Your Childs are genius. Now what? Anaheul Bird is here to discuss her new book, Off the Charts,

The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prudges.

How do you confront the issue of race and white privilege in a novel about a white kid in

Boston? Sam Graham-Felson will be here to discuss his debut novel, Green. Alexander

Alter will give us an update from the literary world. Plus, we'll talk about what we and

the white-er-world are reading. This is Inside the New York Times Booker View. I'm Pamela

Paul.

Anaheul Bird joins us now. Her new book is called Off the Charts, The Hidden Lives and

Lessons of American Child Prudges. Reviewed this week in the book review. And thanks for

being here. Thanks so much for having me.

So your first book was called Raising America, History of Parenting Advice, which I loved.

And it was a really interesting way to approach a subject because it was about obviously the

people who give parenting advice to the doctors and the psychologists and the gurus of

parenting. But it was also in its way a parenting book. And to a certain extent, it seems

like this is also in its way a parenting book and that people will glean lessons from

it about raising children. But obviously, that's not the intent of the book overall. I'm

curious how you got from Raising America to this subject.

Well in writing Raising America, I was fascinated to learn how much early experience seemed to

be a crucial focus of experts for an entire century. They were promising based on sort

of shaky evidence, but with lots of confidence that early nurture was going to reveal untold

new dimensions of human potential. Every generation would be more enlightened than the next.

And one of them, G Stanley Hall, who you may remember as a turn of the century psychologist,

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