THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency Li ^^ in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and --- John E. O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky,...
...Matthew Continetti Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age by Kay S. Hymowitz (Ivan R. Dee, 202 pp., $24.95...
...Technology and the Presidency in Fail-Safe and Colossus" and "'Biological Business-as-Usual': The Beast in Oliver Stone's Nixon...
...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...
...Still, anyone who isn't working on a Ph.D...
...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...
...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...
...The essays are all strong on academic jargon and weighty generalizations, and weak on insight...
...How we can break the ugly cycle is a question Hymowitz has yet to answer...
...Readers may be scared away by such titles as "Who's In Charge Here...
...And they have, in the words of Kay Hymowitz, "unprecedented opportunities to realize their talents and tastes...
...On second thought, that last one may come as a surprise...
...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...
...They're liberation's children, and they're growing up in a neighborhood near you...
...Erin Montgomery...
...the only deepness here is the deep sleep they're likely to induce...
...You may not think Dick, the 1999 comedy featuring Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon, is worth serious academic analysis...
...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...
...There's a new breed of children out there...
...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...
...The Standard Reader Books in Brief Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency Li ^^ in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and --- John E. O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 441 pp., $32...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It's no wonder school discipline is dead and that "tweens"—kids between eight and twelve who lean toward troubling teen behavior—are ubiquitous...
...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...
...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...
...But they needn't worry...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 2
