Books in Brief
Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 441 pp., $32). You may not think “Dick,” the 1999 comedy featuring Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon, is worth serious academic analysis. But then you read Charlene Etkind’s very serious “Richard Nixon as ‘Dick’ and the Comedic Treatment of the Presidency,” and you realize–well, that you were right about “Dick.”
Etkind’s essay is one of many in “Hollywood’s White House” that examine how the film industry has portrayed real and fictional chief executives over the years. The essays are all strong on academic jargon and weighty generalizations, and weak on insight. It’s no surprise to learn, for instance, that “Most men elected to the presidency bring to the office their foibles and peccadillos,” and that “Dick” “serves a restorative purpose, returning to the audience a sense of control and a chance to give the deeds of the past a historical perspective.” (On second thought, that last one may come as a surprise.)
Readers may be scared away by such titles as “Who’s In Charge Here? Technology and the Presidency in ‘Fail-Safe’ and Colossus” and “‘Biological Business-as-Usual’: The Beast in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.” But they needn’t worry; the only deepness here is the deep sleep they’re likely to induce.
The first half of the collection, which traces Hollywood’s various takes on Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, et al., is a little more readable, if only because the pieces are more concerned with facts than theory. Still, anyone who isn’t working on a Ph.D. in film theory should wait until a stronger writer comes along to make better use of the excellent appendices that “Hollywood’s White House” contains.
–Matthew Continetti
Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age by Kay S. Hymowitz (Ivan R. Dee, 202 pp., $24.95). There’s a new breed of children out there. And they have, in the words of Kay Hymowitz, “unprecedented opportunities to realize their talents and tastes.” They’re liberation’s children, and they’re growing up in a neighborhood near you.
Hymowitz, author of the 1999 “Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future–and Ours,” continues her exploration of child-rearing in “Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age.” The book contains eleven essays, written over the last seven years, that outline how children are suffering from a moral void brought on by parents who, instead of guiding their children morally and spiritually, are preparing them only for society’s “meritocratic struggle for success.”
The moral instruction of today’s children has been replaced with the instruction afforded by “Baby Mozart” CDs, foreign-language tapes, even computer software for infants, Hymowitz declares. Suddenly, getting their four-year-old into an elite “Baby Ivy” elementary school has become more important to parents than teaching manners and self-control. It’s no wonder school discipline is dead and that “tweens”–kids between eight and twelve who lean toward troubling teen behavior–are ubiquitous. With morals and self-restraint taking a backseat to child empowerment, Hymowitz laments that kids are dangerously free to explore their sexuality or to attend college with no real grasp of their nation’s history, “now lumped with the ‘useless’ humanities.”
How we can break the ugly cycle is a question Hymowitz has yet to answer. But in “Liberation’s Children” she scrupulously points out our all-too-familiar “obsession with individual autonomy”–which begins with the career-driven mother dropping her baby off at a “quality” day-care center and ends with that child grown into a decentered, obsessively work-driven adult.
–Erin Montgomery
