ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending

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Washington Post book reviewers

Apr 27, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Laura Vanderkam
Portfolio
ISBN 978-1591844570
248 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Moira E. McLaughlin

Forget saving for college, cutting coupons, and even bulking up your 401k. Laura Vanderkam's newbook, "All the Money in the World" examines money from a unique perspective: What if money can buy happiness? "We often assume we can't afford X, Y or Z, or that only rich people experience certain things and we'll never be rich," she writes. "We assume certain expenditures are absolutely necessary, even though much of humanity survives without them. And so we live with a constrained mental picture of our lives."

Vanderkam's compelling book is not a lesson in greed or shallowness; rather, she asks you to consider ignoring what society says you ought to buy or own, and instead make choices according to your actual needs and desires. You like your morning latte? Buy it guilt-free knowing that you're forgoing that designer sweater. You want to head to Paraguay for two weeks with your family? Do it knowing that you picked up extra work to pay for it. You like donating your money? Find a fun cause that speaks directly to you.

Her main suggestion is to think creatively about your money, and therefore your life, and Vanderkam interviews dozens of people who are doing just that, from those who raise chickens in their backyards, to prospective parents contemplating the cost of children. The result is a book that will quell readers' anxieties about money and inspire them to stop seeing money's limitations and start seeing its potential, no matter what their tax bracket.

Moira E. McLaughlin can be reached at mclaughlinm@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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'Think Like a Man' success boosts book sales

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY

Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man was the No. 1 hit at the box office last weekend, bumping off The Hunger Games. Not surprisingly, Steve Harvey's best-selling advice book, released Jan. 31 as a movie tie-in paperback, rises to No. 40 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. (The hardcover reached No. 1 on March 12, 2009.)

"The movie is selling books because we all want to believe there are magic formulas that will ensure the fairy-tale ending," says Dawn Davis, Harvey's editor at Amistad. "And while Steve doesn't offer that, you do get to see a big-screen version of how things might play out if you follow his advice, such as the 90-day rule."

That would be no sex for the first 90 days.

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INDIA: A Sacred Geography

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Washington Post book reviewers

Apr 13, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

INDIA: A Sacred GeographyDiana Eck
Harmony
ISBN 978-0385531900
559 pages
$27

INDIA BECOMING: A Portrait of Life in Modern IndiaAkash Kapur
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594488191
292 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Chandrahas Choudhury

It's most unusual to see geography as primarily a construct of the human imagination, but that is precisely what ithe scholar of Hinduism Diana L. Eck attempts in her massive new book, "India." Thousands of years before India was a nation-state (1947), a colony of Britain (the 18th century), or a cartographic vision circulated on a map (1782), it was, in Eck's view, still conceived as a geographical unit in the hearts and minds of the faithful, and particularly in the religious imagination of Hinduism.

Pilgrims thought of India as the land of the seven great rivers, as a space marked by the benediction and caprice of the gods who resided in the great northern peaks of the Himalayas, as woven into a unity by the great centers of pilgrimage, or dhams, in the north, south, east and west of the land. Seeking out the marks and manifestations of the sacred, they fashioned with their own footprints a map of a vast subcontinent suffused with the presence of the gods and stories of their appearances in different incarnations.

Eck's perspective, of course, has significant political implications. It arguably refutes the widely held notion that India was merely a confusion of diverse kingdoms, cultures and languages until it was politically integrated by the British Empire. Some scholars hold that the idea of Hinduism too, is the modern tracing of a circle around a diversity of ancient religious beliefs never self-consciously systematized into a whole. This idea struggles to hold itself up against the layered evidence supplied by Eck's book, the synthesis of three decades of work on the myths, rituals, cosmology and everyday life of Hinduism.

But the appeal of the book lies in the fact that its emphasis is not primarily political, but aggregative and connective, making a clearly spied forest out of a mass of trees. Eck offers an exceptionally rich account of how, throughout India, the cosmic is mapped onto the local in a tradition formed, revised and renewed over the centuries by thousands of discrete phenomena and often anonymous actors.

This map of myth, as it were, radiates a worldview very different from the assumptions of modern cartography. Cartography invests each place on a map with a name and an unassailable specificity. But sacral maps, Eck notes, are marked continuously by "patterns of duplication and condensation," demonstrating an ability "to see a world in a grain of sand" in William Blake's unforgettable formulation. For instance, thousands of rivers and water bodies across the country are said by people to be linked to or fed by the holiest river of Hinduism, the Ganga. The Ganga is, depending on what lens one brings to it, both somewhere and everywhere.

"As arcane as (BEGIN ITAL)lingas (pillars) of light ... and sacred rivers falling from heaven may seem to those who wish to get on with the real politics of today's world," Eck writes, "these very patterns of sanctification continue to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country." She devotes entire chapters to regional variations in the worship of the great generative god Shiva, the creator of the universe, or the myth of the Mother Goddess, who is then consecrated and remembered in thousands of local incarnations as "the goddesses of earth and village, glade and river, hilltop and mountaintop." In doing so Eck demonstrates how, just as novels are fully realized only in the minds of their readers, so God is made present in the world by the stories and footsteps of the faithful.

The two main currents of contemporary nonfiction about India might be said to the broadbrush view of the whole animated by strong particulars (such as Patrick French's recent "India: A Portrait") and the attempt to fully realize a fascinating local world (such as two recent books about discrete universes in the megapolis of Mumbai, Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" and Sonia Faleiro's "Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars"). Eck's book might be said to stand at the sangam, or junction (a site of great religious power in Hinduism), of these currents. Its ideas reverberate forcefully, too, against other recent works about geography as informed by the human imagination, such as Rebecca Solnit's book about San Francisco, "Infinite City," or Graham Robb's "The Discovery of France" (Robb and Eck also resemble each other in never writing an uninteresting or flat sentence). All these writers would be fundamentally in agreement with Eck's assertion that "Every story has a place and every place a story."

Eck's book is so dense with detail that one might think of its 500 pages as being a distillation of a world. In Akash Kapur's "India Becoming," on the other hand, an idea that might be written up in a few sentences is stretched out, through the conceit of an autobiographical narrative, into an entire book.

In 2003 Kapur returns, after many years in America, to India, the country of his childhood, and finds the sleepy, unmoving world of old dramatically refashioned by new energies - especially the energies of capital - and ambitions. Fascinated by "that sense of newness, of perpetual reinvention and forward momentum that I had felt when I first moved to America," Kapur beds down in Auroville, a small south Indian town, to take stock of this dramatic historical moment.

Kapur explores the new India through a variety of conversations, with, among others, a landlord who sees the old feudal world falling away around him, a young gay man riding the wave of the IT revolution, an activist in Mumbai fighting for the rights of those who have been marginalized or dispossessed by ruthlessness of the new economy. The Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis slowly emerges from his narration, but only as clich, reverse clich, and all-encompassing clich.

Dazzled in the beginning by the rumbling of a society of a billion people ("India, I felt, had started to dream"), Kapur soon begins to feel disillusionment with the spectacle of rising crime, pollution, and impoverishment, and a "culture of not caring." Finally he decides that he has been too hasty in both his elation and his despair, and settles for the comfort of realizing that "the central fact ... of modern India was change" and the mystification of recognizing "ineluctably, if at times haltingly, a new world was rising."

If this were a novel, one might surmise that the writer was deliberately setting the narrator up as a naif. Anyone who Reads it as straight-up reportage, though, will likely find the banality and contrivance of this self-indulgent "journey" exasperating. It is not just that Kapur does not take any strong positions ("I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay"). What is worse is that his language groans with superfluity ("It was evening, a time between night and day, and the lights of the city were starting to come on") and with lazy allusion ("India, the author Nirad Chaudhuri reportedly once wrote, is a nation of a million exceptions"). If Eck's book reveals the relevance of the local, the unfamiliar and the seemingly obscure to the deep structure of a civilization, Kapur's proves conversely the great gulf between taking up a relevant subject and writing a relevant book.

Chandrahas Choudhury is a novelist and literary critic based in Delhi, and editor of the anthology "India: A Traveler's Literary Companion."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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ISLAND OF VICE: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean up Sin-Loving New York

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Apr 13, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Richard Zacks
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385519724
431 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Daniel Stashower

A clergyman, a detective and a society swell walk into a bar ...

It sounds like a vaudeville routine, but, as Richard Zacks reports in "Island of Vice," his jaunty and beautifully researched portrait of New York at the close of the 19th century, it was actually the opening salvo of "a holy war on vice and government collusion." The clergyman, Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, had delivered a blistering sermon a few days earlier - on Valentine's Day of 1892 - in which he called out the corrupt powerbrokers of the city's Tammany Hall political machine. According to Parkhurst, the mayor and his subordinates were a "lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot" growing fat on the city's houses of sin through an entrenched system of bribes and rake-offs. Something had to be done.

When city officials fought back with libel charges, Parkhurst launched an unlikely fact-finding mission, hiring a private detective to conduct him and a devout blue-blood parishioner on a tour of New York's seamy side. "I never dreamed that any force of circumstances would ever draw me into contacts so coarse, so bestial, so consummately filthy," Parkhurst declared. At one stop, the reverend averted his eyes from a display of nude leapfrog; at another, he fended off a 19-year-old girl's blunt proposition. History has drawn a discreet veil over the carryings-on at the "French Circus" on West 4th Street, but certain statutes invoked at the time made reference to birds, animals and corpses.

In the end, Parkhurst presented the city's district attorney with a list of 284 gambling joints, brothels and after-hours saloons. "Now," he demanded, "what are you going to do with them?" The challenge led, in time, to a clean-sweep election that brought in a reform-minded mayor, as well as a intrepid new police commissioner by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt, writes Zacks, "was then a work-in-progress, years removed from San Juan Hill and the White House." At age 36, Roosevelt freely admitted that he "knew nothing of police management," but he compensated with a winning optimism and boundless energy that initially endeared him to the city's population. With his friend Jacob Riis, the pioneering photojournalist, Roosevelt undertook a series of "midnight rambles," rattling the cages of patrol officers found sleeping on the job or otherwise derelict in their duties.

Roosevelt's efforts went off the rails soon enough when he chose to enforce the city's long-neglected Sabbath laws, which required saloons to close on Sundays. The measure posed no hardship to Roosevelt himself, who seldom drank, but it did not sit well with the populace, many of whom looked forward to knocking back a beer or two after a six-day work week. Saloonkeepers scrambled to find loopholes, and soon discovered that any establishment selling food as well as drink might call itself a "hotel," thereby circumventing the ban. It was not necessary, however, that the food be eaten, and more than one newly minted hotel provided an "an old dessicated ruin" of bread and cheese that could pass untouched from one customer to another to satisfy the requirement. Soon the policy became the subject of jokes: During a pause in service at a particular watering hole, disgruntled customers were told, "Some idiot has eaten the sandwich."

Zacks, whose earlier books include "The Pirate Hunter" and "History Laid Bare," seems to take a professional interest in scoundrels and sinners. He's right at home in fin-de-siecle New York, a time when the city had 30,000 prostitutes and 8,000 saloons available to a population of not quite 2 million people. He has pumped his book full of entertaining details about such things as a "dog's nose," an ungodly beverage made up of barrel dregs and leavings from the glasses of other drinkers, and a five-cent whiskey that tastes of "kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol and the chemicals used in fire extingushers." Though Roosevelt is the marquee name in his drama, Zacks makes good use of a fascinating array of supporting players, including the corrupt precinct captain "Big Bill" Devery, "a true Hell's Kitchen New Yorker, mixing charm and menace," and the exotic, Algerian belly dancer Little Egypt, who was fond of appearing in what she called "zee altogether."

Against such "brilliant evil," as one newspaper phrased it, Roosevelt never stood a chance. Within two years, as the anti-vice crusade stalled out amid "constant bickerings between men who know better," he looked for greener pastures. By then the press had dismissed him as a "blue-blooded Knickerbocker" who would never amount to anything. The New York Mercury declared: "No Roosevelt was ever President; no Roosevelt ever led an army to victory - and none ever will." By April of 1897, he had decamped for Washington as assistant secretary of the navy.

"It is fascinating and somewhat uncanny," Zacks writes, "that despite one of the most concerted efforts in the history of New York City to crack down on whoring, gambling, and after-hours drinking that all three somehow thrived." Uncanny? Perhaps, but as O. Henry, another keen observer of the city's vices, once declared, "It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York."

Daniel Stashower is the author of "The Beautiful Cigar Girl."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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BOOK WORLD bestsellers — March 11, 2012

Notable additions to the list this week include the new memoir from the late Anthony Shadid, whose tragic death while on assignment in Syria stunned the journalism community, and Jodi Picoult’s new novel, the #1 debut of which shows she still has the magic touch ...

BOOK WORLD

Bestsellers — March 11, 2012

[click on the author’s name to be linked to Book World’s review]

NONFICTION HARDCOVER

1. THE START-UP OF YOU: ADAPT TO THE FUTURE, INVEST IN YOURSELF, AND TRANSFORM YOUR CAREER

(Crown Business, $26). By Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha {2}

2. STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0: ... ONLINE TEST FROM GALLUP'S “NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS”

(Gallup, $24.95). By Tom Rath {71}

3. THE POWER OF HABIT: WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO IN LIFE AND BUSINESS

(Random House, $28). By Charles Duhigg {1}

4. AMERITOPIA: THE UNMAKING OF AMERICA

(Threshold, $26.99). By Mark R. Levin. Claiming that the American Dream (individualism) is at risk, courtesy of a rise of utopian fervor. {7}

5. BECOMING CHINA’S BITCH: AND NINE MORE CATASTROPHES WE MUST AVOID RIGHT NOW

(Turner, $27.95). By Peter D. Kiernan {1}

6. HOUSE OF STONE: A MEMOIR OF HOME, FAMILY, AND A LOST MIDDLE EAST

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). By Anthony Shadid {1}

7. BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: LIFE, DEATH, AND HOPE IN A MUMBAI UNDERCITY

(Random House, $27). By Katherine Boo {4}

8. THINKING, FAST AND SLOW (FSG, $30)

By Daniel Kahneman. The Nobel Prize winner (economic sciences) examines the modes of thought that fuel our decision making. {12}

9. STEVE JOBS (Simon & Schuster, $35)

By Walter Isaacson. The life of the offbeat, visionary founder of Apple, based on numerous interviews with Jobs himself. {19}

10. THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION: THE ULTRA-HEALTHY PROGRAM FOR LOSING WEIGHT, PREVENTING DISEASE, AND FEELING GREAT NOW!

(Little, Brown, $27.99). By Mark Hyman {1}

FICTION HARDCOVER

1. LONE WOLF (Atria, $28)

By Jodi Picoult. It’s the day of reckoning when a father’s serious accident compels his estranged family to grapple with long-ignored issues. {1}

2. KILL SHOT (Atria, $27.99)

By Vince Flynn. Readers are given a “prequel” of sorts with a chronicle of agent Mitch Rapp’s first year in the CIA. {4}

3. PRIVATE GAMES (Little, Brown, $27.99)

By James Patterson & Mark Sullivan. A very au courant mystery, featuring murder at the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. {3}

4. VICTIMS (Ballantine, $28)

By Jonathan Kellerman. Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis rush to nab a killer who leaves some rather gory corpses behind. {1}

5. CELEBRITY IN DEATH (Putnam, $27.95)

By J.D. Robb. It’s murder at a film premiere party at which Lt. Eve Dallas is a guest. {2}

6. I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER (Dial, $26)

By Sophie Kinsella. A phone — one lost, one found — scrambles a young woman’s happily engaged bliss. {3}

7. WATERGATE (Pantheon, $26.95)

By Thomas Mallon. An inventive take on the presidential scandal; who did erase those missing 18½ minutes of tape? {2}

8. DEFENDING JACOB (Delacorte, $26)

By William Landay. The son of a noted assistant DA is accused of murder, putting his family in a tailspin. {5}

9. DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY

(Knopf, $25.95). By P.D. James. A bit of murder is injected into the milieu of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” {13}

10. CINNAMON ROLL MURDER

(Kensington, $24). By Joanne Fluke. A jazz band’s leader is dead, and it’s up to Hannah Swensen to root out the culprit. {1}

NONFICTION PAPERBACK

1. THE FOX EFFECT: HOW ROGER AILES TURNED A NETWORK INTO A PROPAGANDA MACHINE

(Anchor, $15). By David Brock & Ari Rabin-Havt {2}

2. THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES: THE SECRET TO LOVE THAT LASTS (Northfield, $14.99)

By Gary D. Chapman. Knowing that special someone. {30}

3. BOSSYPANTS (Reagan Arthur, $15.99)

By Tina Fey. An amusing memoir from the acclaimed former SNL writer, comedian and actress. {9}

4. THE VOW: THE TRUE EVENTS THAT INSPIRED THE MOVIE

(B&H, $14.99). By Kim & Krickitt Carpenter. The wrenching ordeal that began with a car accident in November, 1993. {5}

5. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

(Broadway, $16). By Rebecca Skloot. How one woman’s death from cervical cancer in 1951 led to the creation of the prodigious HeLa cell line. {52}

6. MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS

(Ballantine, $16). By Carol S. Dweck. Why one’s attitude is as important as talent. {1}

7. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING (Workman, $14.95). By Heidi Murkoff & Sharon Mazell. Fourth edition of the popular guide. {20}

8. HEAVEN IS FOR REAL: A LITTLE BOY’S ASTOUNDING STORY OF HIS TRIP TO HEAVEN AND BACK

(Thomas Nelson, $16.99). By Todd Burpo {60}

9. THE OFFICIAL SAT STUDY GUIDE

(College Board, $21.99). This revised manual offers 10 practice tests and loads of tips. {101}

10. GETTING TO YES: NEGOTIATING AGREEMENT WITHOUT GIVING IN

(Penguin, $16). By Roger Fisher and William Ury. Second edition. {8}

FICTION PAPERBACK

1. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST

(Vintage, $15.95; $9.99). By Stieg Larsson. The Millennium Trilogy concludes with Lisbeth Salander hunting for her failed assassin. {2}

2. THE LUCKY ONE (Grand Central, $14.99; $7.99)

By Nicholas Sparks. True love awaits at the end of the search for a woman smiling in a photo; a new feature film. {5}

3. THE SIXTH MAN (Vision, $9.99)

By David Baldacci. An alleged serial killer’s attorney is murdered before King & Maxwell can confer on the case; the mass market (and third) edition of this novel. {9}

4. REDWOOD BEND (Mira, $7.99)

By Robyn Carr. A flat tire on the way to Virgin River forever alters a young mom’s future. {1}

5. THE HELP (Berkley, $16)

By Kathryn Stockett. A frank chronicle of the lives of several black maids working in a town in 1960s Miss. {46}

6. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

(Vintage, $14.95; $7.99). By Stieg Larsson. First book in the late Swede’s “Millennium Trilogy.” {126}

7. THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House, $15)

By Téa Obreht. While on a humanitarian mission, a doctor in the Balkans is confronted by the riddles of her own family’s past. {16}

8. THE JUNGLE (Berkley, $9.99)

By Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul. Juan Cabrillo, and the crew of the high-tech ship “Oregon,” aim to stop a plot of world domination. {1}

9. PORTRAIT OF A SPY (Harper, $9.99)

By Daniel Silva. Art conservator and sometime agent Gabriel Allon parries with an American-born cleric and terrorist. {2}

10. LIVE WIRE (Signet, $9.99)

By Harlan Coben. A client’s missing husband brings athlete-cum-agent Myron Bolitar’s past front and center. {1}

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended March 4, 2012. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright 2012 by Nielsen BookScan. (The right-hand column of numbers represents weeks on this list, which premiered in Book World on Jan. 11, 2004. The bestseller lists in print alternate between hardcover and paperback; the complete list can be found online.)

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“The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice” by M.G. Lord

The Political Best — March 11, 2012

Much the same as last week, save for a new title focusing on America’s often testy relationship with the People’s Republic of China ...

BOOK WORLD

(Unofficial) Political Bestsellers — March 11, 2012

[click on author’s name to be routed to Book World’s review]

1. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

(Threshold, $26.99). By Mark R. Levin

2. Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now

(Turner, $27.95). By Peter D. Kiernan

3. All In: The Education of General David Petraeus

(Penguin Press, $29.95)

By Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb

4. Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

(Basic, $26). By Zbigniew Brzezinski

5. Enemies: A History of the FBI

(Random House, $30). By Tim Weiner

6. The World America Made

(Knopf, $21). By Robert Kagan

Drawn from Book World’s bestseller data supplied by Nielsen BookScan for the week ending March 4, 2012 (culled from the top 50 titles sold). The chart may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright © 2012

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Battles endure over undocumented schoolchildren

About this blog: A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court does
not necessarily mean the end of battles over a disputed issue. The wars over abortion still rage despite the
landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. So, too, with the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe, which allowed undocumented children to enroll in Texas public schools and marked a turning point in immigration rights. But the battles over undocumented school children continue, as Michael A. Olivas shows in his book “No Undocumented Child Left Behind: Plyler v. Doe and the Education of Undocumented Schoolchildren,” recently released by New York University Press. Here, Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston, explores where the law and the nation stand today.

--------------------------

On June 15, we will celebrate the 30th birthday of the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. This landmark ruling handed down in 1982 has made it possible for undocumented children to enroll in the nation’s public schools, and it has been widely acknowledged as a success story.

When President Reagan and Congress enacted comprehensive immigration reform in 1986, it was possible for many of these children to become citizens. Even early opponents such as James Plyler, the Tyler, Texas superintendent, later indicated that he was happy the case turned out as it did, inasmuch as these children were permitted to stay and get an education.

The case continues to require vigilance because some states still attempt to enact their own laws on the schooling of undocumented children, as Alabama did when it passed a statute requiring registration of its schoolchildren. The legislators just wanted to put the fear of God (and La Migra – the immigration authorities) into the hearts of the parents, who were lured to Alabama to do the backbreaking work that others don’t do.

The courts enjoined the provisions, although the desired damage had been done: frightened parents removed their children from the schools.

In another recent incident a Texas schoolteacher admonished a child that he should “go back to Mexico.” These kinds of events are newsworthy because they are relatively rare. But the fact is many of the targeted children excel in their academic and personal endeavors and win competitions and awards.

The ongoing debates in the Republican primaries over the DREAM Act — which would provide conditional citizenship to certain undocumented college students — have revealed a great divide on what to do about these children when they reach college age.

Note how Gov. Perry’s immigrant tuition policies, allowing undocumented Texas college students to pay in-state tuition, ran afoul of his opponents in the GOP primary. Herman Cain, in contrast, foolishly advocated for an electrified fence.

State laws do not wisely address the issues — they violate federal law and overreact. They have also shown the interconnectedness and globalization of migrant and farm labor in a way no other means could have. Only federal comprehensive immigration reform can work — we cannot have 50 state immigration policies, any more than we can have 50 foreign policies or forms of currency.

In the end, Plyler is an example of our better angels. Re-reading the case today draws attention to the important issues of incorporation of outsiders into our communities, the strains in the U.S. polity, and the unrelenting meanness of the restrictionists who are still fighting this battle more than 30 years later.

Most educators are drawn to the story’s narrative arc: innocent children brought to a new country where their families live in the shadows. The decision was the best our country has to offer: compassion, a fierce belief in reducing inequality, and political and personal courage.

In our society, then as now, we do not punish our children for the transgressions of their parents.

----------------------------------------------

Follow Steven Levingston on Twitter @SteveLevingston

By Michael A. Olivas  |  11:56 AM ET, 03/14/2012

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Here’s a good ‘One’ about James Brown

James Brown was never a big man, but even as a troubled young man growing up in abject poverty, he was larger than life. RJ Smith's The One: The Life and Music of James Brown crackles with the same intensity Brown used to overcome his destitute beginnings to become the Godfather of Soul, who could whip audiences into a sweat-drenched frenzy with his primal screams and electrifying dance moves.

PHOTOS: James Brown through the years

"He was pint-size, lacking a formidable build, but Brown compensated with a way of moving that gave off waves of energy," writes Smith, a music writer based in Los Angeles. "Even as a teenager, he was able to command attention just by skimming along. He communicated that he was not to be trifled with."

Brown, who was born in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, was the hardest-working man in show business (at his peak, he did more than 330 one-nighters a year), but he was also a hard man to work for and an even harder one to live with. He was a taskmaster who kept his bands in line with fines, firings and fists. He was also a possessive, abusive womanizer. He had a need to be in control and have things his way. That was reflected in his music, which defied conventions with its driving rhythms. It reshaped R&B in the 1960s and 1970s and had lasting influence beyond.

Smith's excellent biography draws upon more than 100 interviews with band members and studio musicians, ex-wives and girlfriends, business associates, record executives and his inner circle of friends to piece together the story of a musical genius who became a cultural icon and a lightning rod for controversy. He grounds the story in the context of the times through which Brown lived — segregation, the civil rights movement, the disco era — and illustrates how events and social conditions influenced the choices he made.

Through firsthand accounts by those who knew him, Smith digs out the truth behind the many legends surrounding Brown (the genesis of the cape act; the motivations by the famed Boston concert in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination; rivalries with other singers). Those stories also explain Brown's obsession with grooming (he had his hair done every morning and before and after shows) and how his need to be the center of attention affected everything he did. He once told protégé Al Sharpton: "Whatever you do, don't follow the crowd. You got to stand alone and have your own style, your own way of doing things."

In later years, Brown found doing things his way increasingly difficult. In the late '70s, disco slowed his momentum, and his artistic progeny attracted younger fans. Smith chronicles his decline with the same rich detail that he traces the glory years. Despite sporadic hits and renaissances fueled by such films as The Blues Brothers and Rocky IV, the former trendsetter was suddenly desperate to keep up. Tax troubles, a tumultuous marriage to Adrienne Rodriguez and an addiction to PCP took their toll, but Brown was still performing a month before he died at 73 on Christmas 2006.

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'Hunger Games' feeds Andy Cohen's reality passion

What's not to love about The Hunger Games?

Bravo Media

Andy Cohen read 'The Hunger Games' during a flight from L.A. to New York and fell in love with the book.

Bravo Media

Andy Cohen read 'The Hunger Games' during a flight from L.A. to New York and fell in love with the book.

A friend in L.A. gave me the book at dinner one night and told me to read it. He wouldn't say what it was about, "Just READ IT. I promise you'll love it." The next day I flew home and read it cover to cover from LAX to JFK, and finished in the car to my apartment. I was instantly obsessed, quickly doodling "Down with the Capitol!" at work, and had the other two books in the trilogy by the next morning.

The series has something for everyone, from a fully realized vision of the future, a commentary on war and government, a fantastic love triangle, and an incredible take on reality TV. But I think the idea of The Hunger Games as reality show is what really sucked me in.

Suzanne Collins has produced in her books a combination of the Olympics and all three of CBS' biggest hit reality franchises: The Amazing Race, Survivor and Big Brother, with death and murder thrown in as the ultimate in horrific reality-show twists. There's no way a show like that wouldn't capture the attention of entire countries.

Her show-within-a-book is so well thought out, and it contains an incredible underlying truth about propaganda and how reality shows are produced, edited and spoon-fed to consumers hungry for more. (And I might have secretly fantasized once or twice about what a Real Housewives of The Hunger Games show would look like, and which housewife would come out the victor.)

Oh, and doesn't Suzanne Collins have a fantastic eye for fashion? Where does she come up with the clothes?

Catching Fire proved to me just as great as the first book, and I really got into the love triangle. Alas, as sweet as Peeta is, I think I'm more on Team Gale. In truth, I found myself thinking a lot about Finnick as I went on, and by the time he went nuts in Mockingjay, I was feeling like he was my boo.

Ahhh, Mockingjay. I was so excited to read it and wanted it to last forever, so I forced myself to put it down every 50 pages. I sadly was a bit disappointed by the final installment, though I was OK with how we left Katniss at the end.

I can't wait for the films so I can go back to District 12 again and see how the reality show works on the big screen. And I want a Katniss doll, please. And a Finnick doll.

See you at the movies. And May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor!

Contributing: Andy Cohen is executive producer of The Real Housewives and Top Chef franchises and host of Watch What Happens: Live on Bravo. His memoir, Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, will be published in May.

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