Daniel Bergner

This is the remarkable story of Ryan Speedo Green's rise from imprisonment in a juvenile detention center to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Also contained within are meditations on how singing actually happens, what goes through the mind of someone who is completely off track at an early age, and on how intensely driven effort and determination can create unexpected outcomes. One of the strongest sections explores the history of " 'Ol Man River" from the musical "Showboat" - and why show more Paul Robeson, Ryan Green, and other black men bitterly resent being compelled to sing it.

Green and the writer seem to have had a mind-meld in the prose - there's almost nothing hidden from the reader and one is compelled to further research Green's career in hopes of finding even more joy from his victories. Truly inspirational. show less

This is a fascinating glimpse inside one of the toughest prisons in the country, Louisiana's Angola, a former plantation which now houses men (predominately black men) convicted of violent crimes, a large percentage of them sentenced to life without parole. The author was given free access to the prison, inmates and staff over a period of a year, despite the warden's second thoughts and attempts to bar him after a few months. It may be a bit out of date, as it was written in 1998, but as the show more author points out, the system doesn't want us to inquire, wonder or mind what happens to these prisoners...they've been dealt with precisely so ordinary citizens don't ever have to think about them again. They will not return to society or commit further crimes against it; their only victims from now on will be themselves and each other. Well written, not the least bit sensational, despite some pretty grim and graphic details.

My cover subtitles this book "The Quest for Hope, Faith and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison". I note that other editions change that to "The Quest for Redemption in..." I think the former is more accurate.
Review written August 2016 show less

I had no expectations of enjoying this book. I picked it up because I'll be where the author will be speaking this year, but enjoy it I did.

Stepping back and forth between the Met stage to the DeJarnette Center for Human Development and Green's instructors' studios might seem disorienting, but it was insightful. Bergner's confident movement between time, person and environment was easy to follow and allowed me to understand the development of Ryan Speedo Green, the man and performer.

As a show more vocalist and the observer of lessons, I found the descriptions related to creating the sounds and the effort required from Green to be honest limited. Had the author continued the details, the uninformed reader would have found it tedious. For me, I was able to intimate what had come before and what was still to come.

And thank you Mr. Green, I will never listen to or hear Showboat the same way. show less

Relatively short book; the NYT feature has a lot of the highlights, though the details were also interesting. Bergner sets out to suggest that many Western ideas about women’s sexuality are mistaken—at least the official ones about women not wanting sex/sex outside of a monogamous relationship as much as men do. The unofficial ones, in which women are dangerously out of control unless heavily repressed, could be reinforced by the science he discusses, though there’s nothing here about show more “out of control.” Evolutionary stories of male promiscuity and female pickiness aren’t consistent with the evidence from our animal relations or from non-self-reported measures of female desire. At least when women aren’t afraid of male violence (a very very big when that he doesn’t spend much time on), women seem plenty lustful—at least when it comes to strangers/new relationships. It’s only in longterm exclusive relationships that women’s desire seems to flag, and Bergner spends a chunk of the book on pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic attempts to fix this within monogamy. Long-term intimacy, he suggests, may kill desire for many women; drugs or specific behavioral interventions may sometimes bring the spice back. One of the most striking parts of the book comes when he discusses the fears expressed by pharmaceutical researchers that their drug would be too effective, making women wantonly/indiscriminately desire sex. It’s hilarious, except for how 44% of US parents won’t vaccinate their daughters against HPV.

As others have noted, Bergner seems relatively untroubled by a project of associating women with greater/more “animal” desire than men, even though he repeatedly acknowledges the social stigma (and more) that women expressing sexual desire face. He also discusses research on women’s rape fantasies as fantasies and their relationship to the idea of desireability as central to women’s desire; researchers are very nervous about how to present this, and he has an extended discussion with one about the extent to which culture/misogyny affects the content of fantasies. I don’t know how much cross-cultural research there is on this, but comparative studies would seem to be relevant.

Key pieces of research include: when faced with a variety of images of sex and nudity, including animals having sex, men who identify as straight react most strongly to the heterosexual/lesbian scenes and not much to the gay male scenes, and vice versa for gay men; by contrast, women who identify as straight and lesbian both reacted to everything with physical signs of arousal (genital engorgement). (Self-identified bisexuals apparently weren’t part of the study.) The exception: women weren’t turned on by a naked, physically fit man whose penis was visibly flaccid and thus not signalling desire. However, both men and women self-reported reactions consistent with their reported sexuality—so women said they were only turned on by a small number of the things they saw. Bergner notes but does not give much attention to the question of what this means. Are women disconnected from their own physical reactions? Or is desire something different than engorged genitals? Another study, on which Bergner ended the book, showed how a very simple manipulation could change what we often think is basic in male-female relationships—that men are less picky. Speed dating studies showed that heterosexual women were more selective than heterosexual men in choosing candidates for follow-up dates. But all the studies had a confounding variable: in all of them, women sat in place while the men rotated. When a researcher changed that setup, so the women rotated—and therefore had the chance to perceive themselves as the ones making the “move”—men were choosier and women were less selective. Given the weight of culture, that’s a pretty astonishing result from one intervention. show less