HotHouse Kids
Bought the book “HotHouse Kids based on a Newsweek review. It’s a half-journalism, half-whimsical essay about gifted kids and the way parents push them to achieve early success. The author describes the lives of several precocious children, with a range of positive and negative experiences; she talks to now adult former child prodigies, and she muses about the big business that has grown fat on the current craze for baby-enrichment products like Baby Einstein.
While being sympathetic to her main premises, I find this book so far very unilluminating. The quality of the logical reasoning ranges from uninterpreted listing of facts and studies to passages of barely coherent free association (where I find the listing of raw facts and study data to be the best the author has to offer). Most of the time, her style seems to be to talk about some aspect of the children’s lives, or of the child-enrichment business she dislikes, and mis in a few mentions of some very negative, but completely unrelated topic. For instance, while talking about the Baby Einstein type products, she suddenly throws in a paragraph about Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and the indoctrination techniques described in the book to brainwash babies. Then she goes on with her story without making any sort of logical connection between the two. At best, this is horribly lazy writing. At worst, it’s a manipulative, almost subliminal attack on the reader. The book is absolutely chock full of this sort of non-rational free association, the intention of which is clearly to bombard the reader until the reader’s world view is molded into the author’s worldview.
Another really bizarre aspect of the book is the author’s apparent obsession with people’s clothing choices. As another reviewer at Amazon says:
“A consistent theme throughout the book is the author’s emphasis on the physical appearance of the people she encountered while researching her book. There is a certain disdain for moms in stretch knits and educators in bright, cheery clothing — in short, for anyone who is not “stylish.” This seems like a nitpicky point, but in my opinion this represents an underlying problem with “Hothouse Kids,” namely the author’s lack of maturity and perspective. I have mixed feelings about using such phrasing in a public forum, but the overall tone of the book is quite catty and junior-high-schoolish, and that both detracts from the book’s positive aspects and highlights its weaknesses. “
I couldn’t agree more. It is just another way the author is trying to make an appeal to the reader’s subconscious, by throwing in descriptions of people’s clothing in very value-laden, judgemental language, as if such descriptions are another argument bullet point providing evidence for her opinions. I find the information about people’s lives interesting. Some of her commentary is interesting (I especially liked the bit about boredom being an essential condition one must experience in order to discover that which is truly of interest to oneself), but all this is completely overshadowed by the lack of any intellectual rigor.
