It’s the bad girls of the Bible we remember best: the deceitful Eve, the perfidious Delilah, the ­ex-­sinner Mary Magdalene. But it may be that none has lodged more firmly in the imaginations of Good Book readers than Jezebel, the idolatrous foreign queen who led the king of Israel astray and then got hers when she was thrown from her palace balcony by ­double-­crossing eunuchs, trampled by horses, and finally devoured by ­dogs.

Since this memorable cameo in the ninth century BC, Jezebel’s name has become synonymous with wickedness and promiscuity, right down to the present day, when it attaches to a line of ­mid­priced lingerie and a recently launched blog that flogs “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion. Without Airbrushing.” But the ignominy that trails the woman is undeserved, insists Lesley Hazleton. Rather, it’s the product of a smear by the ancient authors who told her story in the books of Kings. Hazleton, a one-time Middle East journalist and former psychologist, seeks not merely to rinse the mud off the old girl but to elevate her as a paragon of enlightenment and tolerance for the 21st ­century.

Jezebel’s story appears in 1 and 2 Kings, which tell the saga of the Israelite monarchy from its creation under David, through its division into Israel and Judah, to the eventual dissolution of those two kingdoms at the hands of mighty neigh­bors. The books of ­Kings—­except for the postscript about Judah’s ­destruction—­were likely written in the sixth century BC, after Israel had recently fallen to the Assyrians and its southern neighbor, Judah, feared a similar fate at the hands of the ­Babylonians.

“It was the perfect time to write a polemical history,” Hazleton suggests, “one that would explain why the north had collapsed, and act as an object lesson for the south.” That lesson? Don’t worship false gods. The fall gal? Jezebel. Once Hazleton establishes this crude motive, she assigns Kings’ “Judean authors” the anonymity of a Greek chorus. Perhaps she is depending on her lengthy bibliography, which includes Richard Elliott Friedman’s landmark book

(1987), to fill in the gaps. (Friedman fingers the prophet Jeremiah and his scribe as Kings’ chauvinistic storytellers; other scholars point only to Mosaic reformers.)

Hazleton pieces together her entertaining version of Jezebel’s story with reportage from biblical locales, close readings of the Hebrew, bits of history, and asides about everything from the myths surrounding sacred prostitution to how dogs have been regarded in the Middle East through time. Interspersed are imagined scenes from Jezebel’s life that rely on considerable invention, but the poverty of Hazleton’s materials doesn't faze her. She attacks the project with the interpretive certitude necessary to contradict everything we think we know about the painted lady who spurred Israel’s downfall and was the prototype for the Whore of Babylon in the book of ­Revelation.

The account of Jezebel’s three decades in Israel is related disjointedly in several passages scattered throughout Kings. Married off by her father, a king of the seafaring Phoenicians, to the successful Israelite warrior-king ­Ahab—­likely in order to reinforce a political ­alliance—­Jezebel showed up in the land of Yahweh with a raft of deities. Instead of forcing her to abandon this retinue, her new husband built a temple for Baal (a biblical ­catchall name for several gods), made a symbol of Asherah (a variation on Jezebel’s fertility goddess, Astarte), and allowed Jezebel to import several hundred priests and ­priestesses.

Elijah, the Israelite prophet, enraged at this open idolatry, pronounced a curse: no rain. Three years into a devastating drought, he issued a challenge: He and the Baalite priests would prepare separate offerings on Mount Carmel, then see whose god struck a match. Elijah triumphed when ­fire—­a bolt of lightning, ­Hazleton presumes—­consumed his altar. He led the slaughter of the loser Baalites, brought rain to Israel, and skipped all the way back to the city in front of Ahab’s chariot. Whereupon Jezebel threatened to kill him, and he fled south to Judah.

Hazleton’s story, to this point, mostly elabor­ates on the Bible account. From the Mount Car­mel episode onward, she begins to dispute the Kings story, for it reflects badly on her heroine. Jezebel, in her eyes, embodies liberalism, toler­ance, and political pragmatism. Hazleton’s chief evidence for this characterization appears to be Jezebel’s polytheism, though why worshiping more than one god means one plays nice with others Hazleton never explains. The revered prophet Elijah, a wilderness dweller, is the true villain—­and nemesis to the cosmopolitan Jez­ebel, though Kings doesn't indicate that they ever met face to face. For his monotheism, Hazleton labels Elijah a fanatic ideologue, and even his hygiene comes in for a ­drubbing.

Hazleton has her work cut out for her if she’s to thoroughly redeem Jezebel. The queen’s sexual depravity, which has been received as gospel, is easy enough to refute. There’s no evidence that she seduced ­anyone—­including her own ­husband—­with ­come-­hither glances. Even the Kings writers who had it in for her never hint at promiscuity; her harlotry was idol ­worship.

But Jezebel did have blood on her hands. According to the Kings account, during those dry years she ordered Yahweh’s priests killed. This massacre, oddly, is mentioned almost in passing. But it’s there nonetheless. And so Hazleton argues from her own conclusion. When 1 Kings 18:4 says Jezebel “cut off” the priests, it means she merely ended official support, and the line nine verses later that says she slew them outright was a late edit by another ­agenda-­pushing scribe. “Such an act would have been both ­self-­defeating and out of character,” Hazleton sniffs. (Appar­ently, banishing hundreds of priests and severing their livelihoods was not.)

And so it goes. Hazleton dismisses as a fabrication Jezebel’s clumsy yet successful scheme to do away with Naboth, the owner of a vineyard Ahab covets. “Jezebel would have been infuriated at the very idea that such ridiculous overplotting could be attributed to her.” Nevertheless, according to Kings, it sealed the fate of both Ahab and Jezebel, whose deaths Elijah then predicted in bloody ­detail.

Once Ahab (in Hazleton’s depiction, a ­peace-­loving diplomatist who only fought when he had to) died in battle, two of Jezebel’s sons ruled in succession. But a new king, Jehu, was secretly anointed and killed the son then on the throne. When Jezebel heard that Jehu was heading her way next, according to Kings, “She painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window.” This has been portrayed by some as a seduction attempt, but Hazleton steps in and, convincingly, explains the moment in Jezebel’s favor: “She will not quaver, will not buckle at the knees, will never dream of pleading for her life. . . . She will exit boldly, every inch a queen.” Instead, the dogs get their ­dinner.

As if Hazleton’s attempt to rescue Jezebel from the Kings writers’ calumnies weren't ambitious enough, she’s also intent on drawing meaningful modern parallels. Fortunately, she confines these to a few short passages. Today’s Elijahs are religious hard-liners of all stripes, but “radical Islam” gets the most ink. She compares Elijah’s mindset toward errant Israel to that of top Al Qaeda lieutenant Ayman ­al-­Zawahiri, who has advocated “internal jihad,” and she insists on calling Elijah’s prediction of Jezebel’s death by dogs a “fatwa.” These tenuous analogies are stretched to breaking when she describes the antithesis of blind zealotry as “the true spirit of Jezebel.” Despite Hazleton’s earnest attempt to make Jezebel over into a model of tolerance, the phrase is hardly ­reassuring.

are the vogue, and Hazleton has made them her specialty. In 

Mary: A ­Flesh-­and-­Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother

 (2004), she did a kind of ­sinner-­to-­saint portrait in reverse, conjecturing that Mary could have conceived Jesus when she was raped by soldiers, and portraying her as a midwife and member of the resistance against King Herod. 

—­the novel by Gregory Maguire adapted into a hugely successful Broadway ­musical—­which presents the 

 Wicked Witch of the West as a sadly misunder­stood character, a feisty young feminist born with green ­skin.

, too, is best read as a ­fairy tale—­one that riffs on lively historical material. That’s not to say that Hazleton’s reconsideration isn’t valuable. For nearly 3,000 years, conceptions of Jezebel have fossilized around the bones of her story in Kings. In filling in the blanks, Hazleton reminds us how little we really know of Jezebel, and of so many other biblical characters who have become mere articles of faith. Perhaps Jezebel was just a misunderstood foreigner. Perhaps, when she was bad, she really was horrid. But to imagine her, as Hazleton does, as a teenage bride homesick for the smell of the sea, is to extend to her, for a moment, the grace that history has ­not.

"Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen"

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Sarah L. Courteau on the Bible's harlot queen, Jezebel. 

Was the Lady a Tramp?

Add to oil guzzling, outsize coffee drinks, and celebrity malfunctions another American addiction. Happiness, if we’re to believe Eric G. Wilson, is “an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse,” a disaster he com­pares to those foreshadowed by global warming and other apocalypses. Once he’s clucked over his Chicken Little scenario, Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, lays out the case for allowing a little rain to fall into our ­lives.

In the pursuit of happiness, Americans pop pills and read ­step-­by­step guides as never before, cheered on by the popular new field of “positive psychology.” In a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of Americans said they were at least moderately happy, a finding that dismays Wilson, given the world’s woes (see global warming et al.) and life’s irritations (see this morning’s spousal spat at breakfast). Might these inane “happy types,” with their taste for McMansions, televangelists, and Cool Whip desserts, lure the holdouts to the bright ­side?

What most alarms Wilson is the specter of a “police state of Pollyannas” that could deprive us of the creative frisson we experience when we careen between agony and ecstasy. He fears the birth of a nation “denuded of gorgeous lonely roads and the grandeur of desolate hotels, of ­half-­cracked geniuses and their frantic poems.” Or, put more epigrammatically (he has a weakness for variations on his refrain): “The blues are clues to the sublime.”

There’s a powerful argument to be made that the brave new world of psychiatry could extin­guish a certain creative genius that shows up in people we label depressed. Wilson is at no loss for historical examples of writers, painters, musicians, and others who complained of symptoms that would get them a clinical diagnosis today. (In a letter to a friend at the tender age of 16, Ludwig van Beethoven revealed that, in addition to asthma, he suffered from “melancholy which for me is almost as great an evil as my illness itself.”) As for the rest of us, Wilson argues that a healthy helping of “pervasive gloom” will heighten our appreciation of life and of who we ­are.

The best retort to Wilson’s thesis is Peter Kramer’s book 

 (2005), which Wilson’s title clearly references (though only in 

 bibliographical notes, a useful digest of the literature on happiness and depres­sion, does Kramer’s book merit a mention). Kramer argues that Western society has romanticized a condition that ought to be treated aggressively, like any other debilitating disease. Depression itself, he holds, bestows no special generative magic. His is an extreme stance, but important to remember when we wax poetic about tortured ­poets.

Wilson says he is not questioning therapy for “lost souls” who might harm themselves or others or who simply find existence unbearable. But that leaves a lot of pain to be celebrated rather than medicated. Though he wrings his hands at our tendency to treat everyday sadness as if it were a disease, Wilson makes the opposite mistake of failing to engage with the dark side of darkness. After a few pages cataloging the devastation many of his creative heroes wrought in their own lives and others’, he blithely concludes that “out of their suffering emerge things rich and strange.”

Perhaps Wilson’s bigger mistake is that he underestimates the resilience many “happy types” display in the face of life’s miseries, large and small. In that Pew poll he cites as evidence of Americans’ shallow bliss, only a third of those surveyed claimed to be “very happy.” Another 50 percent characterized themselves as only “pretty happy,” which could easily describe folks who, despite the recent death of Fido, yesterday’s parking ticket, and a fraught relationship with Mom, just grin and bear ­it.

"Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy" 

by Eric G. Wilson, Sarah Crichton Books/FSG, 2007. 

Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 

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Sarah Courteau considers the thesis of Eric Wilson's “Against Happiness”: that happiness is “an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse.”

Turn That Smile Upside Down

The ­self-­made man or woman comes off as something of a charlatan anymore. Nearly every day, genetic researchers seem to dis­cover another human trait on which personal gumption doesn’t have all the traction. Genes aside, there’s the latest salvo in the nature vs. nurture debate. In 

 (2008), America’s sweet­heart sociologist, Malcolm Gladwell, argues that the success of those we dub “gen­iuses,” from Bill Gates to Michael Jordan to, well, Malcolm Gladwell, is little more than the snowballing of luck, privilege, cultural lega­cies, and other advantages—and that the disadvantages of circumstance and bad luck are overwhelmingly likely to consign us to mediocrity.

The American creed has never been this deterministic: Smarts and courage are the raw materials of success, yes, but it’s what we choose to do with them that counts. With enough perseverance and hard work, anybody can be some­body. To read 

 with the new calculus in mind makes for a fascinating though ulti­mately frustrating journey. In this difficult-to-classify volume, Daniel Wolff traces the educations of a dozen influential Americans, ranging from conventional choices, such as Abraham Lincoln and John F. Ken­nedy, to the likes of Paiute schoolteacher Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and ­swivel-­hipped crooner Elvis Presley. Wolff ­himself—­poet, music journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of a book about the New Jersey town where Bruce Springsteen made his name—­is difficult to categorize, which is probably why he could get his arms around this disparate cast of ­characters.

The question that guides Wolff is simple: “How do we learn what we need to know?” His poet’s sensibility homes in on the telling detail or the haunting image. The resulting essays resemble daguerreotypes that time and wear have rendered mostly indistinct, leaving only a few bold lines. Perhaps unwittingly, they show how hard his question is to answer. While Wolff excavates the origins of his subjects deftly enough, he shies away from speculating much about exactly how their “educations,” in and more often out of the classroom, bore on the people they became. Still, his essays remind us that greatness in America can bubble up just about anywhere, and that even the great have trouble understanding the ingredients of their own ­success.

Whatever the facts of their lives, public figures in America have tended to play up their humble beginnings. In his 

, Benjamin Franklin encouraged the idea that he arrived in colonial Philadelphia in 1723 a runaway just shy of 18, hungry, broke, with no advantages to speak of. In reality, he grew up in the home of a respectable Boston candle and soap maker, was sent to school at age eight for a spell, and cut his rhetorical teeth as an apprentice to his older brother, a printer. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president, 70 years after Franklin’s death, he traded on the same homespun lore, declaring it “a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life.” His ­education—­a patchwork of winters spent in makeshift ­schools—­he dismissed as “defec­tive,” but it was more than many other fron­tier children received. Both his intellectually inclined mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and his ­book-­toting stepmother, Sally Bush Lincoln, strongly influenced him, and during his teenage years tending a store in Rockport, Indiana, he acquainted himself with the raw new nation by reading several newspapers. Yet we’ve tended to perpetuate the “log cabin myth” (as though Lincoln sprang into office directly from a pile of wood shavings), for, Wolff writes, it “confirmed not only Lincoln’s genius but the country’s.”

By the time Elvis Presley, Wolff’s final subject, was of school age, in the 1940s and ’50s, the son of what many dismissed as poor “trash” could spend eight months out of the year in a class­room. Presley’s more important education was his exposure to gospel singing at the Assembly of God churches his family attended in Tupelo, Mississippi, and later in Memphis. Yet Wolff notes that one of the few times Presley grew visibly angry in public was when an inter­viewer suggested that his style drew from his “holy roller” background. “That’s not it at all! . . . My religion has nothin’ to do with what I do now, because the type of stuff I do now is not religious music.”

Yes, our origins are a touchy business. “An American education,” Wolff observes, “is going to bear the marks of rebellion.” And it stands to reason that go-against-the-grain individuals will reject the notion that their early lives had a whole heap to do with how they got where they are. As Gladwell notes in 

, the Horatio Alger mythos is so strong that we reflexively resist the idea that anything but “pluck and initiative” influenced our success. Jeb ­Bush—­son of one American president and brother to ­another—­once described his family roots as a “disadvantage” in his business career, and when he ran for governor in Florida he repeatedly referred to himself as a ­“self-­made man.”

Whatever stories Wolff’s great Americans told themselves and the country, none of them—even the former slave Sojourner Truth—built their success in a vacuum. Much had to go right for that greatness to build, like a pearl around a grain of sand. But still, there’s that small hard nodule of . . . intelligence? ambition? grit? Henry Ford wrestled to account for his success, and finally concluded—conveniently for his mass-production empire—that though hard work is important, some men are born great, while “the average worker, I’m sorry to say . . . wants a job in which he does not have to think.”

Gladwell’s model of success, that oppor­tunities great and small nudge us toward the heights, doesn’t entirely account for the fact that adversity seems to spur some to achievement and simply to crush others. Nor does it explain the trait that marks every individual in Wolff’s book: the ability to see beyond their present circumstances, to imagine another life for themselves. Henry Ford couldn’t reconcile himself to the life of a farmer that was his lot in rural Michigan. He wanted to take machines apart and figure out how they worked. Environmental writer Rachel Carson grew up in Springdale, a Pennsylvania industrial town where women were “expected to settle down with a man and raise a family.” Her older sister took a stenography job after the 10th grade and entered an early, dis­astrous marriage. Rachel commuted to a neighboring town to finish her high school education, then attended college, rejecting “the idea that she would function as a second-class citizen in a man’s world.”

Wolff’s biographies highlight how little we know, aside from the facts of these lives, about what drove these men and women. Their own accounts reveal more about how they wished to be perceived than about what went on in their minds during those years in schoolhouses, childhood bedrooms, or farm fields. When asked about the education that had made him, Lincoln answered in part: “I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbor’s talk, of an evening, with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a little hunt after an idea, until I had caught it.” Another boy would have lain down and shut his eyes. If Lincoln paced his room because he was born that way, few of us are ready to discount entirely the idea that some spark in him ignited the curiosity encoded in his ­DNA.

What drives any of us to greatness? Awash as we are in genetic research, sociological studies, and standardized-test results, we’re not much closer to answering that question. And perhaps that’s for the best. When ­self-­knowledge tempts us to sit back and let DNA and destiny do the heavy lifting, we’re treading where Adam and Eve got into ­trouble—­and in danger of pinning our failures on any number of snakes. What Wolff’s innocent little biographies do illustrate is that, gifted and driven as our leaders and geniuses are, they’re a whole lot like the rest of ­us—­and not immune to the same foibles. Sure, it’s nice to dwell on the positive. But in these times, I can’t help wishing for a companion volume to 

How Lincoln Learned to Read. Perhaps How Madoff Learned to Steal, or maybe How Greenspan Learned to ­Miscalculate

How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made ­Them

 by Daniel Wolff, Bloomsbury, 345 pp, 2009.

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Made in America

A sign on the outskirts of Jewell, Iowa, greets visitors with the homey slogan, “A Gem in a Friendly Setting.” By the railroad tracks that bisect Main Street, a grain silo stands as a totem of the soybean and corn fields that tickle the yards at the town limits. The population recorded by the census of 1990—the year after my family moved to Jewell when I was 13—was 1,106. South Hamilton High School, housed in a low building at the edge of town, launched me into the world every way it could, even hiring me as an office assistant to give me a little spending money. My calculus teacher tutored me during her free period. My English teacher directed me on independent study projects. The guidance counselor coached me through the college application process and, at one point, put me up in his home while my family was out of town. The summer after I graduated, my family moved away, and I left for an East Coast college. I’ve been back once.

I am what husband-and-wife sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, authors of 

, term an “Achiever,” and I’m part of a big American problem: a rural brain drain that siphons educated young people from “flyover country” into the urban centers they've seen on television sitcoms. In 1940, the authors note, only one in 20 Americans possessed a college degree, and professionals such as doctors and lawyers were scattered around the country fairly evenly. In 1970, five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that created a federal financial aid system, five percentage points separated the most- and least-educated regions of the country. By 2000 the “regional education gap” had more than doubled, to 13 percentage points, reinforcing “a level of uneven development not seen since the Civil War.” Carr and Kefalas moved to a small town in northeastern Iowa, which they dub “Ellis” to preserve its anonymity, and interviewed hundreds of young Iowa natives to try to pin down the factors that influence a person to stay, leave, or return.

Increased educational opportunities are only a part of the story. As journalist Nick Reding documents in his brilliant and hard-won book 

, a new economy has fundamentally altered the rural landscape, even as many of us continue to harbor Mayberry images of Main Streets populated by salt-of-the-earth types, the kind of people who represent “America’s backbone” in political commercials. Over the course of four years, Reding spent countless hours with the residents of Oelwein, a town of less than 7,000 that, like Ellis, is located in northeastern Iowa, to document the methamphetamine epidemic that is devastating rural working-class communities. The problem has tentacles in immigration patterns (meth is moving along the same invisible conduits as illegal immigrant workers, as Mexican cartels take over the trade from homegrown meth mixologists); the consolidation of agribusiness that rendered small farmers nearly extinct; the powerful lobbying efforts of pharmaceutical giants that don’t want restrictions on the sales of cold medicine, a primary meth ingredient; and the forces of globalization that send manufacturing jobs out of the country or simply shrink wages—say, from $18 an hour to $6.20, as happened at Oelwein’s meat processing plant when it was bought by Gillette in 1992.

Meth helps people work harder and longer at demanding jobs—on slaughterhouse floors and in long-haul truck cabs—and thus escapes the stigma of being a “recreational” drug in the minds of many users. It also fills the void of low morale in places where good work—and the good life that results—is in short supply. As local storefronts darken and sheriffs learn to dismantle hazardous meth labs, rural populations are withering. In the mince-no-words view of Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s general practitioner, “How ’bout the first people to leave are of course the smart ones, and the people with enough money to get out. What you’re left with—and I’m sorry, okay?—doesn't qualify Oelwein High as a feeder school for Harvard, okay?”

Carr and Kefalas make much of the fact that adults, particularly teachers, in small towns curry high-achieving students to leave while ignoring the “Stayers.” That may be so, but even the authors concede that the “careful cultivation of the ‘cream of the crop’ ” is unlikely to change—and probably shouldn't. Still, more technical training for Stayers, as Carr and Kefalas advocate, is certainly in order. Green energy and sustainable agriculture initiatives that can reinvigorate local economies are also part of the solution, as are policies that will assimilate immigrants who may be the best hope for towns that would otherwise shrivel into nothing. But it’s difficult to read these earnest prescriptions without a sinking feeling.

 is a sea change in American life that wind turbines and community colleges can’t reverse. Among Reding’s bleak statistics and grim anecdotes, the only real cause for hope is the efforts of individuals—particularly Oelwein’s mayor, Larry Murphy, whom Reding calls a hero—who dig in their heels and stick around to make a difference. They’re bucking a stacked deck, and we need to deal them any cards we can. Reding himself moved back to the Midwest (he was born in Missouri) while writing his book, for which I admire him. That doesn't mean I plan to return to Jewell anytime soon.

"Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain and What It Means for America"

 by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Beacon, 2009.


"Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town"

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The United States is currently experiencing uneven development at a level not seen since the Civil War, as young, educated professionals flock to cities and stay there.

Ghosts of the Heartland

Confess that you regularly consult a thesaurus, and you call your writing skills and even your intelligence into question, such is the ill repute into which this worthy reference has fallen. In a diatribe published in 

 some years ago, Simon Winchester, author of 

), lambasted Peter Mark Roget, the compiler of the granddaddy that spawned today’s myriad online and school-bag versions. Many writers I know scoff when asked whether they ever crack one. Of course, using a thesaurus—in its basic form, a book that groups words with similar or related meanings—can result in travesties against the language, and even common sense, when a novice plucks a word he doesn’t understand from an entry and substitutes it for thought. But to blame Roget for these crude mash-ups (the improvement of the phrase “his earthly fingers” into “his chthonic digits” is but one of Winchester’s amusing examples) is like blaming Henry Ford when a blind man takes a Taurus for a spin.

A thesaurus can extract that word that’s on the tip of your tongue but can’t quite reach your lips. It reacquaints you with words you've forgotten and presents ones you don’t know. It suggests relationships but usually doesn't spell them out—like a hostess who invites you to a party of well-connected guests where you’re expected to circulate and make your own introductions. In our hyper-searchable world, in which shelf browsing and even book skimming are on the wane, the thesaurus reminds us that precision isn't always a matter of predestined calibration. It can still be an informed choice.

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED)

—which contains almost every word from the days of Beowulf to the present, some 920,000 words and expressions in all—seems the sort of resource that has been sitting on reference shelves for decades. Yet it is the first historical thesaurus produced for any language, and made its debut only late last year. Based on the magnificent edifice that is 

has been in the works since 1964, when University of Glasgow English professor Michael Samuels began plugging away at it.

 editors boast that it provides the context other thesauruses lack. It is arranged into three major sections devoted to the external, mental, and social worlds, which are in turn divided into 354 categories (

, etc.), and then further categories and subcategories, from the most general to the most specific. (Roget divided his thesaurus into six broad classes, though most casual users simply flip to the index, unaware of his taxonomy.) Each word is listed with the corresponding year of first and, if applicable, last recorded use. Under the word 

, for instance, you’ll find a list of words that have meant piety over the centuries, and then sub-entries for words that have to do with, but are not the same as, piety. 

 is only two volumes—one consists of entries, the other is an index—to the 20 that compose the 

 second edition. Missing are all those quotations that make the 

 such a wealth of, well, context; it won’t offer enough linguistic hand-holding to stop the abuse that has given thesauruses a bad name. (Thesaurus abusers flock to Thesaurus.com anyway, and likely aren't interested in Old English words for love.) The 

 lists, no matter how finely tuned, confirm what wordsmiths have known all along: The variety and coloration of the language make a precision-engineered thesaurus impossible. Reading the 

 is a fascinating journey through 1,300 years of linguistic history, each entry a series of signposts to not-yet-scrutable destinations. It will send you straight to the dictionary, which is as it should be.

 "Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary" 

edited by Christian Key, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene Wotherspoon, Oxford University Press, 2010. 

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How has regard for the thesaurus fallen so low? 

A Word By Any Other Name

Last fall, two Harvard psychologists published a study for which they had developed a smartphone application that allowed people to rate their happiness in the midst of everyday activities ranging from sex to commuting. The intrepid (intrusive?) researchers found that people whose minds wander are less happy than those who focus on the present moment. It’s the sort of phenomenon Michel de Montaigne would fasten upon if he were alive today—he spent much of his life disciplining himself to live in the here and now—and one more reminder of why the essays of this minor French nobleman and vintner have resonated with so many readers in the four centuries since he wrote them.

Living today amid the wheat and chaff of the Age of I, it’s easy to forget that not long ago, personal accounts, unless they related heroic and likely exaggerated feats or events for the historical record, weren't written for public consumption. The man who changed that was Montaigne, born near the city of Bordeaux in 1533 to a family that had bootstrapped itself from workaday to nobility. From his pen, which produced 107 essays in all, was born an entire genre based on the idea that writing about one’s own experience can, as biographer Sarah Bakewell puts it, “create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity.”

Montaigne spent the last two decades of his life fleshing out his essays, when he wasn't reluctantly attending to the political duties that sought him out, fleeing an outbreak of the plague, or running interference in the religious wars that were rending France. Some of his essays run a few paragraphs, and others are much longer. In my Everyman edition of his complete works, translated by Donald Frame, his essays occupy 1,000 pages, and his letters and travel journals a few hundred more.

What distinguished Montaigne from his contemporaries, as Bakewell explains in 

, her unconventional and thoroughly charming biography, was his interest in how people—and he was always Subject A—actually live, rather than how they ought to live. Whether he was musing on his sensitivity to human body odor, the consciousness of his beloved cat, or the question of whether a captive is likelier to elicit mercy from his captors through pleading or bravado, Montaigne’s writings embody the meaning of the French word essayer, which means to try. He twisted his subjects this way and that, now asking an impertinent question, now adding a colorful observation, now offering a personal or historical anecdote. He often contradicts himself, a habit that seems to reflect his character as much as the fact that his essays are pastiches of at least three major editions. He added—but seldom subtracted—material over the years.

Montaigne gained a large following before his death in 1592, at age 59, of complications related to kidney stones. Informed by the traditions of Stoicism and Skepticism, he has been regarded by some critics in the years since as a bit of a cold fish (and not sufficiently religious), but many others have found his temperate views a comfort. In 

, Bakewell organizes her delightful introduction to Montaigne just as the man himself might have wished—not chronologically or comprehensively, but around the loose themes and questions that informed his life and touch upon our own. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter,” he wrote. “You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.” It’s hard to imagine a more modern and democratic sentiment in this age when we are all famous for 15 minutes—or believe we have a right to be.

"How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer"

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What distinguished Montaigne from his contemporaries was his interest in how people actually live, rather than how they ought to live. 

He Put the 'I' in Tries

A year ago I moved into a row house in northeast Washington, D.C., two miles from the Capitol. I paid $85,000, a price so low it’s a punch line in a city where the average home sells for more than $600,000. The hot water heater was missing, and the bathroom tub drained into a downstairs closet. My house inspector, a dead ringer for the gravel-voiced actor Sam Elliott, tramped silently from room to room, occasionally pausing to pronounce, “It’s not proper.” The house was in foreclosure and had been vacant for a couple of years, so when I found crayons under the old carpet, I was spared the guilt of imagining them in still-young fingers. But once, someone had loved this place. The backyard bloomed with rosebushes staked with weathered shoelaces. With an FHA-backed loan and a savvy contractor, I gutted the house and renovated it. I found myself realizing a dream I’d assumed was miles out of reach: I was a homeowner.

A white, single professional in my thirties, I moved into a neighborhood of modest houses that is almost 90 percent black and where about a third of the population lives below the poverty line. I’m a gentrifier, a category of urban resident that has become a lightning rod for debates about the evolution of our cities. Last year, a study published in the 

 found evidence of gentrification during the 1990s in the majority of the country’s 72 largest metropolitan areas. But few places match the galloping pace of gentrification in the nation’s capital. In the last 10 years, Washington’s population has grown by five percent, after steadily shrinking since 1950. The white population is up by nearly a third. Since the 1960s blacks have been a majority in the District of Columbia, but that balance will likely shift in the next few years.

Unlike places such as Harlem in New York City, where yuppies have snapped up decrepit but once-grand brownstones, my neighborhood, which was originally settled by European immigrants, has always been working class. My two-bedroom is less than 800 square feet, upstairs and down, and lacks a basement. I love the neighborhood—known as Rosedale, after the recreation center on the next block—and feel proud and a little defiant to have pulled off a financial coup that’s landed me a comfortable life in a place that some relatives and friends, and, especially, taxi drivers (who collectively form a modern Greek chorus of prophetic doom) describe as “sketchy.” But it’s with a mixture of pride and embarrassment that I hear myself called an urban pioneer. Because, of course, this is a long-settled neighborhood. It’s only new to me.

Many of my neighbors have lived in Rosedale for decades, and others can trace their roots back generations. They remember when the neighborhood was a mix of blacks and whites, before whites began to pick up and leave in the middle of the last century. They remember when blacks did their shopping on H Street because they weren't welcome in downtown department stores. They remember when the Rosedale playground was desegregated, largely due to the efforts of local resident Walter Lucas, who one day in 1952 led a group of black children over to play and was beaten and then arrested along with one of his assailants. They remember the riots that tore the area apart for three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and left the area’s commercial spine, H Street, in smoking ruins. Fifty-year-old Stephon Starke recalls that word went out that businesses would be spared only if they displayed a picture of King in the window. His father had put a picture in the window of their house, but not at the liquor store he owned off H Street. Two Great Danes kept the store safe, but many other black-owned businesses did not survive.

H Street was in decline even before the riots. Afterward, though some businesses reopened, many damaged buildings remained vacant. The street was a mute reminder of social failure. Still, life went on. There were summer go-go concerts and afternoons at the Rosedale pool. Kids played in the streets under the watchful eyes of all the adults in the neighborhood. The 1970s saw the beginnings of the drug and crime epidemics that would become full-blown in the 80s. People started referring to parts of the neighborhood as “Vietnam,” and residents installed bars on their windows and locked doors they’d once left unlatched. In 1980, James Hill, the proprietor of Hill’s Market, where people sent their kids never worrying that they’d be shortchanged and old folks could buy food on credit, was shot to death in an argument over change for a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes.

After the riots, recalls 45-year-old Necothia Bowens, who lives in a house on E Street N.E. that her great-grandparents occupied, the area was abandoned by city authorities. Their attitude, she says, was, “Well, you did this. It’s your mess to clean up.” No longer. In 2004, the D.C. government approved a major redevelopment plan calling for more than $300 million in (mostly private) investment in the mile-long commercial corridor of H Street that runs from Second Street N.E. to the Maryland Avenue intersection, three blocks from my house.

Today, H Street is an obstacle course of bulldozers and construction signs. An extensive streetscape project is under way, and track is being laid for a streetcar system that next year will connect this once-deteriorated artery to the Union Station transportation hub. Most evenings, young white partiers from other parts of the city and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs crowd into a string of new bars. During the day, foot traffic is sparser, and many of the faces are black. Muggings and break-ins do occur, but at about the same rate as in other parts of the city. A Rosedale gang known as the E Street Bangers is reportedly still active, though the only evidence I've seen of it is in graffiti. Serious violent crime is rare, and bar-goers and new residents are seldom targets. Long-abandoned buildings ring with the sound of pounding hammers, and a luxury apartment complex is rising on a vacant lot where a Sears once stood.

Though the word has only been in circulation for a few decades, gentrification has become another of the litmus test issues that define who we are on the political and—in the eyes of some—moral spectrum.

The very origin of the word “gentrification” to describe the process by which an urban area is rendered middle class is not neutral. The eminent sociologist Ruth Glass is credited with coining it in 1964 to decry the changes in working-class London neighborhoods. Though the word has only been in circulation for a few decades, gentrification has become another of the litmus test issues that define who we are on the political and—in the eyes of some—moral spectrum.

The lines of conflict are readily apparent in the comments readers leave on blogs that cover Washington’s transitional neighborhoods. Some writers are angry that the neighborhood is changing at all; others are angry that it isn't changing fast enough. Some want to control the change, ensuring that a curated mix of businesses is established—no chain stores, please, but nothing too “ghetto,” either. And some want to curate the people. Gentrification, though driven by economic change, often boils down to issues of race, even among diversity-celebrating gentrifiers. Elise Bernard, a 32-year-old lawyer who bought a house off H Street in 2003, has for years written intelligently and reliably about the area on her blog Frozen Tropics. Bernard, who is white, recalls a conversation she had with a college friend when she was contemplating renting out a couple of rooms in her house. “She wanted me to somehow racially balance the house, like bring in an African American and an Asian, and I’m like, ‘This is not 

When I started reading Frozen Tropics, I was taken aback by the racial tension running through many of the discussions. Most of the comments appear to be left by whites, though anonymity reigns. Last summer, when Bernard posted news of gunfire (no one was injured) outside XII, an H Street club that attracts a largely black clientele, the item drew more than 70 comments. “Post all the ‘oh it could have happened anywhere’ nonsense you want, bleeding hearts,” sneered one anonymous writer. “This type of crap only happens at joints like XII. . . . Cater to a predominately younger, black, male population, and violence will likely follow.” Another, enraged by the “entitled racist yuppie mentality” of the neighborhood, wrote, “May your home values go to shit and may you each find a Burger King wrapper on your lawn!”

Absent in most of these discussions are the voices of those who have lived in the neighborhood all along. I've been met with abundant kindness since I moved to Rosedale. Still, as I ride beside local residents on the bus or pass them in the street, the knowledge that I’m a sign of change they may have mixed feelings about has made me cautious behind my “Hello.” As I prepared to write this piece, I was struck time and again by people’s willingness to talk to me, a gentrifier who had moved into their neighborhood and was, in essence, asking how they felt about it. Thelma Anderson, a retiree who has lived in the house a few doors down from me since the 1980s, told me she is glad that whites are back and that they don’t show fear. But several longtime residents I spoke with expressed ambivalence. They’re happy to see the neighborhood improving but unsure what their place will be in the H Street neighborhood of the future.

The man who’s probably done the most to re-envision H Street is Joe Englert, a restaurant and nightclub entrepreneur just shy of 50. He recalls that when he arrived on H Street several years ago, after putting his quirky stamp on other parts of the city, “every block had a barbershop or a hair weave operation, a takeout, and a church. Other than that, you didn't have more than three or four businesses per block.” He opened his first club, Palace of Wonders, a tongue-in-cheek burlesque bar, in 2006. Today he has a stake in half a dozen establishments on H Street. Englert’s aggressively funky imprint has made the street an entertainment mecca for people in search of an alternative to clubs with dress codes.

A brash Pittsburgh native who exudes a slightly unruly aura of intense activity, Englert has no patience with hand-wringing over gentrification, or “gentri-fiction,” as he calls it. “The only thing that is constant is change,” he says when he meets me for an interview at the Star and Shamrock, a Jewish- and Irish-themed bar that’s another one of his projects. “This was an Irish street, an Italian street, a Jewish street, then it became a black street. Why would it stop changing? That’s the question. Why would anybody expect things to stay the same, when people live, die, move, improve their lives? I mean, who’s gonna dig in and own the mantle?”

As an agent of change myself, I nod my head in agreement. Walking down H Street, it’s hard not to feel a heady sense of inevitability. Change! Progress! And to hold the conviction that all the choices I make about how I live—the way I keep up my yard, the restaurants and shops I patronize, the kinds of foodstuffs I buy at the local grocery store—are contributions to a joint project of incremental improvement that’s spread among thousands of households.

And then, walking home laden with groceries, I watch a tall teenage boy in front of me drop a crumpled white plastic bag, so casually that it seems it’s drifted from his hand because he forgot he was holding it. It falls onto the sidewalk, where it slowly relaxes into uselessness. It is now a piece of trash. I ponder whether to stoop and pick it up and throw it into a nearby trash can. Wouldn't that constitute a censure not only of him, should he turn around and see me, but of the whole neighborhood, where trash blows into streets and yards and forms middens in alleyways? But wouldn't walking by it be a kind of acquiescence? It’s this sort of minute social calculus that’s the mark of the self-conscious gentrifier, not quite sure of her status in the community.

The assumption, so widely held that it’s regarded as fact, is that gentrification is synonymous with displacement.

Whites aren't the only drivers of gentrification. When I go for a drink at Langston Bar & Grille, a three-year-old soul food restaurant and bar a scant block from my house on Benning Road, at the eastern edge of the H Street scene, the place is full, the cocktails aren't cheap, and mine is often the only white face. Yet it’s whites, not incoming middle-class blacks, who get the attention, as Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, observes in 

(2006), his valuable study of the attitudes of residents in transitional neighborhoods. The surprise at white faces, he writes, indicates “just how racially isolated many of America’s inner-city communities had become.”

What those faces mean lies at the heart of debates over gentrification. The assumption, so widely held that it’s regarded as fact, is that gentrification is synonymous with displacement. Adding to the subtext of forced relocation are bitter memories of inner-city revival efforts. The federal urban renewal program, engineered to usher the American city into postwar Corbusier-style order and modernity, destroyed some 1,600 black communities in American downtowns between 1949 and 1973, estimates Mindy Thompson Fullilove, the author of 

 (2004) and a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia. The federal highway program also restructured many cities, razing swaths of poor neighborhoods and providing an easy route along which middle-class whites and blacks who were leaving for the suburbs could still commute to downtown jobs.

Quality studies of the residential impacts of gentrification are few, but those that exist largely don’t support the notion that low-income residents are forced out of gentrifying areas en masse. In the study published in the 

, a trio of researchers that included University of Pittsburgh economist Randall Walsh analyzed nationwide Census data and found no such evidence, though they did confirm, unsurprisingly, that newcomers are more likely to be white, college educated, and better paid. Unexpectedly, the analysis also showed that in primarily black gentrifying neighborhoods, black high school graduates are responsible for a third of total income gains as the area’s affluence increases. It’s unclear, however, how many of those beneficiaries are longtime residents and how many are newcomers attracted by gentrification.

Columbia’s Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, former executive director of the nonprofit Citizens Housing and Planning Council, studied mobility patterns in New York City and found that poor households in gentrifying neighborhoods are 

 likely to move than poor households elsewhere. They concluded that neighborhood improvements induce residents to stay and that rent control laws—in force in cities including New York and Washington—are quite effective at restraining rent increases in gentrifying areas. (Like Walsh and his colleagues, Freeman and Braconi used data from the booming 1990s. It’s unclear if patterns have changed since the economic downturn.)

On the ground, the changes these studies record are the accretion of individual choices. For the past six years, Amanda Clarke, a black architect who moved to the United States from Jamaica in 1986, has made her home in Rosedale. A soft-spoken 40-year-old who lives three blocks from me, Clarke bought her house in a foreclosure auction in 2004 without even seeing the inside, during the height of the D.C. real estate bubble when she couldn't snag a house elsewhere in the city. A couple of years later, she bought a vacant house across the street and rebuilt it from the ground up, designing it with clean modern lines and lots of light. It’s a bright spot on the block when I pass by. Despite the slow economy, the house attracted multiple offers within days of being put on the market last spring. (The buyer, an Asian-American woman in her thirties who works as a management consultant at Deloitte, moved from a thoroughly gentrified D.C. neighborhood.) Clarke just sold a second rehabbed house, a block from her first project, and is preparing to start on a third.

Clarke knows that the homes she designs are attracting people from outside the neighborhood, but what, she asks, should she do differently? Build less attractive homes? Use inferior materials? “This whole idea of affordable, it’s a tough one. What is affordable? What does that mean? Because if by definition things are changing, property values are going up as a result—just by the mere fact that all the vacancies are being renovated. Are you going to try to hold property values down? Do you renovate at a certain level? Do you lower the level? What do you do?”

Not long ago, Necothia Bowens introduced me to Jacqueline Farrell, who in 1971 bought her house on E Street N.E. from a man she describes as the last white person then living in the neighborhood. Farrell, 61, whom everyone refers to as “Miss Jackie,” is a woman with a pleasantly husky voice and quick laughter known for her cooking. It was a Sunday afternoon, and her niece, Kym Elder, 44, who lives in Maryland and works for the National Park Service, was visiting. Patricia Lucas, 50, who lives across the street and whose father-in-law was the man who desegregated the Rosedale playground, joined us as well, as did Bowens. There was a lot of jocular reminiscing, and talk about the current changes to H Street.

“It looks good,” said Farrell. “It’s improving the neighborhood, but I don’t think it belongs to the blacks anymore.”

Elder chimed in, remarking to her aunt that she recalled the first time she rode down H Street and noticed white faces. “It was a spring night after dark. And I called you on the phone, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, where the hell am I? I’m riding past the Atlas [Theater], and they have little bistros. And they’re not afraid.’”

Everyone in Farrell’s living room was happy to see new storefronts and businesses healing over the scars of the 1968 riots. But they expressed concerns, too. There are rumors that an area high school is going to be converted to a charter school that will require students to apply for admission. Bowens is bothered that the two bars on H Street that mostly attract black patrons, XII and Rose’s Dream, seem to get more scrutiny from the authorities than other bars on the strip. No one wants property taxes to go up. If you’re not planning to leave, the concurrent rise in property values that gentrifiers like to celebrate isn't much consolation.

As for their new neighbors? Well, the early experience of those at Miss Jackie’s house has been mixed. It was some years ago that the first white person in the new wave moved to the block. In their description, the fellow sounds like a poster child for bad gentrifiers. He called the police on his neighbors again and again for a litany of minor infractions and walked his two fearsome Akita dogs through pedestrians on the sidewalk “like he was parting the Red Sea,” Farrell said. Since he left about a year ago—was foreclosed on, is the rumor—the block is peaceful again. But Elder is troubled that when she comes to visit her aunt in Rosedale and says hello to passersby new to the neighborhood, they don’t always return the greeting.

The real friction is with people who have moved in near Brown Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church on 14th Street N.E., which Farrell and Elder both attend. The newcomers have complained about parishioners parking on the surrounding streets on Sundays and the loud gospel singing that comes from the church. Some, Farrell suspects, get up early on Sunday mornings to park their cars just far enough apart that churchgoers can’t fit their vehicles in the spaces between. A few neighbors have even come into the church and interrupted services. “They came down and they talked to us like we were dogs,” Farrell said. Elder was equally incensed: “In the biblical days, they had people come into the services and try to disrupt them because they were ungodly. Well, literally, we have to have men at the doors of the church now because unfortunately our new white neighbors are saying, ‘Wait! Ya’ll parking? How long you going to be in services?’ I mean, coming into the house of the Lord, screaming and hollering!”

In general, it’s not the changes themselves that bother longtime residents of Rosedale. It’s how and why those changes are happening. In a separate interview, Bowens ruefully conceded that it was whites who “saw the baby ready to be reborn” on H Street. She works as a secretary for a downtown doctor, but noted that business ownership runs in her blood—for years her grandmother ran a restaurant near the Capitol where people lined up for fried fish on Fridays. “I had an opportunity a long time ago to say, ‘You know, H Street is there. No one’s doing anything on H Street. I can go open up a business.’ But because we weren't taught as black people how to do that, we kind of let it sit. . . . That 

The perception that change of others’ making is washing over longtime residents is what’s at the heart of their anxieties. No one but criminals wants fewer police on the streets. No one wants houses and commercial buildings to remain vacant. But neither do they want their community to become a place where they’re the ones who don’t belong. That’s why displacement—though it may not happen as often as people assume—is such a powerful notion.

Bowens, who has gotten active in community politics, wants to be upbeat. She helped start a scholarship fund for area students, and ran, unsuccessfully, for the local seat on D.C.’s neighborhood advisory commission. But she gets pensive when I ask her what she worries about for the future. “In my mind, the changes that are happening still need to continue, but we need to make sure that we embrace people, because if you don’t, it’s going to be—this is a heavy word—but it’s going to be like a holocaust effect. If you get people to come in and take over, it’s going to be like a slavery takeover. You just got people that take over and don’t care about the mindset of the people, and they just try to kill off everything that doesn't belong or look like them.”

For the past few weeks, the rattle and grind of backhoes has filled the air. The dilapidated Rosedale Recreation Center was torn down last fall to make way for a brand-new complex, complete with a library and an indoor swimming pool. Months of red tape delayed construction, but work has finally resumed. Many of the residents I spoke to don’t go to the new bars and restaurants on H Street, but everyone was eager for the recreation center to rise again. Stephon Starke, the man whose father owned a liquor store during the riots, teaches boxing to kids there. It’s the heart of the community and a monument to its history.

Hearing my neighbors talk of the day the recreation center would reopen, I saw a gulf between the way they perceived it and the way I do—as a boon to my property value, primarily. Some gentrifiers move in and stay, but many, like me, have one foot outside the neighborhood from the start, anticipating the day when a new job or the birth of a baby who will grow up and need to attend a good school will prompt us to put a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. I may not be here long enough to see the rec center completed a year from now, let alone send my own children, when I have them, off to the pool. No matter how you measure transience on that spectrum of urban morality, it separates me from my neighbors.

But the possibility of goodbye is no excuse not to say hello on the street.

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How can you be an urban pioneer when you move to an inner-city neighborhood where families have lived for generations? 

New to the Neighborhood

Depression is the flaw in love,” wrote Andrew Solomon in 

, his exploration of the disease that won the National Book Award in 2001. “To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose.” Depression was a scourge he had experienced personally, and the book he produced was intimate yet clinical: Solomon claims that he can veer into self-pity, but it’s not a thing he indulges in on the page. 

, the book he has spent the last decade working on, addresses another vast subject, one that isn’t discussed as often as the dark caul of depression. This is a book about families in which a child is flawed — at least in the eyes of much of the world. In it, Solomon expounds on what has turned out to be his great and enduring theme: love and its costs.

In a gargantuan volume that weaves together personal histories (he interviewed more than 300 families), cultural and historical background, and scientific research, Solomon, a journalist and lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University, describes the steep challenges parents face when they raise children who are not like themselves. He includes chapters on families with children who are deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, severely disabled, transgendered, categorized as dwarfs, diagnosed with Down syndrome, classed as criminals, and conceived as the result of rape. He even has a chapter on prodigies — focusing on musicians — that demonstrates the gulf that being extraordinarily gifted can create between child and parent. While the focus remains on the families he interviewed, Solomon frames his book with two autobiographical chapters. In the first, he describes the alienation he felt growing up with the “horizontal identity” (that is, an identity his mother and father did not share) of a gay man. The final chapter recounts the decision he and his husband made, during the writing of 

, to raise from birth a child that was biologically Solomon’s own. (The biological mother was a surrogate.)

The gift Solomon gives readers is insight into situations that many with “normal” families (a term he ceaselessly interrogates) don’t think they could imagine, much less manage. The gift Solomon gives his subjects is sympathy without pity. Solomon encounters not just acceptance but often celebration among the parents of these kids — and an attachment so fierce that it defines for him the universal parent-child bond. In support of that bond, parents of children with extraordinary needs, health issues, or abilities outside the realm of their own experience go to extraordinary lengths. They become researchers, teachers, activists, nurses, coaches, parole officers, and linguists. They move across the country so their children can go to a better school. They spend every cent they have on treatments they can’t afford. They learn sign language. They commit to having their children with them for life, or, equally difficult, to placing them in a home where they can receive the care they need.

Along the way, many parents are surprised at the strength and resourcefulness they discover in themselves. Timid personalities are transformed into “won’t take no for an answer” advocates. Nancy Corgi, the mother of two children with autism, told Solomon, “My entire personality has changed. I’m quick to pick a fight; I’m argumentative. You don’t cross me. I have to do what I have to do, and I’m going to get what I want. I never was like this at all.” Several parents who cared for a child with disabilities and were later diagnosed with cancer or another serious disease told Solomon that their child had instilled in them the fortitude to face their own treatment or even death.

But Solomon does not sugarcoat the cost of raising a child with a horizontal identity. Some couples’ relationships, he found, are strengthened by the challenge. A number of his subjects’ marriages, however, weren’t able to endure the strain, even when both parents remained devoted to their child. Perhaps most difficult of all is the lot of parents whose children don’t appear to absorb or return the love they give. Some kids with autism or multiple severe disability can appear emotionally affectless. People who develop schizophrenia can grow openly hostile and even violent toward family members. As Solomon puts it, “Emotion is not gratis. To love a child who does not evidently mirror your love exacts a more terrible price than other love.”

The stories Solomon tells and the history he recounts illustrate how far scientific understanding and social acceptance of many disabilities and differences have come. School programs and education centers tailored to the needs of autistic learners have been founded, and there are support and advocacy groups for parents as well as autistic people that did not exist until relatively recently. Only a few decades ago, parents who gave birth to babies with Down syndrome were advised in the hospital to have their children immediately institutionalized, or were told that their “ ‘mongoloid’ would never learn to speak, think, walk, or talk.” People with Down syndrome in the public eye, including Jason Kingsley, who in the 1980s was a regular guest on 

, for which his mother was a writer, and Lauren Potter, a star on the current TV series 

, have changed social attitudes toward Down syndrome.

But there is still a long way to go. A heartbreaking chapter on transgendered kids tells stories of utter acceptance at the same time that it documents instances of horrific bigotry. Anne O’Hara found that she and her children could no longer live in the Southern community where she grew up when her transgendered adopted son transitioned to a female identity and started going by “Kelly.” When they began receiving threats that Kelly would be killed or mutilated, O’Hara and her children moved out of state.

The subjects of Solomon’s book are, of course, those who agreed to talk to him, and as he acknowledges, they are the parents whose approach to rearing a child who is far from the tree is likely to have been positive and accepting. Many are also well to do, a circumstance that is perhaps in part a function of Solomon’s social circle. (He is independently wealthy.) This means they can afford to go to extraordinary financial lengths, even though, as Solomon found, having money is not necessarily crucial to achieving a better outcome. Icilda Brown, a black woman living in the Bronx who worked as a housecleaner to support her five children, one of whom has learned to live with autism, now speaks to other parents of autistic kids. “I’ll say, ‘You see my son now. And now see your kid’s running and not talking. That was him. If you give up, your child doesn’t have a chance. I looked back, and I said to the Lord, ‘Oh, thank you for bringing me from such a long ways.’ ” Solomon remarks that Brown “seemed more at peace with her son’s condition than almost any other mother I met.”

 is more than 900 pages long — and that the version Solomon originally sent his publisher was twice that length. The stories he tells and the complex moral and philosophical questions he explores take time and space to tease out, and often he stands aside and lets his subjects tell the stories themselves. A major theme of the book is that what is best for one may not be best for all. Solomon mostly leaves it to individuals, both his readers and his subjects, to decide how and where to draw those lines. At one point, he describes a woman who chose to give up her child with multiple severe disability to foster care, commenting, “I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.” There are a few times when he is direct about the need to intercede on behalf of a child. After a two-page catalog of cases in which parents have murdered or attempted to kill their autistic children, some out of desperation and others out of a conviction that doing so is altruistic, Solomon balks at the suggestion that there are cases in which mercy killing is justified: “Courtroom leniency sends a message to the society at large, to other parents, and to people with autism that autistic lives are less valuable than other lives.”

Many of the parents he interviewed wrestle with the fact that their children may experience pain and distress as the price of their very existence. Was it right to bring them into the world? Given what they know now, would these parents do it again? Those questions are particularly pointed in the case of a disability such as Down syndrome, for which increasingly sophisticated prenatal tests are available. Once they have children with disabilities, the question these parents face is whether they should wish for a cure for a son or daughter whom they’ve come to accept and love on the child’s own terms — or, barring a cure, what interventions are merited: cochlear implants for the deaf? limb lengthening for dwarfs? hormone treatment for transgendered children?

Not every parent, of course, will choose to bear and raise a child with differences. Many women abort fetuses diagnosed in the womb with a disability. Others carry the pregnancy to full term and give the child up to foster care or adoption. But many of the mothers and fathers Solomon interviewed can’t imagine choosing those options — or are glad they didn’t have them at the moment of decision. “Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others,” Solomon concludes. “They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die — even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.”

Unlike many of the parents in Solomon’s book, Tom and Sue Klebold didn’t know from the time of their son Dylan’s birth about the “identity” — that of a homicidal and suicidal criminal — that would eventually separate them from him forever. Dylan Klebold was one of the two young men who shot 13 people to death at Columbine High School in 1999. But like the other parents Solomon interviewed, the Klebolds have grappled with the complex emotional and moral calculus of having brought their child into the world.

Solomon ends his chapter on juvenile criminals with Sue Klebold’s words: “When it first happened, I used to wish that I had never had children, that I had never married. If Tom and I hadn’t crossed paths at Ohio State, Dylan wouldn’t have existed and this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. But over time, I’ve come to feel that, for myself, I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids I did, because the love for them — even at the price of this pain — has been the single greatest joy of my life. When I say that, I am speaking of my own pain, and not of the pain of other people. But I accept my own pain; life is full of suffering, and this is mine. I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.”

 was literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

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Loving children who are flawed in the eyes of the world

Several years ago, I was living in Washington with one of my brothers, who had come to stay with me while he pulled himself out of a rough patch. Eventually, he got a gig selling memberships at a gym, part of a well-known national franchise. No one in our family is a natural salesperson, but it was a job, and at least the gym is one place where my brother is in his element.

He had the closing shift, and he’d get home in his regulation polo shirt and raid the fridge just as I was going to bed. Pulling in a paycheck straightened his shoulders, as it does for anyone. Some of his wry humor returned, and so it was that one night he came in and, standing at the kitchen counter, recited “The Affirmation,” the creed that new gym employees had to learn by heart:

I will win. Why? I’ll tell you why — because I have faith, courage, and enthusiasm! Today, I’ll meet the right people in the right place at the right time for the betterment of all. I see opportunity in every challenge. I am terrific at remembering names. When I fail, I look at what I did right, not what I did wrong. I have clearly defined goals. I never take advice from anyone more messed up than I am. I never let a negative thought enter my head. I am a winner, a contributor, an achiever. I believe in me.

We laughed until there were tears on our cheeks, in part because of the mock enthusiasm with which my brother belted out that last line, but mostly at the idea that such earnest propaganda could ever be received — much less adopted — with a straight face. What kind of chump did these corporate types think he was?

But really, what was so ludicrous about a company that makes its money burnishing the temple of the body applying that same approach to the mind? Sure, it isn’t exactly a tune you can dance to. Still, “The Affirmation,” crude as it is, echoes some of the time-tested ideas of the self-improvement canon, old and new. Back in 1936, in 

, a folksy businessman’s bible that is really just a useful guide to not being a jerk, Dale Carnegie admonished his readers to “remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” And in the 2006 blockbuster 

, various “experts” unrelentingly advocate using positive thinking to mobilize the “law of attraction” in your favor. “Your life is a mirror of the dominant thoughts you think,” but the law of attraction doesn’t register “words of negation,” says one of these authorities. (In other words, if you’re thinking “I don’t want the restaurant to give away our table,” what the universe hears is “I want restaurants to give away our tables.”) 

, with its pseudo-historical references and simplistic explanations peddled as deep insights. The law of attraction is bunk. But there really are some benefits to thinking positively.

The truth is, my brother could have done worse than take “The Affirmation” to heart. And at that point in my life, dating a string of men whom Dale Carnegie would have kicked to the curb, I could have, too. The main trouble with “The Affirmation” was the source — a company that wanted its workers to bristle with enthusiasm so they’d sell more memberships. That didn’t invalidate the message.

There’s a fundamental contradiction in our attitudes about self-help — a term that describes the broad category of products and ideas that are supposed to make us thinner, happier, smarter, and more efficient. We Americans accept protein powders, extreme diets, personal trainers, expensive gym memberships, and the Rube Goldberg exercise contraptions that litter our basements and garages as the necessary paraphernalia for the pursuit of physical perfection. We openly admire gym rats and envy their fit bodies. But anyone who dabbles in the improvement of the mind — even taking yoga that hasn’t had its spiritual roots bleached out completely — invites a raised eyebrow among those of us who consider ourselves serious people. We are above such lockstep platitudes, empty positivity, and pop psychology.

As I read through a stack of self-help books in preparation for this essay

, I started with what I hoped was an anthropologist’s distance. It diminished pretty much immediately. I found myself mulling insights from 

 (2012). In both books, she records her attempts to take domestic bliss to the next level and offers tips on how the rest of us can, too. “Acknowledge the reality of other people’s feelings,” a chestnut that’s at the heart of Dale Carnegie’s win-people-over philosophy but is easy to lose sight of, did wonders for Rubin when she was faced with a kid’s tantrum. I could see plenty of applications in my relationships with adults.

In conversations, I took to reciting various 

 (2012), which distills his life wisdom into a charming do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did primer. Burroughs made his literary mark — and a fortune — with books including 

 (2002), about growing up in two dysfunctional families, and the rehab memoir 

 (2003). When he warns, “The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past,” he knows whereof he speaks. He seemed to be specifically describing my own tendency to endlessly rehash family history with certain others of my flesh and blood, sort of like saying a rosary together, rather than look at what we can do about the here and now.

With each mention of the current self-help book I was reading, I’d include a “research” disclaimer, afraid to risk the judgment or, worse, pity of those who’d now lump me with weak-minded housewives who fall prey to TV pitches for kitchen gadgets that can Do All This and More! for $29.95. That fear is another reason self-help provokes such profound unease in us. We assume it’s the opiate of the intellectual underclasses — the people who don’t know any better than to go in for that sort of thing. And that’s where we’re wrong.

The ethos of self-help is woven into American culture. It’s the literature of aspiration. The pursuit of happiness is embedded right there in the document that launched the American experiment. For centuries, religion has offered a strong tonic for those in need of backbone, upper-lip stiffening, moral guidance, or practical advice. The cultivation of good human relationships and moderation in both food and drink — two central preoccupations of the self-help industry — are touchstones of the Christian faith.

It’s hardly a coincidence that self-help is booming at a time when America is less religious than ever before. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that nearly one in five of us claims no religious affiliation at all. But we’re still in need of guideposts — a Good Book or a guru — when our appetites, our relationships, our finances, or the general busyness of life get the best of us. 

, a Florida research firm that tracks the U.S. self-improvement industry, puts the price tag for our collective appetite for self-help books and seminars and those ubiquitous infomercials for diets, speed-reading, and killer abs at $10 billion a year.

 is buying all that stuff. Men are a distinct minority of the self-help clientele — only about 30 percent, according to Marketdata. They tend to consult books about how to dominate in the boardroom or be a savvier investor. The typical consumer is a woman who is middle aged and affluent. (By and large, self-help is neither marketed to nor used by the young, who are busy out there making the mistakes they’ll be looking to fix in a few years’ time.) She’s someone who wants to maximize, and she has the luxury of a little money — and perhaps time — to worry about how to take off a few pounds, put her best foot forward at work, improve her relationship or her dating life, get her schedule or her closets more organized, or become a better mother. She is representative of a generation that has made enormous strides, yet she feels dissatisfied with where she is.

It’s easy for women to believe they need all the help they can get. We’re raised on 

, both of which are chock-full of tips on how to pluck our eyebrows, choose a lipstick, or have better sex. We graduate to 

 when we have households of our own. The line between fighting for equal footing — that elusive sense of “empowerment” that we’re forever supposed to be grasping for — and the conviction that we could 

 be doing more is fine, if it exists at all. No surprise that self-help marketers know that their target audience consists of people who have already shelled out money for a self-improvement product within the last several months.

As much as I enjoyed my foray into self-help

 — a bit too much, in the opinion of some near and dear to me — I grew increasingly uneasy about it. No matter how “authentic,” “down to earth,” or “real” this advice is supposed to be (and marketers, if not the authors and seminar leaders themselves, tout these qualities at every opportunity), the creators of these self-help products are not people like us. There’s much we don’t know about them—whether they stiff their waiters, snap at their spouses, or kick the dog when they come home. But what we do know should be enough to give us pause. Self-help, along with the rest of the culture, has undergone a pronoun shift, from “you” to “I.” In Dale Carnegie’s 

 or, to go back to the beginning of the genre, Samuel Smiles’s 

 (1859), the inspirational anecdotes are about others. Today, the focus is relentlessly on the I who is delivering whatever advice is on offer. It’s their lives that serve as the platform, and if they’ve overcome hardship, so much the better.

Increasingly, that I is a woman. In the self-help industry, male gurus have traditionally dominated, but today there are more women at the top. I’m looking at you, Oprah Winfrey, Suze Orman, and, most recently, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. For women like me, looking for a way to balance the stresses and pressures of trying to do it all, these women’s success is actually a problem. We might not seek to emulate Tony Robbins’s home life or look to Dr. Phil as a role model. But female self-help authors are a different story.

I have to keep reminding myself that Sandberg, who just published Lean In, in which she argues that women need to become more forceful advocates for themselves in the workplace, has a battery of nannies and household staff and a net worth of several hundred million. Yes, Oprah Winfrey grew up in poverty, but it’s been many, many years since she looked into a bare fridge. Financial doyenne Suze Orman takes every opportunity to remind us that at age 29 she was still a diner waitress. In 2011, she brought in $15 million. Even the domestically minded Gretchen Rubin, author of 

, isn’t a simple housewife: It’s all well and good to create scrapbooks to preserve family memories and take the time to plan a thoughtful birthday party for your mother-in-law. It helps if you’re a mom living on the Upper East Side who has a babysitter, a housecleaner, and a husband who’s a private equities trader — facts Rubin carefully dances around in her books.