Boys Adrift

Book Club #13.
Lesson: Homeschool. Let's do it.

About the Book:

Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax

 Summary: 

Leonard Sax is a psychologist who sees a number of factors contributing to a trend of underachieving boys and men in our current society. Factors range from changes in our current education system, role models, coed education, video games, plastics, etc. Controversial and a great source of debate, readers will be all over the place on this subject.

Characters:

• Leonard Sax
• various children and parents

Questions:

1. Do you notice a trend in unmotivated boys/men? Do you think it's true?

2. Which factor(s) do you most agree with?

3. Did anything surprise you?

4. If you had a son is there anything in particular you would do after reading this book?

5. Do you agree that schools are becoming more feminized? 

6. Do you believe that kids need to be in a co-ed educational environment?

7. Has this changed the way that you think the world socializes little people?

Conversation Summary:

Discussion topics:

• Is there a trend in boys/children that is different than previous generations
• Agree/disagree with book factors and observations
• Education system and homeschooling
• Experience with young children
• Difference between boys and girls - personality, learning, development
• Training animals and children

3/3 bears finished book

References:

1. Diane Rehm Interview: Dr. Leonard Sax: “Boys Adrift”

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2007-08-14/dr-leonard-sax-boys-adrift-basic-books

2. America’s ‘quiet catastrophe’: Millions of idle men
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.fa220cfd710d

3. TED talks: How masculinity is evolving

https://www.ted.com/playlists/how_masculinity_is_evolving

10.2016 Boys Adrift

Introduction:

Last month we briefly touched upon child development as Jack spent the first 5 years of his life living in Room. This month we delve further into the area of boyhood development and disturbing trends seen in this demographic.

Overview:

"Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, they’re less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere twenty years ago. In fact, a third of men ages 22–34 are still living at home with their parents—about a 100 percent increase in the past twenty years. Parents, teachers, and mental health professionals are worried about boys. But until now, no one has come up with good reasons for their decline—nor, more important, with workable solutions to reverse this troubling trend. 

In Boys Adrift, family physician and research psychologist Leonard Sax tackles the problem head on, drawing on the very latest research and his vast experience with boys and their families. He argues that a combination of social and biological factors is creating an environment that is literally toxic to boys. Misguided overemphasis on reading and math as early as kindergarten, too much time spent playing video games, over-reliance on medication for attention deficit disorders (much more common in boys than in girls), and overlooked endocrine disturbances are actually causing damage to boys’ brains. 

Dr. Sax offers a wide range of reassuring remedies— including innovative ways parents can wean their sons away from video games, practical steps they can take to improve their sons’ schooling, and surprisingly simple life changes they can make to protect boys from the environmental estrogens that undermine boys’ motivation. 

Filled with moving success stories that will inspire parents and teachers everywhere, Boys Adrift points the way to a new future for today’s boys and young men."

Book Details:

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0465072100
ISBN-13: 978-0465072101

Get Book: 

Amazon
Overdrive

Room

Book Club #12.
Lesson: If a man asks you to help him with a dog and you can't see the dog, don't follow him into his truck

About the Book:

Room

 

 Summary: 

Ma was kidnapped when she was 19 where she had a young boy named Jack. She raises him in Room, isolated from the real world spending each day following a schedule and hiding from Old Nick. When Jack turns 5, his mother decides he is old enough to learn the truth about her capture and Old Nick's identity as her captor and try to escape. Tv world is suddenly an actual real world outside of room. While Ma's memories of the real world gave her hope through the years and her stories of a much bigger world Jack has never experienced sound wonderful, Jack and Ma must adapt to their new reality. Jack is like an alien unable to comprehend social norms and his mother must realize how the world has changed during her time away and confront how the world view them.

 

Characters:

• Ma
• Jack
• Old Nick
• Ma's family members
• Doctors, Nurses, and Staff
• Police
• Media

Questions:

1. What did you think of the authors choice to use the boys point of view- how would it be different if it was from another character (mother, object, etc)?

2. Who did you relate the most to?

3. What would you have done similar or different if you were in the same circumstance as the mother?

4. If you saw the movie how was it similar or different from the book?

5. How do you think the experience may affect Jack in the future?

6. Was there anything from your childhood that you may remember different than a family member or realize later was different than what you originally thought?

7. What did you think about how the boy used English? He would say things like "double more chocolatier" or say "big" instead of "size." 

8. What do you think of Jack getting a dog named Lucky? How do you think it would impact his life?

9. Jack begins to discover the nuances of things in the real world, e.g., fire departments are not TV but real. But even in the real world, they are sometimes for play. Do you remember doing this, or have you talked to kids who have taken things literally?

10. Do you think Ma regrets or feels guilty about not putting him up for adoption?

11. What did you like most about the book?

 

Conversation Summary:

Discussion topics:

• What we would have done in Ma's predicament
• Book realistic in terms of portraying young boy in captivity/media
• Author's inspiration
• Movie versus book
• Most related to frustrated people characters
• Childhood memories
• Plato's cave analogy/differing versions of reality
• Gender identity development
• Adapting to social norms/unwritten norms
• Travel and experiencing different ways of living

2/3 bears finished book and 1/3 saw movie

References:

1. Room: the movie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3170832/

08.2016 Room

Introduction:

Back to fiction we go. This book is now a major motion picture and winner of best actress. A story of a mother and son and the beauty of their relationship and the world they build together despite harrowing circumstances.

Overview:

"To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child."

Book Details:

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Reprint edition (September 25, 2012)
ISBN-10: 0316223239
ISBN-13: 978-0316223232

Get Book: 

Amazon
Overdrive

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Book Club #11.
Lesson: No ship is unsinkable.

About the Book:

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

 

 Summary: 

A large passenger ship, the Lusitania, is sunk by a German submarine. This highlights a historical moment in which the previous rules of war are broken, civilians are no longer safe and the power of the German U-boat is displayed. Warships and large cruise liners are quickly sunk.

 

Characters:

• Cerman U-boat Captain
• Various Lusitania passengers

Questions:

1. Which character did you relate to the most?

2. How important is it to use primary sources when writing a nonfiction? Do you care as a reader about what kind of research the author performed in preparing for a book?

3. What did you know about the Lusitania prior to reading this book and what new I formation surprised you?

4. What did you find captivating about the writing style of the author, and what would you have liked to be different?

5. Do you think that the US should have jumped into the war earlier? How might things have turned out differently?

6. What did you think about this perception of unsinkable ships during that era? Would you have taken the trip?

 

Conversation Summary:

Discussion topics:

• previous knowledge about Lusitania, WWII, Uboats
• Larson writing style - lots of detail
• How much detail should be included
• Progression of storyline
• Researching for non-fiction books

1/3 bears finished book and 0/3 loved it
guess we should go back to fiction

References:

1. Erik Larson Google Talk, 4/28/2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRJ96wAa40A

03.2016 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Introduction:

Our first Erik Larson book. Though the books are based on true history they may read like a suspenseful thriller. The events we may have read in a few sentences from a high school textbook are expounded, elaborated, and described in the full richness of that the particular event deserves. Game changing moments in a war or country's history are not simply a date and facts but a setting of an amazing tale.

Overview:

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

Book Details:

Paperback: 430 pages
Publisher: Crown Publishers; 1st edition (March 10, 2015)
ISBN-10: 0307408868
ISBN-13: 978-0307408860

Get Book: 

Amazon
Overdrive

Go Set A Watchman

Book Club #10.

About the Book:

Go Set a Watchman

 

 Summary: 

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—"Scout"—returns home from New York City to Maycomb, Alabama to visit her aging father, Atticus. During a time of civil rights tension, new realizations found put her assumptions about her hometown and family members into doubt.

 

Characters:

• Jean Louise "Scout" Finch
• Atticus
• Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finch
• Aunt Alexandra
• Henry ‘Hank’ Clinton
• Joshua Singleton St. Clair
• Colonel Maycomb

Questions:

1. Where do you consider your hometown? When you go back how are things different or the same?

2. When have you not seen eye to eye with your parents? Was it resolved or did you agree to disagree?

3. When have you had to be a part of a group whose ideology you did not agree with? Did you learn anything from the experience?

4. Scout goes back to her hometown from New York. What did you think of Harper Lee's portrayal of her reaction and thoughts about being back? Have you been to a reunion after many years and had similar or different thoughts?

5. Scout has a bunch of flashbacks of very relatable growing up experiences, like finding out where babies come from and her big school dance. Did you like this sandwiching of past experiences in the current narrative?

6. The publishing of Harper Lee's second book was controversial. How do you think this second book affected her legacy? Did you enjoy it or find it interesting?

 

Conversation Summary:

Discussion topics:

• suspicions this may have been Harper Lee's first draft of TKAMB
• hometowns
• where would you want to live?
• differing ideologies
• flashback, narrative styles
• the book was written for the ending

3/3 bears finished book and 3/3 loved it

References:

1. RIP Harper Lee 1926-2016
http://www.nytimes.com/video/obituaries/100000004221331/harper-lee-1926-2016.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FLee%2C%20Harper&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=collection