Review by New York Times Review
BEN SASSE IS A LUCKY MAN.That, at least, is the impression one gets from reading his new book, "The Vanishing American Adult," even if the junior Republican senator from Nebraska - a 45-year-old conservative whose political ascent has been remarkably swift- is at pains to deny that luck has had anything to do with it. He might hail from an ancestral line that includes a Lutheran church officer on one side and a manufacturing executive on the other, but he spent his childhood learning the value of "real work," weeding soybean fields as a 7-year-old and waking before dawn to detassel corn. Any privilege in his upbringing was a temptation to be resisted rather than a boon to be enjoyed. The same now goes for his three children. Last year the Sasses sent their 14-year-old daughter to work on a cattle ranch so that she could experience the "unrelenting encounter with daily necessity," like learning how to drive a manual tractor and, he proudly recounts, donning shoulder-length gloves to perform rectal exams on pregnant cows. "At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences," Sasse writes, and he presents his book as a guide for parents determined not to raise the kind of soft, entitled kids he encountered when he was president of Midland University. He says that the idea for "The Vanishing American Adult" first came to him several years ago, when a group of Midland students were asked to decorate a 20-foot Christmas tree on campus, and they dressed only "the bottom seven or eight feet . . . the branches the kids could easily reach." Sasse was "startled" - "shattered," even. Seeing this Christmas tree "worried me for the kids." So began his growing awareness of "a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history." He noticed that the affliction he observed at Midland could be found in the households of his closest friends and even his own home. His daughters once complained of being unable to sleep because the air-conditioning was broken. Sasse was aghast. "When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house . . . but we never used it." The fact that his daughters claimed a "need" for air-conditioning lefthim and his wife with "a heavy sense of failure." The nagging anxieties, the feelings of defeat, the inflation of picayune examples to Defcon 1 threats - all signs point to yet another book intended for panicky uppermiddle- class parents. What distinguishes "The Vanishing American Adult," however, is Sasse's suggestion that it isn't merely the well-being of a younger generation that's at stake, but the very future of the Republic. He warns that his anecdotes add up to something far larger, and far more troubling, than poorly dressed Christmas trees and broken A.C.s would initially suggest: American youth have been so coddled that "we lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life." "Economic disruption" has made "a culture of self-reliance . . . more urgent than ever before." Parents need to steer their children away from the dangers of "idleness and passive drift" - of, as he puts it, "affluenza." The result is a strange hybrid of a book, part how-to manual, part jeremiad, filled with rambling disquisitions on the likes of Augustine, Teddy Roosevelt and the philosopher John Dewey, who serves as the villain of Sasse's chapters on education, wherein families seeking to nurture their children's individual "souls" do battle with a "homogenized" public school system in thrall to Dewey's "totalizing goals." (It should be said that this is a rather creative interpretation of Dewey's work. It should also be said that Sasse's children are home schooled, and that he unequivocally praised Betsy DeVos - who sponsored unregulated charter school expansion in Michigan, with poor results - as an "excellent pick" for secretary of education.) Studded throughout are listicles of tips that can get highly specific, like forgoing flotation devices in the water for children ("Let go and re-grab them . . . and then celebrate their survival"); sending "your 2-year-old to get your socks every morning"; and enlisting your offspring to "build a pet cemetery." He waxes nostalgic about "aging members of the Greatest Generation," especially his grandmother Elda, a tiny dynamo of a woman who juryrigged her newborn baby's bassinet to a "lumbering old John Deere as she taught herself to harvest." ALL OF THIS MAKES "The Vanishing American Adult" both voluble and evasive at once, as Sasse layers tale upon tale, repeats modifiers and metaphors (at least three separate mentions of "bubble wrap," all of them pejorative), and serves up bland platitudes ("our common humanity") without venturing much by way of political specifics. In other words, this is a consummate politician's book, and Sasse declares he's writing not "as a senator, but rather as a citizen, as a dad, as a reader, and as a former college president." What he's advising is simply so much "common sense." As one of the first so-called Never Trump Republicans before the presidential election, he has curiously little to say about the new president, other than to refer in passing to having "said a number of things critical of the honesty and trustworthiness of both major party presidential frontrunners" before returning to his daughter's month on the cattle ranch. Indeed, during the election campaign Sasse roundly characterized Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as "both liars" who were one and the same, which just goes to show: Having a grandmother who attached a bassinet to her tractor doesn't necessarily endow you with an ability to make distinctions or a sense of proportion. Nor does it save you from a sentimentality that seems almost willfully impervious to the facts at hand. As much as Sasse wants to indict millennials for our "crisis" of "character," young Americans voted decisively against the presidential candidate who lacked any governing experience, bragged about groping women's genitals and actively courted the bigoted vote; it was voters over the age of 65 who favored Trump by an 8 percent margin. To read "The Vanishing American Adult" is to reside in a parallel universe where older Americans stoically uphold standards of decency and responsibility, instead of electing to the country's highest office a reality- TV star with six business bankruptcies to his name who brazenly flouts both. But it's more demanding to reckon with stubborn facts than it is to resort to clichés about the Problem With Kids Today and how "suffering can be virtuous." (That this book purports to be so above partisan politics that it's blurbed by both Marco Rubio and Cory Booker is as telling as it is unsurprising.) Considering all of Sasse's talk about hard work, maybe the most peculiar aspect of "The Vanishing American Adult" is how it takes the easy way out: Sasse, a Republican senator and history Ph.D. who holds actual power during a particularly fraught moment, decided that now was the time for him to publish what ultimately amounts to a self-help book for well-to-do parents. Still, there is something politically coherent in this. The Republican Party has been pushing a hyperindividualistic ideology for decades, fixated on the idea that the solution to every problem lies with each American falling back on his or her own personal reserves of "selfdiscipline and self-control." In this unforgiving cosmology, there isn't much room for forces that aren't so amenable to an individual's will - and sure enough, there isn't much room for them in Sasse's book either. Economic scarcity? We're an "exceptionally prosperous nation" whose biggest problems are the "surplus creature comforts" that "make a civilization fat and unambitious." (He approvingly quotes a friend whose travels to Ecuador made him "realize that America's poor are rich by comparison.") Racism? The United States is now "free of the racist legal barriers that held back many Americans" and is "finally transcending our slaveholding past." Sexism? What's that? It must be nice to be Ben Sasse, in a position to pick and choose the hardships one will adopt in order to learn some life lessons - and to feel morally superior for having triumphed over phony adversity. But to anyone who buys into the notion, especially now, that the country's political future can be rescued by getting our toddlers to bring us our socks, one can only say: Good luck with that. Sasse talks a lot about hard work, but his book takes the easy way out. JENNIFER SZALAI is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The nouns parent and even adult are now used as verbs. Our society speaks of parenting as the act of raising a child so that he or she accumulates traits of maturity like so many game points as she or he practices adulting. Without sounding like a curmudgeon from the village of Mayberry, U.S. Senator Sasse of Nebraska posits that this semantic transition points to a greater underlying condition, one that does not adequately prepare young people for the very real responsibilities they will face as they grow older. From the philosophical agility that provides a basis for personal norms of behavior to the emotional acuity that enables a person to understand diverse points of view, Sasse addresses the basic skills young people must possess and offers ways the older generation parents, educators, even employers can help to instill these values and behaviors at an early and appropriate age. Deeply thoughtful, delightfully personal, and bravely ecumenical in scope, Sasse's guide for stemming the tide of delayed responsibility showcases what is both practical and possible. Media appearances will stoke demand.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Heartfelt advice about how to raise engaged citizens.Sasse, a junior Republican senator from Nebraska and former president of Midland University, a liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, makes his literary debut with an earnest critique of American youth. A father of three, he worries that the nation's children "are not ready for the world they are soon going to inherit." Too many are passive, insular, and coddled, lacking a strong work ethic, moral center, and sense of initiative. The author blames a variety of factors, including broken families, a culture of overconsumption, the social upheaval of the 1960s, and ubiquitous "screen time." How, asks Sasse, can parents ensure that their children will become "fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves as called to love and serve their neighbors?" The author does not look for answers from schools, which he criticizes for failing to inculcate strong moral values, resulting from the progressive educational ideas of John Dewey and the banning of school prayer. Sasse presents advice that seems most applicable to the affluent and educated: distract children from peer culture by enhancing family time (dining, singing, memorizing poetry together); emphasize the difference between want and need; engage in travel as learners rather than merely tourists. The author thoughtfully underscores the importance of reading, "a necessity for responsible adults and responsible citizens." His recommended books include those about God; "Homesick Souls," a category that includes The Canterbury Tales and Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica; Shakespeare; the American idea (the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents); markets (Adam Smith, for one, and Milton Friedman); books about totalitarianism, to protect against "the newfound popularity of socialism among millennials"; books that offer a "humanistic appreciation of science"; and canonical American fiction by authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and Ralph Ellison. Sasse makes a host of debatable assertions, but he also makes a simple, sensible call for an informed electorate. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
