|
recent posts
----------
Bossa Nova in the Morning
Indian Summer
First Semester
Yes, Katrina
Soap Box Interlude
I Want to be Evil
Stay Away from the Xiphoid
New World, Not Necessarily Brave
Is It Possible?
Purity
|
 |
You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
Pre-order from:
- Simon & Schuster
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
Get that Dander Up, Up, Up
Today, The New York Times has a piece in its Style section (though it is interesting that it didn't appear in the Tuesday Health section) about the ubiquitous but unpleasant What to Expect When You're Expecting. To flip through the book, and glance at the dyspeptic drawings is to know its tone intimately, so if you haven't already been exposed to its holier than thou attitude and are confused about why a book in its third edition that has sold over ten million copies can be so reviled, all you need to know is that my level headed, non-alarmist friend came to call it What to Expect When You're Neurotic during her pregnancy.
I didn't much care for What to Expect, and had much more success with the information and attitudes of Pregnancy For Dummies. (Terrible title, I know, but two of my sister-in-law said that their doctor recommended it, and it was neither wildly doctrinaire nor did it make me feel guilty about my lifestyle, which by What to Expect standards was edgy to the point of being insanely dangerous.)
Anyway, the article touches on a strange phenomenon about What To Expect, which is that, in spite of the book going into new editions and having been revised to get rid of various outrageously alarming tidbits (one edition suggested that oral sex can kill mother and baby, and the "Best Odds Diet" that finally got evicted in the third edition is just insulting) old editions lie around and get passed around, a lot and as a result, the bad information never manages to fade away.
I am a case in point. When my husband and I started to combine our book collections years ago, we were rather surprised to find a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting (early edition) nestled in with the fun stuff, like the Slang Dictionaries. Neither of us would take responsibility for bringing it into the apartment, and its origins remain murky, and then a second copy came after I got pregnant, evicted, I suspect, from the library of a friend. When I was about 20 weeks gone, my insurance company threatened to send me a third, but I managed to fend that one off. I suppose there's no way to tell people that they should always check their editions, and unfortunately the bad versions don't have a self-destruct mechanism, but I wonder why people stick with something that is clearly so problematic. Why embrace a second and third edition if the first was so impractical, superior, and glaringly inaccurate. One might, if one were so inclined, derive some sort of political metaphor from this tendency to stick with something that works so badly and rewards so few.
posted by Elise at 3:14 PM
........................................................
........................................................
<< Home
........................................................
|
