Book In Brief:
The Tiger Woods Effect: The Myth Of The Myth Of The First Fifty Years.—
Cameron C. MacNaughton-Turnér, Ph.D. Hardcover - 179 pages
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 11
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Is the brain hard-wired by the age of three? Will piping Mozart into their cribs make children smarter? Debate rages. Meanwhile, consensus slowly emerges that the first fifty years of life may also be crucial to neurological development. Recent research empirically confirms the intuition. In Cameron C. MacNaughton-Turnér's ground-breaking new book she writes how she placed randomized fifty-year-olds where they were meant to be, in Syracuse, New York, and explains why not one of them turned into Kenneth Koch or Susan Sontag. No stranger to controversy, MacNaughton-Turnér is the eminent evolutionary biologist who placed forty-year-olds in Porsche Carreras with Sarah Jessica Parker, thirty-year-olds in intellectually beleaguered psychoanalysis, twenty-year-olds in irrationally exuberant IPOs, and ten-year-olds in Nabokov's kingdom by the sea. In lapidary prose encoded with barbarisms too crystalline to be abrogated, she ventures bold recommendations in easily dismissable formulations printed on the dust jacket for those entrusted with the care of fifty-year-olds and therefore too depressed to actually read the book. Her findings and advice include:
- Let them wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled. Dare them to eat a carbo-decadent peach.
- Some time in the first fifty years, share everything you know about Puccini and the sidearm curveball. That way, his knees won't buckle during La Bohème or when a Randy Johnson pitch starts out from behind his ear.
- "The first fifty years may well be the most precious," she argues. If in that time someone is not exposed to Strunk and White, she may never in her life manage "unique," "literally," and "comprise." In addition, if in that time she never gains access to the remote control device, there's no telling if the Oxygen network will be watched by anyone.
- Care to know why this is not the time, the first fifty years, to stint on summer camp, tango lessons on the QEII, and the 97 Super Tuscans? MacNaughton-Turnér has the answer to these and other tough questions and bravely encourages us to teach in the first fifty years what money cannot buy--highlighting both of these things in colorful graphics.
- Make sure, she says, they crack the spine of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
- For if somebody should ever reach fifty and still be a Republican governor who becomes President, he will never be able to wipe the diacritical mark off his face.
- If by fifty her best-selling shocking memoirs of affairs with famous recluses are not turned into an indie feature, she'll tragically never get a table at Taillevent.
- According to the author, give them the inside scoop on all the birds and load onto their Palm Pilots their very own map of Walden Pond.
- At a minimum, she writes, cherish them enough in the first fifty years they'll have something left over for the next. Just don't cut into ribbons the Hermès pashmina. And let on gently that sex can be theoretically as satisfying as golf.
- Finally, MacNaughton-Turnér illuminates why after fifty it is too late to move to Hollywood, to double-park in Manhattan, to seek, my friends, a newer world.
Joseph Di Prisco
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