I'm reading this remarkably bad book called The Reluctant Reader, by Wendy M. Williams, not to be confused with the late lamented lead singer for the Plasmatics, who marched with us in a no-nuke rally back in 1982. Anyway, her brief, which she expands in popular magazine style prose, is that the way to get kids to read is to stop all the miserable parenting that's going on. In short, she is a scold: the parents have been the culprits in every single "case history" she has supplied: parents who favored the older child; parents who didn't value the child's interests; parents who over-scheduled the child. It would appear she is a highly regarded researcher and writer, currently a full professor at Cornell, no less. I'm assuming what she's saying is based on ...something, but it's reading like an acid flashback to ten-year-old parenting debates. Apparently she's co-authored a book called The Nature-Nurture Debate. I'd love to know if she became a cat's-paw for Bushie policy makers: this book certainly reads like it.