Act of Passion, by Georges Simenon

Another of this prolific author's romans durs seeping with brooding misery. One can only hope that as a leech draws blood from its host, so to will Simenon's work absorb our own little miseries. Maybe that's why I like them? Echoes of Camus' The Stranger and even, at times, Doestoevsky's Notes from Underground decorate this confessional tale delivered in a letter to a court official after a guilty verdict of murder. The murderer takes us along as he chronicles his life and slowly loses his sanity, all the while convinced of that sanity, like most mad people are. After all, a mad person's reality is no less real to them than it is for us. I particularly like how tidy and non-convoluted this tale is. The murderer is a doctor who becomes abusive to his lover, a young, promiscuous, woman he meets in a train station. He wants to return her to a purer state before she grew up and started sleeping with men. Perhaps his obsession with her is wrapped up in his profession as a healer. Perhaps he is obsessed with her because he can control her in ways that he cannot control his wife. Or, perhaps, because he had a controlling mother. The physical violence is his poorly evolved way of dealing with the conflicts within him. The rationalization of that violence is a manifestation of the intellectually evolved, yet warped, way the mind deals with conflict. Psychic blindness and madness may be the result - clearly so in this case.

The Smartest Kids in the World, by Amanda Ripley

A nice discussion comparing the American educational system to that of three foreign countries, Poland, Finland and South Korea, which perform near the top of the PISA, "Programme for International Student Assessment" (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/index.asp). It is heavily referenced and should be read by all American educators. Ripley follows three American teenagers as they spend one year abroad immersed in their respective country. At one point the American student asked some Finnish high-schoolers why they cared so much about school. They responded that they "had to in order to get a good job." Mind you, these Finnish students seemed to have the same general social interests (and time) as American teenagers - they just took their schooling a bit more seriously. Why? Is it because Americans don't need a quality education in order to succeed? Current data argues against this. Significant earnings are left on the table if one doesn't graduate high school. And earnings are stratified as one reaches higher levels of education (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm). Rather, Ripley argues, America has a cultural problem. Our educators don't only teach (many of them do double duty as sports coaches). Our teachers are also not the highest performers in school themselves - you can't teach what you don't know. For example, many math teachers in the U.S. were never math students. In Finland, in order to be a teacher, you must have graduated in the top third of your high school class. Similar requirements exist in other countries. The upside is that being a teacher becomes a prestigious professional occupation drawing in high performers. In Finland, too, while average teacher salaries are not significantly higher than in the U.S., they are more aligned with what doctors and other professionals earn. Ripley also explores the evidence on how we make children life-long learners. Would you believe that children of parents actively involved in the PTA and school activities don't perform any better than their peers? Rather, the most effective thing you can do for your children is read to them on a daily basis.