Reviews by Al

The subtitle of the book is: how height affects the health, happiness, and success of boys–and the men they become.  The author being about 5′6" himself seems a bit obsessed about how shortness has impacted his life.  Society is stacked against the short, especially the short male, he says.  They get bullied.  They earn less.  They get no attention from women — who are tallness obsessed it seems.  There are moments when I felt compassion.  And in a way, tall and short is a bit like beauty and ugliness.  You could almost write the same book about unattractive people.  It’s sad, but someone has to be ugly for someone else to be beautiful.  Someone has to be short for someone else to be tall.  (Almost like that movie "Unbreakable" by Shyamalan where someone has to be weak for someone else to be strong.)  But what was my point here.  The author makes some points for the obvious shallow nature of a society which still highly values height (pun intended) even while height confers no obvious true advantage except to see over the heads of others in a crowd and being closer to the hoop in basketball.  Still perhaps it’s an indication of good nutrition (wealth) and good genes.

But back to my earlier point: I wonder if you could make a similar argument to beauty.  Supposely beauty is due to symmetry which comes from good genes and strong immunity.  One might also suggest that beauty does confer obvious reproductive advantage to offspring assuming beauty can be inherited.

So just as the author points out that the short learn to make up for their… shortcoming through other means, I suppose the unattractive have to make up for their unattractiveness through other means.

The author makes the point at the end of the book that the tall are environmentally worse than the short.  They take up more calories.  But I was thinking this is also a genetic signal.  In the past, if a family can sustain the tall genes and the extra calories it requires it must be wealthy or at least have some success.  Unfortunately, height might be less of a viable signal today with all the cheap calories out there. (Today maybe we should replace height with thinness.)

The author also talks about early and late puberty and various confusing studies about this.  I read a different article or book about homosexuality being linked to early puberty.  The author does seem to say that being short can come from delayed puberty.  Combining the two ideas, does that mean that short guys tend not to be gay?  Hmmm, I don’t think that’s true.  Must be some counteracting factor there, because someone would have noticed if gays are all tall or average height.

It was eye opening to read some testimonials included by the author from his tall classmates indicating the advantages even as they saw them — in terms of confidence, attention from teachers, expectations, sports, etc.  Must be nice to be tall.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.