Out of Order

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Author of several books on the environment, including An Unspoken Hunger (Vintage, 1995).

BIRTH ORDER: oldest child--and only female--in a family of four siblings.

"My two brothers have been in a more oppositional position to our parents than I am, and especially my next-youngest brother, who is by far the most conservative. There were in many ways more expectations on him, as the firstborn son, than on me, particularly because of our family pipeline-construction business, which he was expected to take over. Not much was expected of women, so I was given more freedom.The most interesting thing to me about Sulloway's book is his discussion of biology. We are animals; we forget that."

Sulloway: "Because Williams was not expected to occupy a certain niche--namely, the successor to the family business--it would be reasonable to argue that niche structure was a little different in that family. And her point about biology is well taken. Part of the argument behind Born to Rebel is that we do the kinds of things that would be expected from our animal relatives--including sibling competition for parental love, affection, and resources as a mechanism for getting out of childhood alive. It's a mechanism that is no longer needed in most modern societies, because we're all going to make it out of childhood alive. But prior to a century ago, half of all children did not survive childhood."

Stephen Mitchell 

Celebrated translator of religious texts such as the Book of Job and the Tao Te Ching.

BIRTH ORDER: first of two brothers.

"I have gone through long periods of actively rejecting my parents' values. My father was a doctor, and my parents expected me to be a doctor. So there were a good 15 years when they doubted my sanity, because I was on what was to them a very bizarre path. But on this path I have connected with old traditions, so in that sense I feel conservative. As far as Sulloway's work goes, I resist any kind of large, world-encompassing concept. As Lao Tzu says, in the process of knowledge every day you learn something; in the process of real understanding every day you drop something. Eventually, you wind up in the place where there's no structure and even the most profound truth is an obstacle."

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