The Core Dump

The powers that be at work decided that all minions had to read Who Moved My Cheese?, and since I like to read anyway, and have been low-grade curious about this book for a long time, I was a good boy and plowed through it.

Which took all of 15 minutes. Really. Without skimming.

According to the blurbs on the book itself, Who Moved My Cheese has changed the lives of countless people, and has shook more people than there are stars in the galaxy to the very core of their beings. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The book is really divided into two parts, the Who Moved My Cheese parable itself about two mice and two little people looking for cheese in a maze, and a “discussion” at a high school reunion between what I can only judge to be four stroke victims.

The parable itself is not bad—it cuts to the chase† and provides some food for thought, even though it’s glib and breathlessly optimistic.

But the discussion! Oh, the discussion! It’s all on the level of “Hey, I had no idea what to do and my life was going to hell, and I had no idea what was going on until you shared this wonderful, wonderful story with me and now I totally know what I have to do!”

Seriously, if you read this book and it changes your whole outlook, good for you. Glad you got value out of it. That being said, how about you turn off the TV, stop reading mouth-breather management books, and start reading grownup books? Please.

Also, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

†It took a lot of restraint to not use the word cheese instead of chase.

Subtitled The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers follows a selection of students at Whitman, a high school in Maryland, during a year of their lives.

It’s a deeply disconcerting book about children and young adults under intense pressure from their parents, themselves, and their schools, all with the goal of getting into the “right” college and thus collect a golden key to success in life.

Robbins writes with verve and does a great job of bringing the children to life on the page. It’s a very easy book to read.

The tales of children whose parents pressure psychologists to falsely diagnose their children with learning disabilities so they can get more time on exams, rampant cheating, suicides, and above all the sleep deprived lives of the students as they build up their resumes for their college applications are like something out of a nightmare.

If you’re a parent, you should read this book. If you’re at all interested in the state of young people today, you should read this book.

Granted, focusing exclusively on the overachievers leaves out a lot of other high school experiences, but it is chilling.

Related Core Dump reviews:

The Price of Privilege

Have U.S. Drivers Reached Filling Point of No Return?

The brilliant This American Life program “The Great Pool of Money” is required listening for anybody looking to understand the credit crisis that grew out of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

This is why we have NPR.

One in 25 Americans is a sociopath. This means, essentially, that they are incapable of feeling love or connectedness and exist in an emotional vacuum where the only thing that matters is to “win” over other people. The damage they cause the other 96% of the population is incalculable.

Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door provides a chilling look into the minds of sociopaths as well as ways to recognize them and above all how to deal with them.

Stout uses exceptionally well written composites of case files from her years of experience as a practicing psychologist to drive home the damage sociopaths cause and how their victims have learned to cope.

The Sociopath Next Door is an important work, and one that deserves to be widely read.

Highly recommended.

I did not know Wizardry was on the books in Florida.

Note to self: Never go to Florida.

David Simon is one of the creators of the fantastic HBO show The Wire. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets after spending 1988 observing three squads of Baltimore homicide detectives. Simon’s unprecedented access to the detectives as they go about their jobs resulted in a book so tight and well-written it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s not fiction.

Not only does Simon capture the lingo and banter of the detectives, but he also finds empathy and raw emotion in the most unlikely places.

As a bonus for fans of The Wire, one of the many classic scenes from that show, where the detectives use a photocopier as a fake polygraph machine, is straight from Homicide.

Even though now 20 years old, Homicide is a gripping read. It is hard to imagine that the business of murder has changed all that much in the intervening years.

A practicing psychologist, Madeline Levine wrote The Price of Privilege after noticing an increase in serious problems, such as depression, substance abuse, and cutting, among teenagers from affluent families.

The book’s subtitle, How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids sums it up neatly.

Levine’s basic argument, supported by anecdotes from both her practice and from those of other psychologists, is that the “culture of affluence” and its emphasis on material possessions and perfection, is leading parents into making choices in their child rearing that, while well-meaning, ultimately hurt their children.

These choices include pressuring children into being “perfect” at school and in social occasions—often accomplished by bribery and threats—and by trying to ensure success for children by micromanaging their lives and becoming helicopter parents.

The end result is that these children, while coddled, don’t get the opportunity to develop their inner selves and thus end up “empty.”

It’s pretty bleak reading, but the closing section of the book offers advice on how to avoid the traps and help children grow up to become healthy adults.

The Price of Privilege is one of those unfortunate books that is important and deserves to be read, but probably won’t be by those who need it the most.

Well worth the time and with lots of food for thought.