If This World Were Mine, by E. Lynn Harris
In the hilarious “just keepin’ it real” style novel, If This World Were Mine, by E. Lynn Harris, a group of friends decide to start a journal club, like they did back in their college English class. This story is told by each and all takes place in the 90's around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
Sometimes it is easier to put your thoughts on paper rather than express them out loud. A group of college friends decides to restart their journal club called, If This World Were Mine. The group includes Yolanda, single, independent, and not looking for a man. She was once married, but her husband wanted to travel, while she was ready to be stable. Then there’s Dr. Leland Thompson, gay and single. Riley Woodson, the epidimy of beauty. She’s married to her college sweetheart Selwyn, who is also a member of the journal club, and they have a set of twins’, Ryan and Reginald. Dwight Leon Scott is also a member he is divorced and mad at the world. He was married to Kelli, a former member of the group. She left because Dwight wouldn’t. The group has monthly meetings where they eat, drink, and read and discuss their journals. Each member of the group always brings something to read to the meeting, but they never read what is really going on in their lives. They all feel like they have to impress the other members, which defeats the whole purpose of the journal club.
The climax of the story begins when Leland’s client, Taylor Wilson called and asked to have an emergency meeting. After Leland’s secretary scheduled the meeting and Taylor made it to the office, he began to tell Leland what was going on. At the same time Yolanda was in New York handling some business and also visiting John, her new guy friend. One day she went to John’s apartment on surprise and got a bigger surprise than she expected. While back in Chicago, Taylor was still talking with Leland about the man he saw that he had met back in the days when he was a family court judge. They had an affair and caused him to divorce his wife and leave his kids and career. Taylor told Leland about the man’s gray eyes which made Leland think about Yolanda’s new guy friend.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
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