Read an Excerpt
Chapter One one
Nightly when my four children were young, I sat with a flashlight outside their bedrooms on the floor of the darkened hallway and read to them from chapter books. We read thousands of pages of Harry Potter and made hundreds of doughnuts with Homer Price. We spent time with Ramona and Beezus on Klickitat Street and sojourned in Narnia with the Pevensie children. We devoured diaries of a wimpy kid and reeled through volumes of unfortunate events. We thrilled to The Red Badge of Courage and wept over Where the Red Fern Grows. And of course, we returned more than once to the Arable farm, where miracles were woven into Charlotte’s Web.
For many years, I enjoyed an audience of devoted listeners, but as the kids grew into their own concerns, I knew our shared time was coming to an end. They would soon have finals to study for, and crushes to FaceTime, and Netflix to stream deep into the night. The moment I was dreading arrived after we turned the last page of another adventure with Peter and the Starcatchers. My middle daughter suggested that we suspend our nightly reading indefinitely, and the others (more quickly than I would have hoped) chimed in to agree.
Sometime before we reached the end of our reading, the kids learned that Daddy was a writer of some kind, and they began asking me to write a book for them—the sort of book I could read aloud in the dark with my flashlight. I wanted very much to deliver for them, to pull a bit of magic from my hat and spin it into a tale both bracing and amusing, a story of brave and resourceful young people making their way in a marvelous and dangerous world. But every stab I took at writing a children’s novel failed in one way or another. Gradually, I realized that my reading days would run out with their wish still unfulfilled, and that my failure to deliver a suitable story would be one more in a catalogue of ways in which I would disappoint them. A father hopes to be as extraordinary as his youngsters, in their innocence, imagine him to be, so that they need never become disillusioned with him. Perhaps some fathers accomplish that. As for me, my children matured, took notice of their father’s shortcomings, and gave up asking for a book written just for them.
But now, here it is.
Admittedly, this is not the book they wanted. While there are plenty of exploits and perils and tragedies and amusements in the pages to come, none of them involve castles or pirate ships or even much tender romance. The main character has undeniable charms, but he’s no hero, certainly no superhero. This book is bereft of wizards, crime-solving orphans, time travel, or empathetic talking spiders. It’s not the book they asked for, but I believe it is a book they will need.
For this is a book about surviving, even thriving, through adversity and revolutionary change. Today’s children—yours as well as mine—will live out their lives in a maelstrom of change. Some of it can be forecast. Other challenges will arrive as abruptly as a worldwide pandemic. I expect that self-driving cars and conversational robots are only the beginning, puffs of wind on the mild side of the storm. For cars and robots are gadgets, and gadgets evolve without necessarily changing the world. My own generation, after all, came of age with transistor radios and nineteen-inch Trinitrons. Now we have Spotify and eighty-five-inch UHD TVs. Yet we’re still listening to music from handheld devices and watching two-dimensional pictures in motion behind a glass screen.
Revolutionary change is another matter. Revolutions have the power to remake societies and cultures and economies and political systems. Think of Gutenberg’s printing press. Before print came along, there was no reason for most people to be literate. Information traveled slowly and unreliably by word of mouth or hand-copied manuscripts. Knowledge accrued very slowly because people knew only what they could learn from their elders in a family or village. The printing press made it possible for the first time to connect people cheaply and efficiently across broad distances and even across time. The follow-on effects were extraordinary: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the rise of democracy and free markets, the end of legal slavery, the age of exploration, including the exploration of space. All of these were made possible by print. If movable type—mere blocks of wood and slugs of lead—could do all that, what changes might be wrought through a revolution that places the world’s libraries and languages in the palm of each hand and gives to every human being the power of mass communication?
The nature of work is changing, too, as more and more of the world’s productivity derives from the interaction of humans and computers. History teaches that vast upheavals follow in the wake of workplace revolutions. When foraging gave way to farming, the world of tribes and nomads became a world of cities, states, nations, and empires. Cultures have been remade again wherever industrialization and market economies have replaced subsistence farming. The feudal world of kings and tsars became a mechanized world of finance and bureaucracy. For some, the new world was one of alienation and strife; for others, it was a world of freedom and aspirations. Women were liberated to have fewer children, for example. Having fewer children meant longer lives and time to think. The children they did have were better fed and endured less drudgery. Longer lives came to mean time for an education, and education taught people to dream. Today, we might suppose that parents have always hoped that their children would sail into brighter futures, but for most of human history, parents expected that their children would endure lives just as brutish and short as their own. Palace or hovel, one’s birthplace was one’s destiny.
I believe the digital revolution has already begun to spin off effects every bit as dramatic and vast as these past revolutions produced. Politics is being transformed by the disruptive power of social networks. Our news and information sources—the wellsprings of civic conversation—are unraveling under the power of infinite choice. Mating rituals are being recast by algorithmic yentas and virtual singles bars. Institutions are being undermined, while formerly localized threats, from terrorism to novel viruses, have gone global.
Parents want to give children the tools they need to succeed in life. But our kids are launching into a world so strange and unpredictable that a parent can’t help but worry whether today’s toolkit might become tomorrow’s burden. God forbid our advice takes them in the wrong directions.
As I’ve watched the growing magnitude of the digital revolution, I’ve come to fear that I don’t know enough about change to be of much help to my kids. I know about change at the gadget level, but have seen comparatively little of it at the levels of entire cultures and societies. Though I’ve marveled at many technological wonders through the years, my life has not been all that different from the lives of my parents. My mother and father grew up when radio was new, and I’ve lived to see radio splinter into broadcast, satellite, and wireless streaming. But my parents and I all lived in the time of radio. The same could be said of airplanes, newspapers, internal combustion engines, network television, Republicans-versus-Democrats, “modern medicine,” and a thousand more categories that have lent a stability to our lives even as the new gadgetry amazed us. During my children’s lives, however, the categories themselves may be erased, and new categories created.
It dawned on me that I must go back another generation or two to find a role model and scout for them—a true surfer on a sea of change. I had to get back to the last years of the agrarian past, that moment when middle-class people lived without electricity or running water, when humans didn’t fly and antibiotics didn’t exist. I needed to find someone whose early life would have been recognizable to farmers from the age of Napoleon, or of Leonardo da Vinci. Someone from the world where horse-drawn carriages far outnumbered automobiles, where pictures didn’t move, and where kings ruled empires. An American born in the early 1900s who managed to live into the 2000s would have one foot planted in the age of draft animals and diphtheria—a time when only 6 percent of Americans graduated from high school—and the other planted in the age of space stations and robotic surgery. Such a person would have traveled from The Birth of a Nation to Barack Obama. From women forbidden to vote to women running nations and corporations. From Sunday potlucks in neighborhood churches to Sunday frenzies at football games where every big play is instantly rerun on screens five stories high. No human foot had ever touched the North or South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest when they were born, yet they lived to see footprints on the moon.
Children of the early 1900s who lived to a great age saw their lives and their communities, their places of work and of worship, their families and mores shaken, inverted, blown up, and remade. They entered the world at just the moment that (in the words of Henry Adams) history’s “neck [was] broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new,” and they lived through the ever-changing consequences. What did it take to thrive and find happiness while experiencing so much disruption? Whatever it was, those were the tools I want to pass on to my children: the tools for resilience and equanimity through massive dislocation and uncertainty.
I decided to write a book for my children that would unlock the secrets of life inside the storm. And once I understood this was my task as their father, I would have gone to the ends of the Earth to find such a tale. But that proved unnecessary, because one blazing August morning I looked up from my driveway and saw my story standing there, just across the street.
