conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Children of Crisis about Harvard, Medical, School with the genre: Health, Fitness & Dieting, Psychology & Counseling.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard College. He lives in Massachusetts.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Children of Crisis
  The roses attracted Marjorie's interest after that episode. She looked them over carefully, came to be fond of them. She had been interested in flowers and plants for several years; she kept several cacti in her room, and a month or so before the gardener had made so bold as to take the initiative with certain rose bushes, he had obtained for Marjorie three quite lovely plants, or so she had judged them. Did her father have quite another opinion? She was afraid to ask. She was afraid even to ask her mother. But the maid also loved plants. Why not ask her? She could innocently enough ask her father what he thought of his daughter Marjorie's plants. The maid did ask the girl's father, and reported back that he had indeed noticed them and pronounced them quite lovely. Shortly thereafter the father brought the subject up at the dinner table, told Marjorie how very much he liked her room, how pleased he was to see the care she gave to it, and how particularly fond he was of her three plants. Then he turned to the mother — saying nothing, but smiling and nodding, as if to send her a compliment, also: the one who, no doubt, selected the three plants and gave them to the girl. The mother said that she did agree with her husband's judgment, but in all fairness had to admit that it was the gardener who had selected the plants and given them to Marjorie. A moment of nervous silence, then a smile from the father, a relaxation of everyone's apprehension, and a statement from the man at the head of the table: "I think we are all becoming the gardener's protégés. I must sign up myself!"
  A month later Marjorie used paints to indicate her approval of the lush late summer garden outside the house. She was especially drawn to the roses, but also to some enormous and beautifully arranged sunflowers — a stunning column of them, astride rows of vegetables. They were so "lucky," she reminded herself, to have a gardener of such skill and devotion. He grew beautiful flowers all year around (the mother had a hothouse, attached to the stable) and he also had an exceptional way with lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and squash, which wandered and flowered and intrigued Marjorie by their independent ways. The gardener also helped out with the horses — kept an eye on "everything outdoors."
  Marjorie tried hard to do justice to the beauty the gardener had made possible near her home, but worried that she was not a good enough artist. She was especially anxious to make the sunflowers the commanding presence they were for her. Each one received her closest attention. And she topped them off, so to speak, with the sky's sun — in her words, "the sunflower that makes all other sunflowers grow." She decided at the last minute to put the gardener in the painting, but abruptly changed her mind: best to leave people out of it. As she put the painting aside (Figure 60), she gave herself some credit, but was still humbled by her self-acknowledged inadequacies. If only she could become even a half-competent amateur artist one day! But she has no gift in that direction — unlike two of her sisters. Yet, she loved to look at the flowers outside the house, and she could at least learn to grow them, care for them, keep them reasonably healthy and attractive. Now she had a thought: the ground, the earth that nourished the gardener's flowers, her family's flowers, the earth she had rather quickly suggested with a few strokes of brown paint, was the very same earth, not too far away, that men dug and cut into — miners in search of coal.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Soon, however, that ambition faded. The girl became increasingly interested in her fathers business. Wasn't there a way she could work for him? She asked him that repeatedly, and he scratched his head, and shook his head, and said no, there was only room for his son and three nephews, and maybe not all of them. Besides, in a few years she would have other ideas in mind — marriage and motherhood. Joan was not so sure; she resented being told exactly how her life ought to unfold. She resented, too, being given one dress after another, along with bracelets, a watch and then another, fancier watch, some necklaces and hair braids and an endless number of shoes. She took to wearing her jeans all the time — or as much of the time as she could. She was now delighted with her school uniform — its somber simplicity pleased her immensely. She felt torn between her desire to dress up (in the future) and talk before the television cameras, and her desire to be utterly casual (right then and there) and lounge around the house, watching television.
  She also felt torn between various "lessons" she had heard from her parents: "I can't win. My mother tells me I should study hard. Then I do. Then she says I shouldn't study too hard, because boys do that, and I should try to be 'lighter.' I ask her how, and she says I shouldn't ask her, because I already know the answer, and I'm only being stubborn. My father says I'm not supposed to be interested in his business. Then he catches me sitting in the house watching television, and it's nice outside, and he gets very angry, and asks me why I don't go outside. Then I tell him there is nothing for me to do outside, and he gets very angry. He pulls me! When we get outside he points to the pool, and to my bike, and to the grass. He says I can swim; I can go on a bike ride; I can cut the grass. I said it was for my brother to cut the grass! He exploded. He told me I would get no allowance for a month. I was glad. All I do is put the bills in my wallet, and it gets fatter and fatter! When my father is in a different mood, he won't even let us spend our own allowance. He buys us what we want, and tells us the allowance is for the extras. But a lot of times, I can't think up anything extra that I want, and so I get richer all the time!
  She will switch from one ethnic or racial self-description to another, depending on the subject of discussion. She knew that Anglos often referred to her people in a derogatory way as "Mexicans." She herself can unselfconsciously assume Anglo attitudes and words toward her own kind as if she were one of "them." She can also be more evenhanded, can talk in a rather neutral tone about "the Mexican-American streets" in San Antonio, as contrasted to the Anglo ones. She can also become fiercely proud of her own ("Chicano") people. At twelve or thirteen she frightens her parents with her declarations of solidarity — and enmity: "I don't like to hear my father talk about the Anglo bankers. He admires them. He says he is sure that they like him. Well, why shouldn't they be nice to him and like him? They make a lot of money off him! First he makes money; then he borrows more money from the Anglos; then he makes more money, and so do they! No wonder they smile at him and pat him on the back, when he comes to them and tells them that he is going to build some stores or some office buildings or some houses. I wish some of our own people had as much money as the Anglos do; then we could go to a Chicano bank and borrow money from Chicanos, and then Chicanos would be helping each other. The Anglos don't like us; they do business with my father, but he is just another 'Mexican' to them. He told me that himself a long time ago, and I remember. But when I remind him, he gets angry with me and tells me I should stop talking like a man who is running for mayor of San Antonio!
  Toward the end of the eighth grade, when Joan was a few months short of fourteen, she "settled down," as her parents described it. She didn't by any means become, in the mother's words, a "dream girl." She played her hi-fi set louder and louder; her choice of music (acid rock) confused and enraged her parents. Her dress continued to be casual, or provocatively disheveled. She was no better at taking care of her room. She turned sour and petulant inexplicably and remained so for hours, even days. But she indicated to her parents a desire to stay in San Antonio, to go to college, to take there "a business course," and to become, at least for a while, a "business secretary." Her father was delighted. Maybe Joan could, after all, join his business. He had a part-time secretary already; he had for some time felt the need of someone to keep track of his various obligations and commitments, as well as the bills he sent out and received, the payments he had to make and expected to arrive. Why not entrust such important and mostly quite confidential matters to someone in the family?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But, alas, she told her parents what she liked to do in an occasional "off moment." They were hardly reassured. They were quizzical the first time; annoyed the second; admonitory the third; worried the fourth; and ready to consult a doctor the fifth — those "off moments" indeed! They did call a doctor; he urged intelligent restraint, and his advice proved correct. Not that there was actually restraint. The girl was implicitly and sometimes directly told to get on with it — life. She was, her parents decided, "a little too introverted." She had best be made "busy." They knew the enemy — inwardness. They knew the point of life: the headlong rush; the ferris wheel at the age of six, the assembly dance at the age of sixteen; the full calendar; the school choir, everyone beautifully, expensively, similarly dressed; the clock that keeps moving; the dream that is promptly forgotten; the sigh before retiring that registers satisfaction and congratulation — no wasted time. No wasted time. No time heavy on one's hands. No time to spare. No time left. In no time, no time at all — world without end.
  The girl felt the push. It took her a little time to stop being part of some bad time her parents were convinced she must be having — else why the "funny time" she was for a while reported having. So the mother put it: "She still has a funny time up in her room, looking at that cemetery. She tells us she talks with the people in the tombs! I was horrified. She smiles. I thought at first she was teasing me. I guess she's all right. She's just growing up. All children do a few crazy things before they get sensible." She was right; just about all children do have their strange, wondrous, luminous, brooding, magical, redemptive moments. The girl described hers in a way Clarence John Laughlin, mystical and messianic photographer of her native city, would likely find helpful to remember as he stalks the light and shadows, the memories and bizarre actualities of a place, a time: "I don't think there's anyone there, across the street, inside the cemetery. I just like to look at the place. I used to walk in there with my grandmother. I was little, and she was still alive. She told me she had lived a nice long life, and she had been happy, and she was ready to leave us, whenever God decided she had been with us long enough. She would be glad to go. One day we found her asleep, and it was late in the morning for her — nine o'clock. She was dead. My mother said there was no need to call the doctor, but we had to. I never saw her. I wanted to go in the room, but they wouldn't let me. I tried to sneak in, but they said no.
  She stopped all that wondering within a few months. She had gone through her worrisome time, had "recovered." So the mother had it: "Thank God, she's better. She's recovered from her interest in cemeteries." An "interest"? Or was it, perhaps, a brief spell of release, of openness, of escape from Kierkegaard's, Walker Percy's "everyday-ness"? And maybe a dialectal moment or two — such as Thomas de Quincey, with Clarence John Laughlin approving, once described: "When one feels/oneself sleeping alone, / utterly divided from all call / or hearing of friends, / doors open that should be / shut, or unlocked that / should be triply secured, / the very walls gave, barriers / swallowed up by unknown / abysses, nothing around one / but frail curtains, and / a world of illimitable night, / whisperings at a distance, / correspondence going on / between darkness and darkness, / like one's deep calling to / another, and the dreamer's / own heart the center from / which the whole network of this / unimaginable chaos radiates..."
  The groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize–winning five-volume work that established Robert Coles as America's preeminent child psychiatrist—distilled into a single volume