“The Reader,” written by Berhard Schlink and translated by Carol Brown Jane, is not only beautifully written, but philosophically enticing. After a referral to check it out, I lucked out in finding an older copy at a local thrift store (for way cheaper than it’s worth).

From the first page, I couldn’t put it down until I finished it a few hours later.

The story focuses on a young man named Michael, who, at age 15, begins a relationship with a woman named Hanna. Hanna is about twice his age, but they continue to have this strange sexual relationship, which includes him reading to her preceding sex or after sex. Michael is in love with Hanna despite her abuse, and she disappears a few months after the relationship begins. It’s only at a trial for Holocaust war crimes that they see each other again.

I know, it’s sounds really girly…or erotic. The book was really neither of those. It actually focused on German guilt.

The story, taking place in 1958, follows Michael as he falls in love with someone who was a part of the Holocaust in a way that he had never imagined. “The Reader” shows the mind of the generation whose parents and family were responsible for the atrocities of Nazi Germany. It also concentrates on the concept of illiteracy in relation to the understanding of what happened during that time.

There’s some pretty heavy stuff in the book. It’s beautifully displayed through diction, and can, at times, sound like poetry. I was so moved by the book that I wanted to see it on the big screen. Considering my favorite actress, Kate Winslet, plays one of the starring roles, I was sure I wouldn’t be let down.

Part of me knew that the Hollywood version would most likely focus on the sexual part (big surprise!), which it totally did. Yes, their relationship was focused on sex in the film, but the book had a different way of describing it. It wasn’t vivid or raunchy as some of it appeared in the film.

The beautiful relationship portrayed in the book became a much more promiscuous ordeal in the film version. There is quite a bit of nudity in the film, too, so keep that in mind before you watch it with someone who may be uncomfortable with that.

In all, the film gave a narrow glimpse of the book’s main focus, and really purpose, in my opinion. If I hadn’t read the book, I may have enjoyed it more. Knowing that there’s much more to the story than what the film portrayed, it’s disheartening that some of the more philosophical aspects weren’t brought up as intelligently, if at all, as they were in Schlink’s book.

Overall, I like what the book stands for, essentially Pinsky’s thesis on how celebrities are more narcissistic than the average Joe, which Pinsky classifies as “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” He says, using psychological terms, that it’s apparently not self-love, but self-loathing and the “inability to form a sense of self without input from others” that results in this form of behavior and pathology.

The problem for American society with relation to this fixation of celebrities on themselves came with the Internet and the ability for people to put themselves in the public eye with something as simple as a video camera and access to YouTube. With this, Pinsky and Young want to demonstrate that celebrity narcissism is actually “luring American into a vicious trap” because it provides instant fame, and being “obsessed with celebrity can lead to dangerous mimicry of the worst celebrity behavior.” And, of course, since many celebrities can be unsympathetic to anyone hurt by their sometimes bad or “outrageously uncommon” behavior, copying it can lead to problems for everyone in American society.

This makes sense to me, though the first part I think I could have told you without a degree in psychology.

Pinsky then goes into detailing those most affected and prone to this behavior. He cites that those with the “greatest exposure to technological developments” are the most likely to fall into this “trap.” Of course, teenagers are the most obvious group because of their “body image obsession, sexual acting-out, drug use and diva behavior.” Pinsky points out that these are all ways that celebrity “gawkers” can inadvertently mimic bad celebrity behavior.

One of the most interesting portions of the book, to me, was when Pinsky and Young gave an example of how a typical American would respond to “typical” celebrity behavior. The example was when Britney Spears took her son out for a ride in her SUV, except the baby wasn’t in a car seat, but sitting on Spears’s lap, window rolled down for the whole world to see, which it did. Pinsky says on a typical American’s reaction to this story, “The person would dismiss it as spoiled or crazy.”

I agreed with this almost immediately, but soon had my thoughts challenged when Pinsky and Young brought up another point, and backed by psychological study.

Pinsky and Young want their readers to understand that narcissism isn’t just a personality trait, but it’s almost always the result of childhood trauma. The book goes on to describe the different sorts of trauma and to point out notable examples among today’s celebrities. The main idea behind this is that if we refuse to recognize the underlying cause of celebrity misbehavior, then we’ll never succeed in understanding it and may well end up encouraging it.

Since the behavior is rooted in childhood, this suggests that celebrities are not just normal people who behave badly or become “corrupted” by fame. Instead, they are drawn to the celebrity culture that satisfies their already narcissistic desires, which goes back to the thesis and how we all have narcissistic tendencies. It’s just whether these natural tendencies are stimulated and brought out of us.

I think this is a most important book for any parent of today to read. Celebrity is everywhere. Just start clicking through your cable television stations to see, or go to the grocery store and look at the covers of the magazines in the check-out line. It’s undeniable that celebrities are a huge focus for many of our media outlets. This, in turn makes celebrity impression and influence important because it will certainly have some impact on our society, particularly youths as this books points out. And instead of providing the negative aspects of this personality disorder, Pinsky and Young end with expert instruction on how parents can raise their children to prevent these narcissistic tendencies. Not to mention, the authors also provide at the end of the book a “Narcissistic Personality Inventory” so that the reader can see how narcissistic they really are, which I found to be extremely interesting.

Overall, I found the book to be a great mix of science and celebrity.

What might be funny, but is also true, is that what I was most impacted by in what I read in this book is how in some parts of the U.S., such as in Missouri, fast food companies like McDonald’s outsource to call centers hundreds of miles away. These restaurants don’t outsource jobs like creating the wrapper your Big Mac comes in, they outsource the job of the person who takes your order.

To say the least, I was completely shocked by this information, as I was with most of the other information “divulged” in this book, but that seems like Thomas Friedman’s goal in the work. I have to say, however, I’m not entirely convinced by all of his allegations, but only on the basis of, “How can it be as bad as Friedman describes and I don’t know about it?” Is this some plot by our government toward the success of initiating a one world government someday?

I like how Friedman organized the book, particularly how detailed he is in spelling out his argument in a chronological manner (”List of 10 World Flattening Forces”) on why the world is essentially being taken over by big corporations and how all of our jobs are being outsourced to foreign countries.

A good portion of the first quarter of the book – and many spots intermittently after – was dedicated to expressing just how much of the Indian population America supports with outsourced jobs, mostly with call centers. Friedman went as far as to say how much it means for Indian students studying in colleges to get jobs in call centers linked to American callers. Instead of studying for a law or medical degree, many Indian students work to get these jobs working for Americans. They go as far as to take classes on how to sound and act more “American” over the phone, and some even change their names to more “American-sounding” names to have a better chance of being hired at one of these call centers.

To me, that information alone disgusted me. I realize this book was published in 2007, but that’s only three years ago. We’re in an economic depression right now. I don’t care what anyone says. People all over the country are being laid off, while others can’t afford groceries and some can’t afford to keep a roof over their heads. All this is going on while the American system is supplying countries like India with jobs and money, and thus security. How can we afford this? How can these corporations continue to let this happen, or, rather, continue to make this happen? As Friedman points out, we can’t, but it’s not going to stop because “it’s all about the money, baby.”

And this is where Friedman’s fifth chapter comes into play: “America and Free Trade.” Here, Friedman suggests the idea of a ban on all outsourcing, and to put a stop to any ideas of wall-building or border boundaries. Instead, he talks of improving education and training, preparing American citizens to take on a global world, not just a national world. My question to this chapter is, “Isn’t that what we’re doing by outsourcing our labor?” Friedman doesn’t specifically mention what his idea of what “Americans must instead be prepared to compete on a global playing field” means. He simply states it, and that’s the end. It sounds a lot like a one world government to me.

For the most part, I liked Friedman’s ideas on how we can adapt to this unstoppable force that is globalization, as with such descriptions as his “synthesizers, explainers, leveragers, versatilists” (chapter six). These terms, mostly invented to drive his points home, are used to put a description on key point in what he thinks we should do as Americans to prepare ourselves and make ourselves ready for this already shaping event.

As with his “Great Synthesizers” explanation, Friedman goes into how we need to “bring together mathematicians and marketing experts” who can optimize search engines more efficiently, and how we need to “bring together bio-scientists and computer engineers” so that we can better map the human genome…etc. These are excellent ideas because pulling our best people together to come up with (in theory) some of the best and most efficient ideas on the planet will help us keep up with competition around the globe, and thus promote competition. We can’t just give in and let other countries step in and take our jobs from us, essentially, as Friedman suggest, though most of us aren’t even aware of it in the first place.

Chapter 10 really hit home for me when Friedman mentioned the statistics on China and how it’s making its way up in the world, and fast, overtaking Mexico as the U.S.’s number two importer in 2003. It made me think about how just about anything I pick up in my house has “MADE IN CHINA” stamped on it. And again, it brings that question to mind, the one Friedman pulls for in his writing, “What will it take for us to stand up and do something about this?” Why is China making most of our weapons, toys, packaging, etc? Why aren’t we making these things?

All in all, I think the message Friedman was trying to deliver in this work, or at least what I took away from it is that as people grow and become more able to get together and collaborate on tasks, issues, problems, etc., people become more able to compete and create with other races, cultures, countries, religions, backgrounds, languages, etc. This book, in my opinion, is a real eye-opener. It brings these issues to the table and puts them into perspective. It may not answer all the questions or provide solutions to all the problems, but it does suggest plausible solutions and promote the general idea of trying.

Essentially, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is one giant argument against the concept of “American liberalism,” something Coulter considers without any scientific or factual basis whatsoever, and even goes so far as to call it a “primitive religion.” She bases this idea on how she sees liberalism in America possessing many characteristics that define religions around the world. She says that it has “its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints…” and so on. Basically, Coulter sees this “faith” as something like nature being god and men being apes, or monkeys.

In my opinion, a lot of what she has to say, what she uses to back up her argument here, makes sense.

Coulter’s main points center around the following: creation “myths” (evolutionary theory); sacraments (Coulter compares abortion to the “virgin sacrifice”); Holy Writ (Roe v. Wade); martyrs (like Alger Hiss and Mumia Abu Jamal); clergy (public school teachers), churches (public schools where prayer is banned and condoms are passed out); doctrine of infallibility, and cosmology (Big Bang, where humankind simply appeared suddenly and from out of nowhere; essentially, the human race is just a big accident).

These bullet points are the supporting structures of Coulter’s argument, which basically says that liberalism constitutes a religion based completely on faith, not fact, and simply has no god or higher power.

As I agree with most of what Coulter argues in her book, there are some portions I found to be weak. One such section includes this excerpt, one of her descriptions that compare her religion (Christianity and all of its forms) to the religion of liberalism: “Our religion says that human progress proceeds from the spark of divinity in the human soul; their religion holds that human progress is achieved through sex and death.”

The remaining four of her descriptions like this one are similar, but didn’t stand out to me as much as this one. Of course, each is a generalization based on what really could be defined as a stereotype on liberal people. Generalizations, of course, are never fully founded in truth.

Another example, a generalization like this one, is: “Even after the complete failure of liberal policies on crime in the sixties and seventies, and the success of conservative policies on crime beginning in the eighties, liberals are itching to start springing criminals again. Attempts to rehabilitate liberals on this are futile. It’s in their DNA.”

As these specific examples demonstrate, Coulter has a tendency to base her arguments on weak generalizations, although fancy and witty as they are read. As much as the first portion of the first example I included here is true for Christianity, the second portion of that statement, I do not believe holds true for the majority of liberal people. As for the second example, one cannot state as fact that criminal rehabilitation is impossible because “it’s in their DNA.” We all know this is not true, as it has been done in the past, though statistics do fall heavy on the side of criminals not being able to be rehabilitated.

Overall, I simply find this a weak string in Coulter’s argumentative ability in this book, as there are several examples like this one throughout.

Then again, other uses of generalization I think work well for Coulter, such as with the following examples:
“Liberals say: ‘We’re the only modern democracy with the death penalty.’ ” Where Coulter retorts with: “I think this should be treated as a selling point: ‘Come to the United States for the economic opportunity, stay because we fry our Ted Bundys! Among our many other unique characteristics are these: We’re the only modern democracy founded on a belief that all men are created equal; we’re the only…the fought a revolution to redeem that idea and a civil war to prove it; we’re the only…that nearly single-handedly smashed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia…”

And: “Liberals say: ‘Capital punishment should be suspended until the exact same percentages of blacks and whites are executed.” I think the argument against this one is obvious, so I won’t include Coulter’s retort here.

My point in bringing these examples to this analysis is to demonstrate Coulter’s brilliant argumentative abilities, on some points. With both of these points, Coulter highlighted two generalized liberal viewpoints and obliterated them with words. This is why she has such a large conservative following.

As for the attention she also carries, we’re all well-aware of the reason for that. She’s simply one of the most outspoken political speakers in the country. She has the gull, she’s brash, she’s brilliant, she’s witty and she’s fearless when it comes to presenting her perspectives on the world and politics.

These are the reasons why I will continue to read her books and continue to follow her in the news. In my opinion, Ann Coulter represents one of the strongest examples of free speech this country will ever see. Sure, she’s completely biased to the right, but that’s what this country is all about. Freedom. If one takes anything away from this book, as they should with reading any of her books, that’s it right there. Take Coulter’s works for the fact that they’re such great examples of personal freedom and one’s ability to express and push its limitations.

Not to mention, I believe any time one puts themselves into a situation that will challenge his or her beliefs is a good thing. It’s never a bad idea to challenge oneself, to push oneself to research and look up the facts. This book is a great chance to do all of the above.