BOOKS IN BRIEF The Normal One Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling by Jeanne Safer Free Press, 204 pp., $24 Some time into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the public was told that his picture-book family included a retarded sister who was reared by the family to seem nearly normal. (This effort ended when a lobotomy, intended to reduce her anxieties, instead reduced her intelligence to a point at which she required permanent professional care.) But bad as this was, the family could afford special doctors and schools without struggle or sacrifice, and the sheer number of the normal Kennedy children diluted the impact. Far more typical is the story of Michael Dukakis, whose brother suffered a breakdown in college, to the horror of his overachieving immigrant parents, who could not imagine what they did wrong. Michael, as Richard Ben Cramer informs us, “became in a matter of days, or weeks, something akin to an only child,” the over-serious, workaholic, super-responsible “good son.” Later, when Dukakis was running for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in his long, careful climb up the ladder, his brother would trail his volunteers when they went leafleting, take their fliers out of mailboxes, and put in his own. “Do Not Vote for My Brother,” these leaflets asserted. “Michael Dukakis is the Last Man to Vote for.” The birth of a difficult, damaged, or disabled child is a heartbreak for parents and a catastrophe for the child afflicted. But it is also a problem for the other children in the family. Jeanne Safer, author of “The Normal One,” is a psychotherapist with long experience. She was “the normal one,” too, in real life. To this day, Safer is not sure what went wrong with her brother Steven, but by the time she was born, he was already established as different and difficult: fat, surly, defiant, and sullen, and given to great gusts of rage. At birth, Safer was given the job of being “the good one,” whose achievements would make up to her parents for the trials they suffered and reaffirm their good opinion of themselves. Safer’s childhood, as she makes clear, was far from as bad as that experienced by some of the patients she treats. Some of her stories involve those, like her brother, who are somewhat off-normal. But there are also the greatly retarded, the severely disabled, the paralyzed, and the schizoid. Some cannot be left alone for a moment; some exhibit unbridled hostility. “It is hard to imagine the level of tumult, anxiety, and sheer effort that life in a damaged family requires,” Safer asserts. “Home life is a series of little murders of privacy, pleasure, peace of mind.” A difficult child can become a hole into which all of a family’s resources–emotional and financial–vanish. The normal ones in this context are often neglected, their triumphs uncelebrated, their problems dismissed as trivial. They may have feelings of resentment towards, or even death wishes for, the difficult sibling–and then feel guilty for having such feelings. Safer’s advice to parents is to resist the urge to let these pathologies wholly take over their families, and to let their “normal ones” also be children. Her advice to the siblings is to stop feeling guilty, and to accept their bad–and good–fortune as chance. Safer writes on behalf of Michael Dukakis, and of the millions just like him. This is an overdue and important book. –Noemie Emery The Question of God C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr. Free Press, 295 pp., $25 Thirty years ago, Harvard asked psychiatrist Armand Nicholi to teach a course on the thought of Sigmund Freud. Nicholi’s students quickly decided that while Freud may or may not have been a great man, he was tone deaf when it came to religion. This convinced Nicholi to look for and find a “perfect foil” in the great Oxford don C.S. Lewis. Group discussions “became much more engaging” thereafter. “The Question of God” is both an extension of, and supplement to, that class. It’s also the best piece of (unintentional) Freud-bashing since Frederick Crews published “The Memory Wars” in 1995. The book traces the ideas in each man’s life. Readers get to see, for instance, Freud’s prickly manner and morbid obsession with death contrasted with C.S. Lewis’s much more joyful life and good end. Nicholi argues that how we live our lives forms an important part of the debate between believers and unbelievers over whether or not there is a God. By setting up Lewis vs. Freud, however, it feels as though Nicholi has stacked the deck–for Freud was a deeply odd and contradictory human being: a prude with a dirty mind, an atheist obsessed with the Almighty, an egomaniac who loudly proclaimed his own humility. If Freud’s life and corpus are the best arguments in favor of unbelief, we are all doomed to a life of faith. –Jeremy Lott Invasion How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores by Michelle Malkin Regnery, 332 pp., $27.95 Malkin mercilessly catalogues and classifies the various unsavory types allowed into the United States daily by lax immigration policies and corrupt INS agents: would-be terrorists, serial killers, cop slayers, and more besides. Dishonest immigration lawyers and self-serving bureaucrats are also Malkin’s target. “America’s historic generosity toward the salt of the earth,” she writes, “has been exploited ruthlessly by the scum of the earth.” A full-fledged salt-of-the-earth type herself (it is impossible to get within a ten-foot radius of “Invasion” without being told that she is the daughter of “patriotic, level-headed, and hard-truth-telling” Filipino immigrants), Malkin is righteously indignant about our current irresponsible policy. That lends the book its shocked-and-appalled tone, but it doesn’t interfere with some lighter moments, such as the reference to visa agents in Miami international airport as “stamp monkeys,” or cutesy chapter titles such as “It Ain’t Over ‘Til the Alien Wins.” What “Invasion” lacks is evidence that Malkin’s suggestions would be more effective at fixing the system than competing proposals or less subject to unforeseen problems than the status quo. A nine-page chapter at the end of the book throws out eleven policy prescriptions that are, at best, obvious. She suggests that we institute a targeted visa moratorium, scrap visa-free travel, militarize the borders, clean house at the INS, and end deportation delays. The careful attention Malkin lavishes on present corruptions is absent from the whirlwind final chapter of proposals for the future. Still, the book shows well the extent of the problem that must be addressed. You may have thought you knew how bad things are–but read “Invasion” and find out that you had no idea. –Katherine Mangu-Ward Showdown Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests that Divide America by Larry Elder St. Martin’s, 352 pp., $24.95 Confronting “victocracy”–the reign of a self-perpetuating, government-dependent class of citizens–is the principal aim of “Showdown,” the second book by talk-show host and syndicated columnist Larry Elder. Although largely a second helping of the themes addressed in his first book, the bestseller “The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America,” “Showdown” situates the welfare state, gun control, and public education in relation to the events of September 11 and the subsequent war on terrorism. Never, according to Elder, has there been a more opportune time for the American government to make a polite exit from the lives of its citizens. There is now overwhelming evidence that government’s preoccupation with satisfying domestic demands occurs at the expense of national security. Encapsulating Elder’s plea for self-reliance is the tale of Mohammed Isaq, a burka salesman in Afghanistan–and the most endearing personality portrayed in “Showdown.” Lacking the luxury of government-backed loans and cash advances, the salesman frankly considers the future of his business, which now operates in a post-Taliban Afghanistan where
the wearing of burkas by women is no longer mandatory. “My business will die,” he says. “I will just have to find something else to do.” For the sake of national security and the legacy of American individualism and self-determination, Elder requests that Isaq’s American contemporaries approach life with a similar attitude. –Sara Henary Let Freedom Ring Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism by Sean Hannity Regan, 338 pp., $25.95 Near the beginning of “Let Freedom Ring,” Sean Hannity proposes that we build “a Museum of Modern Left-Wing Lunacy–a place like the Smithsonian or the Guggenheim where, instead of coming to see great art or artifacts, people can come to see great examples of contemporary liberal idiocy.” Exhibits could include John Kerry’s accusation that the CIA was responsible for crack cocaine in Los Angeles, or the proposed national history standards that mentioned the Ku Klux Klan seventeen times, McCarthyism nineteen times, and George Washington only in passing. And then there’s the school district in Wisconsin that banned the “The Star Spangled Banner” because, as one educator put it, “mandating patriotism is a really scary thing.” “Let Freedom Ring” is replete with such examples, but Hannity also holds forth on issues–including abortion, the environment, and national security–in which he discerns the undesirable consequences that result when political correctness trumps traditional moral values. Much of the book is familiar territory, but it is a breezy read made all the more enjoyable by the zest of Hannity’s arguments. –Rachel DiCarlo
