Favorite Books of 2001.

• Position: Books

by Kate Clinton

Everybody loves interactive book listmania! Before you read three of my recommendations, see if you can put my reading list in order. Hint: organizing principle--annus horribilis.

A. Dell Golden Deluxe Word Search (Dell)

B. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

C. Preventing Violence, by James Gilligan (Thames & Hudson)

D. Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Harvard University)

E. Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf)

F. New York. Times Tuesday Crossword Puzzles, ed. Will Shortz (Ivy Books)

G. The Bush Dyslexicon, by Mark Crispin Miller (Norton)

If you said 1.G, 2.D, 3.E, 4.C, 5.B, 6.F, 7.A, you are correct and should take something for anti-anxiety and mourning sickness.

Right after the Bush II Inauguration, I consoled myself with The Bush Dyslexicon. Miller dissects Bush's grammar and syntax and reveals a man illiterate but not ignorant, who could not care less about his shortcomings. Bush gives himself goose bumps. I found Miller's categories--from W's evident-to-himself tautologies to his deflective self-appraisals--helpful tools to becoming a better Bush-watcher. I know to think, for example, that Bush is reading his speeches better now, not because of the crisis, but because they have increased the font size.

I tried to read the much-touted Empire for the deep space of background. What I read I enjoyed, like a boil on my cheek. The two authors, one in an Italian prison (an untold story), who collaborated via e-mail and could have used a ruthless editor, examine the shift from modern political understandings of sovereignty, nation, and people to new networks of communication and control through transnational corporations. But dense.

For ice cold clarifying relief, I cleared my head with Joan Didion's Political Fictions, a collection of eight of her essays from The New York Review of Books. Sure, sure, some of her revelations that politics are inauthentic are obvious, but it's fun to tour the brain from which Maureen Dowd sprang half-formed.

Then there was 9-11. George Bush announced that he believed fighting terrorism was why God had made him President. I thought his brother had done that. What to do? Nothing gives a more hopeful blueprint for the times ahead than James Gilligan's Preventing Violence. It answers clearly that whining media question: "Why do they hate us?" and urges a view toward violence not in moral and juridical terms but as a public health problem.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is soooo Oprah, but a great way to live through airport security lines, and I'll take that book jacket meaning of O if he doesn't want it. The rest is crossword puzzles and after Tuesdays, Dell word searches.

Kate Clinton is a comedian.

by Ruth Conniff

Naomi Wolf turned me off at first with her rather grim descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth. She presents pregnancy as a time of ambivalence and even self-loathing, which struck me as the worst sort of party-pooping. Having a baby is so fascinating and wonderful. Who cares if you gain a few pounds? But I was glad I stuck with the book. Wolf's insights on childbirth are profound. If the buzz around Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday) is anything like that generated by her previous works, it will do a real service for a generation of women of childbearing age.

I felt lucky, reading Wolf's powerful indictment of routine hospital birth in America, that I discovered her sources in my own childbirth classes this year. My midwives gave me Ina May Gaskin's book, Spiritual Midwifery (Book Publishing Company, 1990), when I was pregnant. Gaskin, the godmother of American midwives, still delivers babies naturally on The Farm commune in Tennessee, where Wolf visited her. She extols Gaskin's record of safe, happy, nonsurgical births, which puts modern hospital obstetrics units to shame.

Wolf also cites Henci Goer, whose work I read as part of a Bradley natural childbirth class. Goer compiled many of the crucial facts and statistics Wolf cites to show what a grim mill American maternity wards have become. Until the 1970s, C-sections made up about 6 to 10 percent of all births in the United States. By the 1990s that number had risen to one in four. Healthy, white, middle-class women in their thirties and forties in private hospitals have an astounding 50 percent C-section rate. Wolf exposes the financial and legal pressures that have so distorted birth in this country. If half of unnecessary C-sections were avoided, she reports, hospitals would lose $1.1 billion in revenue each year. She also points out the damage done by one-size-fits-all laborprogress graphs that turn having a baby into a game of beat the clock.

Wolf's own first labor is a vivid illustration of all that's wrong with this approach: slowing labor with an epidural, then forcing painful induction and even surgery on healthy, low-risk women who don't labor fast enough. As one midwife Wolf interviews points out, most doctors are so quick to intervene and operate, they have never witnessed a normal birth. The psychic damage done by this is overwhelmingly sad, because it doesn't have to be that way.

What incredible good fortune I encountered. After learning the alarming news Wolf reports in my Bradley class, and becoming increasingly anxious about trying to stave off this ghastly fate, I was able to find two wonderful home birth midwives in my community. Many anxious questions and meetings with family members later, we took the plunge. Like Wolf, I was afraid to have my baby at home. But unlike her, I found role models, including a couple of nurses in my classes who chose home birth. I was even able to find a doctor willing to back me up and meet me at the hospital should anything go wrong.

I gave birth with the midwives, my husband, and my mother supporting me, in a quiet, respectful setting, using a birthing tub for pain relief and with the powerful reassurance of these strong, professional women. They even made house calls to give me and the baby follow-up care. It was a profoundly challenging, beautiful, ecstatic experience. We had, in short, that impossible, pie-in-the-sky birth that...