Friends and Frenemies Forever: Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons

...It is time to end another silence. There is a hidden culture of girls' aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive. It is not marked by the direct physical and verbal behavior that is primarily the province of boys. Our culture refines girls' access to open conflict, and it forces their aggression into non-physical, indirect, and covert forms. Girls use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on victimized targets. Unlike boys, girls attack within tightly-knit networks of friends, making aggression harder to identify and intensifying the damage to the targets.

We've all heard the lay version of this description of girls. "Girls are catty, sneakier than boys." "Girls are mean." "Girls are two-faced, nice to your face around grown-ups, and behind your back they turn everyone against you." Almost every woman has at least one story to tell. Veteran teachers sigh, and in weary voices will describe countless hours given to mediating these labyrinthine problems with girls and their parents year after year. "Girls will be girls," say some laid-back moms; "they just have to learn to deal with it like we all do," they add.

But as Rachel Simmons' original Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, (Houghton Mifflin) pointed out in its best-selling 2002 edition, these girl problems are not just kid stuff. Girls seem to be hardwired to fear and avoid isolation at all costs, and the hurt from this "shunning," however below adult radar it may be, affects its victims deeply, sometimes for life.

Together with Rachel Wiseman's similarly themed Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World and the earlier Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, this book became required reading for teachers, guidance counselors, youth workers of all kinds, and parents because of its extensive personal anecdotes and succinct analysis of the current cultural overlays from which these behaviors arise--that girls must be "nice," and "good," never overtly aggressive--which drive their fights underground into possibly more nefarious means, what Simmons terms "alternative aggression,"or "a pervasive game of Twister."

Simmons' just published paperback edition of Odd Girl Out, Revised and Updated: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Mariner, Houghton Mifflin, 2011) adds extensive discussion of the changes in Girl World which have radically altered the means, if not the basis, of girls' aggression which did not exist when the 2002 edition was written--ubiquitous cell phones, texting, sexting, and social media such as Facebook (and other, potentially more harmful sites) which add a whole other dimension to alternative aggression. Simmons describes and analyzes how these media have taken rumor-mongering, social scheming, and cyber-harassment to entirely new levels, some leading to teen suicides and overt school violence. Parents with children about to enter this vulnerable demographic, which now begins around third grade, will find it well worth while to read this section and with her suggestions formulate family policy before the need arises.

Simmons' thesis, her "remedy" for girls' secret aggression, is easy to accept but hard to implement, requiring considerable psychological insight and skill in inculcating it in children from early on:

Over the course of a few years, as girls become conscious of the culture around them, they are forced into abrupt disconnection with themselves. Their truthful voices, their fearless capacity to speak their minds, their fierce appetite for food and play and truth, will no longer be tolerated. To be successful and socially accepted, girls must adopt feminine postures of sexual, social, verbal, and physical restraint.... To avoid rejection, they must enter whitewashed relationships, eschewing open conflict.

Teach girls to be aggressive? Well, yes. I return again to a major symptom of girls' loss of self-esteem, idealized or conflict-free, relationships. If we can guide girls into comfort with "messy feelings," such as jealousy, competition, and anger, they will be less likely to take them out of their relationships with others, less likely to repress the feelings that over time simmer into rageful acts of cruelty.

Such rage-sparked acts are familiar, repetitively paraded across our screen and print pages in a media frenzy of attention to victim suicide and frenemy murder. Simmons at least points to what needs to be done, the teaching of civil and honest means of conflict resolution among young girls. As she points out near the end of her book, "social ordering" is as ancient as humankind and will endure as an element of group life. Girls have to acquire the inner confidence and strength to work their way through it, to come of age intact, and Odd Girl Out, Revised and Updated: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girlsis must reading for those who want to help.

Ghost Busters? Ghost Hunters by William M. Lace

Donald and Sarah Wrenn were puzzled--and a bit scared. Their four children were having recurring nightmares. Three of them--Karen, Jesse, and Adam--said they had seen black shadows in their rooms. The youngest, five-year-old Ellen, said she had spoken with a woman who lived in her bedroom closet.

Who you gonna call?

Ghost hunters!

People have probably been fascinated with tales of ghosts and spirits as long as stories have been told. In modern times, when many mysteries of nature have been explained by science, there are still weird experiences which are unexplained, and that is when people turn to scientists who investigate such phenomena. Enter the ghost hunters!

In William Lace's Ghost Hunters (The Library of Ghosts & Hauntings) (Reference Point Press, 2010) the reader waits with the famous team from TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) called upon in 1997 to investigate the mysterious goings on in the Wrenn's house. As sometimes happens, when the team attempted to video strange shadows within the house, they found that their camera's battery, believed to be fully charged when they arrived, was suddenly and inexplicably completely drained. Then during a midnight vigil two ghost hunters saw the figure of an old woman, seated on some boxes in the closet. When told of the appearance the next day, something clicked for Mrs. Wrenn--her great aunt has just died, and all her belongings were stored there in the family's closets and basement. When the personal effects were removed from the house, the nightly visits ceased.

Did the battery discharge because someone left a switch on? Did the ghostly apparition stop appearing because the family felt they had met its wishes, or did the children just outgrow their nightmares?

Author William Lace takes the reader through the history of paranormal investigations, describing the famous hoaxes and hoaxers of history, the stories and "evidence" of some of the world's famous ghosts and haunted places as well as stories of some scientific debunkers of the mythology of hauntings. Lace has to report that, despite motion sensors, temperature gauges, magnetic field detectors, infrared and video cameras, ultra sensitive recording devices, and other electronic gizmos, however, there is no unquestionable external proof of paranormal phenomena resulting from all this investigation.

Still, some people persist in their belief that ghosts exist, either because they offer proof of life after death or because the believers have had convincing personal experiences. Others just love the adventure of the quest. For those readers who find the subject intriguing, Ghost Hunters (The Library of Ghosts & Hauntings) is a good place to begin the rational study of such fascinating phenomena and its long history.

Other books in the new Library of Ghosts & Hauntings series include Graveyard Companion (Ghost hunters' library), Ghosts (The Library of Ghosts & Hauntings), Hauntings (The Library of Ghosts & Hauntings), and Poltergeists (The Library of Ghosts & Hauntings), all of which include tantalizing informational sidebars, text boxes, illustrations, and a well-documents appendix of notes, books, web sites, and an index.

Undercover Underground: Secret Subway by Martin W. Sandler

"There is a perpetual jam and lock of vehicles for nearly two miles along the chief thoroughfares." An editorial in the New York Evening News complained that New York streets were so congested that workers in the city had to spend more than four hours a day getting to and from their jobs.

So what else is new? But would you believe that this traffic report is more than 150 years old?

By the mid-nineteenth century New York City was a wonder of the world, with museums, theatres, restaurants, and brand-new palatial department stores, all attracting visitors from everywhere. But its streets, especially the famous Broadway, were a nightmare, jammed by horse-drawn carriages, delivery wagons, careening omnibuses and horse-pulled railcars, and coated with inches of manure from the animals which made intracity transport possible. Pedestrians and their footgear were an endangered species on clogged streets on which it took three hours to cover four miles. Something had to be done.

Inventor Alfred Beach thought he had the answer. With the invention of the typewriter, the cable car, the pneumatic tube (still in use by drive-by bank tellers today), and the founding of the magazine Scientific American, under his belt, Beach, also a backer of Thomas Edison's "Talking Box," believed that he had the solution for the city's traffic problem. Already his pneumatic system was moving documents and packages around underground in Manhattan, and Beach believed that such a system could be used to create an air-pressure driven subterranean rail line, later to be called a "subway." Beach studied the pneumatic railway at the London Crystal Palace Exposition and created his own prototype, the Pneumatic Railway, unveiled at the American Institute Fair in 1867, which whisked 170,000 attendees back and forth across the exposition. Now Beach knew that such a system could be made to work beneath New York's choked surface arteries, moving passengers in mere minutes to all parts of the city.

But if there were no insurmountable technical problems, there were political roadblocks. New York's mayor, Boss Tweed, controlled everything that happened in his city. There was no way Beach's subway could be built without his support, and his support came at a price, huge sums that the Mayor would demand under the table to allow construction.

Beach was determined not to pay and conceived a daring plan. A demonstration tunnel would be built in total secrecy, using the vast sub-basement of Devlin's Clothing Store as his entrance. The engineering was daunting--Beach had first to devise a tunnel-digging machine, which he named the hydraulic shield. He designed a circular brick tunnel supported by steel arches and circular plates, to be lighted by zircon lights, the latest in illumination in these pre-Edison days, and powered by enormous circular fans, the Western Tornado, which provided the motive power.

Amazingly, the enormity of Beach's construction remained a secret, with city officials believing that he was merely constructed another pneumatic mail tube beneath Broadway, and the pneumatic subway and its elegant waiting room finally opened to the press and officialdom in 1870. Soon, for twenty five cents passengers could enjoy a swift, clean, and luxurious ride beneath Broadway from Warren to Murray Street. Beach proclaimed that when complete his proposed system could carry 70,000 passengers per day at speeds up to 60 mph.

Beach became a media darling instantly, but Mayor Tweed was enraged by the inventor's end run around his patronage system, throwing all of his power into blocking the next phase of extension to Central Park. But Beach soon acquired a potent ally, the young and talented political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who took great glee in lampooning the corrupt mayor and his graft-filled administration. Tweed eventually was driven out of office, jailed and in a bribe-fueled escape, fled the country.

The way seemed open to make New York's infant subway system the marvel of the world. But the intervention of the Panic of 1873, a deep economic depression which lasted four years, brought an end to Beach's great plans, and he was eventually forced to rent out his original tunnel as first a shooting gallery and then a wine cellar. It was only decades later, when the electric motor was beginning to power rapid transit, that New York returned to his grand plan of a city-wide system. Meanwhile Boston got its electric-powered subway in 1895 and thus laid claim to America's "first" city subway, and Alfred Beach died a disappointed and under-appreciated man in 1897, only eight years before New York's system became a reality.

Author Martin W. Sandler's account of the secret subway, Secret Subway: The Fascinating Tale of an Amazing Feat of Engineering, (National Geographic, 2009) reads like a spy thriller as it tells this tale of enormous vision, astonishing feats of technology, and ultimate disappointment but not defeat in the face of political and economic forces beyond inventor Beach's control. Although Beach's tunnel and station, uncovered briefly in 1912 during the construction of New York's current system, remain entombed beneath the city, his dream of underground mass transit now exists in major cities around the world. This slim but engrossing volume makes nineteenth century engineering in all its wonders come alive for middle and high school readers. Filled with wonderful illustrations and backed up by extensive appendices for research, Secret Subway: The Fascinating Tale of an Amazing Feat of Engineering, is nonfiction of the highest order.