry about ourselves
Improvisational potential — open to chance
Continuation desire — a desire to keep doing it and when it’s over to do it again
I’ve “attached” the presentation slides and my (somewhat incomplete) notes to this post so you too can hopefully have the “light bulb” moment I had when listening to this webinar. What I did not realize is that this is a book that cannot, and should not, be read quickly. Take notes and take breaks, because several months after reading this book and “attending” the webinar, I don’t remember the specifics about his theories or the studies that were cited.
However, I do remember how the webinar and the book made me feel afterwards. It made me stop and think about what we as libraries are doing to promote these priorities. Do-It-Yourself events where participants learn a craft are a start, but how can we do more? We bring in speakers and presenters on a variety of topics, but the musical acts bring the biggest crowds. Our scavenger hunt had over 50 participants last summer, and there was no prize. What are you offering adults for a chance to have fun, engage in a passion or hobby, and encourage a desire to keep doing it? We advocate for hands on learning and active events for youth, but then most of the adult programs are sit-down and listen. How do we change that? Do we need to? How do you promote play?
Title: Rise: How a House Built a Family
Author: Cara Brookins
ISBN: 9781250095664
Pages: 310 pages
Publisher/Date: St. Martin’s Press, c2017
Pouring the house’s footing had been a wake-up call. Not only was the project a million times more difficult than I had imagined, but it was a mere metaphor for what I really needed to do. I had fooled myself into believing that building a physical house was the same as rebuilding our family. While we might still use the physical build to accomplish the personal one, they were two distinctly different creatures and required individual diets. I felt enormously out of my league in both cases, like I’d adopted a Saint Bernard and an elephant. (92-93)
Cara Brookins and her four children suffered from her marriages, first to a man suffering from delusions and schizophrenia and then to an abuser. Both were scary in their own right, leaving everyone in the family, including the dog, jumping at shadows, looking behind their shoulders, and checking the locks on their doors. Intent on making new memories and helping her kids and herself, Cara pursues a piece of land, a construction loan, and a nine month timeline to build a new house, and hopefully a new home for her family. With no experience, knowledge, or free-time due to school, work, and chores, even they realize the impossible task they have created for themselves.
Even though I laughed over the image of the kids and me as a construction team, I liked the idea a lot. Sure, it was a little nuts, but it was the first workable plan I’d come up with that fit our limited finances. We could do it. I knew we could. Building a house would prove we were strong. It would prove that despite my stupidity in staying with idiots for so long, I was still intelligent. It would prove so many things–most of all that we were alive. (22)
Several of the reviews mention that Cara embarked on this effort due to financial necessity, but if that was mentioned I didn’t catch it. Instead, she stresses repeatedly the need for a safe harbor, a place where ghosts wouldn’t plague their fragile state of mind. In alternating chapters, she jumps from flashbacks focusing on two of her unsuccessful marriages (briefly touching upon her first marriage to an unnamed high school sweetheart) to an accounting of the nine months it took to raise the house from nothing. The flashbacks are graphically detailed, and the fear the whole family felt is palpable when they are chased in a car by the schizophrenic ex-husband and their dog is abused when left alone at the house. It’s psychological warfare, whereas the third husband is physically abusive towards Cara.
The actual build is composed of delays, setbacks, and uncertainties. Things get slightly repetitive, and the addition of pictures and diagrams might have aided in the explanation of how the walls were raise, the pipes were laid, or the electric wires were strung. That was when I felt most invested in that part of the story, like when she discusses how she rationalized the choice of piping, or what they had to do to make the waterlogged wood work. The enterprise began in 2009, when YouTube was in its infancy and there were no smart phones, which makes it all the more impressive.
It’s impossible to not be awed by her tenacity, but I do wonder about the children, who Cara frankly admits do not get to experience a true childhood during that time frame as they slog through mud, slinging studs and sand around. There are benefits in their pursuit, as they all gain valuable skills and confidence and come together as a family. For those who might be inspired to follow her pursuit, she might have included a timeline or list of resources. I’m a huge fan of triumphant underdog stories, and while it does leave me wondering what I could accomplish if I committed to a goal like Cara and her family, I certainly don’t have the confidence (or is it naivety?) to attempt it by myself.
Title: Tetris: The Games People Play
Author/Illustrator: Box Brown
ISBN: 9781626723153
Pages: 253 pages
Publisher/Date: First Second, c2016
Alexey believed that games were the perfect confluence of humanity and technology. Games model the human experience, not just physically but mentally and emotionally. Puzzles are metaphors for thoughts. Games aren’t just an escape. Puzzles reflect society. Games reflect patterns of thinking. Emotions. Games can model consciousness. Games are facets of humanity working together. There is a challenge. A reward, discovery, frustration, closure. (67-69)
An unscheduled surge of interest seems to have arisen regarding the game Tetris, as this book and The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman have been published in the last year detailing the history of the game. It’s not a major anniversary year for the game, first released back in 1984, which seems to place this fluke as purely coincidence. With neon yellow, black, and white illustrations, Brown begins with game creator Alexey Pajitnov, teleports readers back in time to the cave man to cover a very brief evolution of the game, then focuses in on the history of Nintendo before finally returning to the main story. It takes the first hundred pages to cover the creation of the game, and readers are fleetingly introduced to a number of key players. By the time readers realize this though, they have already forgotten most of the names and identities as rights to the game are sold and transferred by multiple companies, some owned by the same people. It’s a shell game of international proportions, involving bidding wars and Soviet subterfuge. It would have been extremely helpful to have a graphic at some point in the book that related the people involved to each other and that could be referred to throughout the reading. There are few details in terms of how much money was involved, the specifics of the contracts, or the timeline, which leaves the whole account reminiscent of a person watching an unfamiliar sport: all the characters are there, but you wonder just who you are supposed to be hoping to win.
Too convoluted in its telling with very few details make this an unmemorable read. Unless you have a high interest or familiarity with the business workings of video games in the 1980s, most readers will be unable to sufficiently summarize what they read or what went down. I don’t feel I came away with any additional knowledge of the creation of the game Tetris after reading this book then I had prior to starting the book.
Title: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
ISBN: 9781594634710
Pages: 276 pages
Publisher/Date: Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, c2015.
There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant? (pg. 259)
About halfway through the book, Elizabeth Gilbert summarizes her entire book in just two sentences: “The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust – and those elements are universally accessible. Which doesn’t mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.” (158) Disregard all the other distractions, excuses, and doubts, and just make an effort, and if you don’t think creativity is present at the start, it will be at the end, because it’s always available if you are willing to use it. She supports her claims with stories from her own past and those of people she has met, with a few quotes from other, primarily spiritual, sources.
If you are looking for the science behind creativity, or specific steps to increase or improve your creativity, you’ll be disappointed. I did something that I don’t typically do, and read the book with a packet of sticky notes. When I compiled those quotable moments, it amounted to less than two pages. Once I realized that she’d done TED Talks on creativity (which I haven’t seen), the dearth of real advice became more understandable, and it felt like she had tried to hard to expand her ideas to cover a book length.
Her personification of creativity and other traits as spirits was a detour I could have done without, especially in the chapter about “Enchantment”, which boils down creativity to a combination of a state of mind and dumb luck. The chapter about “Permission” was equally vague, stressing the fact you need to abandon your own doubts about whether you should be attempting creative endeavors. In fact all of the concepts mentioned are internalized, and Gilbert encourages people to either stop or start thinking in a certain way, with few suggestions on how to do that, at one point telling people that if they dress up and make themselves appealing, creativity will find them and want to work with them. I find myself shaking my head thinking “If only it were that easy”.
One portion I specifically found contradictory, in which she tells readers “Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think Oh, please don’t. (98)” She defends herself by further justifying that “I did not write this book for you; I wrote it for me. I wrote this book for my own pleasure, because I truly enjoy thinking about the subject of creativity. It’s enjoyable and useful for me to meditate on this topic.” (100) While I agree that she seems to find pleasure in the writing, if she was just doing it for herself then she wouldn’t have published the book, and simply would have kept a meditation journal instead of a manuscript. Anyone who publishes anything has ideas that they want to share with people, and something as philosophical, abstract, and communicative about establishing patterns of behavior as this book is certainly intended to invoke change and ultimately help people; in this specific case, help them be creative. Readers may find kernels of truth, like I did with my two pages of quotes, but the book didn’t need the rest of the background noise.
This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. Take a look at what everyone else is reading in nonfiction this week.
Title: My Year of Running Dangerously
Author: Tom Foreman
ISBN: 9780399175473
Pages: 276 pages
Publisher/Date: Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, c2015
My descent into the madness of ultrarunning began with a Thanksgiving conversation. The dishes had long been cleared, we’d watched some TV, and I had returned to the kitchen when my eighteen-year-old daughter, Ronnie, asked that question every father dreads.
“How would you feel about running a marathon with me?”
My heart jumped. My pulse raced. A bite of leftover stuffing fell from my fork. […] I had the flexibility of a stepladder, and my weakness for cinnamon rolls had convinced me that covering any sizable number of miles would forever more involve a combustion engine or a plane ticket. […]
I sighed the way a man might when the judge asks if he understands the charges.
“Okay. When do we start?” (5-7)
Tom Foreman is an Emmy Award-winning CNN Correspondent (so proclaimed on the cover of the book). He used to run (used to being the key word there), which consisted of disappearing during high school track practice and getting lucky during meets and four ill-trained for marathons with his brother after college. Using a 4 month training schedule, Foreman works in runs during east coast winters between covering breaking news and constant travel. He finds himself in the most unlikely of places pursuing the pavement. Then, after that first marathon with his daughter, he’s hooked, and keeps going farther and farther distances, until the end of the year arrives and he’s set his sights on a fifty mile ultramarathon. The biggest question waiting for him is if he’ll finish.
More anecdotal and motivational then instructional, Foreman avoids giving any specifics regarding his training process, such as the name of the first or any subsequent schedule that gave him guidance. Foreman mentions the bad and the ugly when it comes to running, including inclement weather, injuries, fatigue, and hunger. While running is typically a solitary sport, he also relates the camaraderie he experiences when in a race, meeting people who share this strange passion and looking out for each other, taking turns cheering for the other. It’s a self-deprecating display of what happens when outlandish ideas take hold and the impossible becomes possible. You can almost hear the “Anything you can do I can do better” challenge issuing from the pages, questioning readers “What’s holding you back from accomplishing your goals?” So lace up those running shoes and take that first step towards your own goals. You may be surprised where they lead.
This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. Take a look at what everyone else is reading in nonfiction this week.
March 25, 2024
challengingthebookworm
Title: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
Title: The Year of Less
Title: Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
Title: Rise: How a House Built a Family
Title: Tetris: The Games People Play
Title: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Challenging the Bookworm Blog 